Thanks guys & gals for sharing your info, very generous, it sure will come in handy.

Becareful,

Thanks for your reply. Was much as I expected re: the roller coaster on longshots.

I have had similar experinces although I used to bet all price ranges dependent on the horse/race. When I reviewed my betting I found that while those over 7.00 were shwoing a profit it all came from one winner! This worried me as you can hardly rely on jagging something at those odds. The effect these longshots have on your strike rate can not be underestimated and it flows on that it effects your confidence (because your are losing) and you will probably start to 2nd guess yourself etc. which is big trouble in this game.

So now if I like something @ a decent price I want to know why it is that price. Am I overrating it or underrating something else? From what I have seen if I can't figure why the horse invariably runs up to the market price(not mine). To me this means there is some other reason which the people who matter are aware of but I have missed or am unable to obtain. eg. a fitness problem which has caused the horse to miss work which has been kept away from the public.
Whereas if you know why the market doesn't like the horse but you don't see that as a problem then by all means back your judgment.

thekey

Thekey,

You are exactly right there with prices. I used to ignore them but now I pay a LOT of attention to what the market is saying.

I think Shoe-In wrote to never change your mind based on price - I now have the opposite view and one of my final checks before placing a bet is what does the market price indicate about the chances. Basically i have a "Reverse Price Filter" - if my selection is over a certain price then NO BET. It has improved my strike rate, my profit and my consistancy enormously (and hence my confidence!). Unless you have insider information (direct from a stable, not from some joker on SKY!) then you have to assume that the market as a whole has much better information than you as an individual so if the market is pricing your selection at double your price then the market probably knows something you don't!

It certainly is possible to make money out of the longer odds horses - but I have found it much easier and less stressful to concentrate on the favourites. You still need to do your analysis and work but it is easier (IMHO) to find the value. Also a 60% strike rate is better for the heart than a 15% strike rate!

__________________
"Computers can do that????" - Homer Simpson

Perhaps those punters who like the longshots but hate the long waits between wins would be advised to back 3 or 4 horses from the top 8 lines of pre post betting/nothing over $15pre post.

If they were to pick there races carefully the occasional huge odds would give you your profit,and hey it would be more fun then trying to make 20% or less p.o.t. from the shorties.

hi guys, lots of interesting points of view.
i tend to back my selections regardless of price unless they come up very short. Becareful i find on the short-priced horses i get more annoyed when they go down because I and many others expect them to win where on a $10 pop if that goes down you can live with that.

Your point on strike rate is a good one because you can begin to doubt yourself or run out of the days allocated punting funds.
6/10 is a good strike rate but to make any money i need to risk more than i'm prepared.
On a saturday i usually bet to win about $200 on each bet. This means even money $100 and 10/1 $20 bucks.

What i'm saying is while you can work the short priced favourites many people cant sustain even a small run of outs where betting on the 10/1 or even reasonable odds i.e 4/1 up you can have more bets.

i suspose it depends on your aim.
obviously everyone wants to win and it depends on your comfort levels

Umrum,

On your point of "risking more than your prepared" I have found that once you work it out you find that the risk with the shorter priced horses is a lot lower for a given return (assuming you are getting a decent POT).

Just an illustration of what I am talking about:

Lets say we have two systems:
A favourites system with a strike rate of 60% and ave. div. of $2.00 which gives us a POT of 20%
A longshots system with a strike rate of 10% and ave. div of $12.00 which also gives a POT of 20%

(Note - I selected the above just to illustrate the point - same logic applies if you use say 20% SR and $6.00 ave div to the second system - the difference just isn't as dramatic).

Now lets say we have a betting bank of $1000, we are betting level stakes, and we want to be 99.5% confident that a run of outs will not bankrupt us.

With a 60% strike rate the longest run of outs, with 99.5% confidence level, is 6.
With a 10% strike rate the longest run of outs, with same confidence level is 29.

This means with the 60% stike rate we can set our bet size at $167
With the 10% SR then the bet size is $34.
(of course this is a bit simplistic as it only looks at a single run of outs, not worst drawdown position - in reality I would probably halve each of these figures for safety).

Now the 60% SR system is very selective so lets say we get 3 bets/week. The expected profit per week is therefore $167 * 20% * 3 = $100

To make $100 out of our longshots on average we would need to make roughly 15 bets per week (so 5 times as many) so we can already see there is more work involved.

But what about risk? The chance of a week with NO WINNERS under each system is:

favourites: 0.4 ^ 3 = 6.4% (or roughly 1 in 16 weeks)
Longshots: 0.9 ^ 15 = 20.6% (or roughly 1 in 5 weeks)

To me that clearly shows the risk is higher with the longshots - you are going to have much more variability in your results and many more "losing" weeks. Of course you will get bigger winning weeks too so I guess it depends whether you are happy to lose more often for that occassional big week or if you would rather have a very consistant steady winning income.

Puntz,

That's not strategy - thats incredibly ************ lucky! You should buy yourself a lottery ticket with that luck.

According to my database there have been over 7000 runners in the last year that have started at 100/1 or higher on all 3 tabs. Guess how many winners?

13!

So apparantly you have somehow picked several of those 100/1 winners but avoided the 7000 selections that would have lost - that is incredible luck!

Had you backed all the 7000+ qualifiers at $5 each to win you would have lost $25,000 by now.

[ This Message was edited by: becareful on 2003-09-19 23:24 ]

BC
I have no point to answer up against databases and instant figures at the klik of a mouse button. However, I discoverd something purely by accident during a process of a race. It was second on my list of rated selections.
but yeah, it's rare


[ This Message was edited by: puntz on 2003-09-23 22:13 ]