18th April 2016

Hi ,

Over 90% of betting public fail at the first betting hurdle. This hurdle is not difficult, requires no special skills and does not take much learning. But… it requires the dedication to spend 20 minutes of your time on it every day.

It is… tracking your bets!

If you don’t track your bets then I will guarantee one thing. You’ll make a loss.

Okay you may get some winning streaks and be lucky, but ultimately you will make a loss. There’s not a single professional bettor that I’ve ever heard of who doesn’t track their bets.

That should tell you straight away that if you want to make a profit then it’s something that you MUST be doing.

The most common reason for not tracking bets that I hear is… “I’m not sure what to track or how to use it”. After today there will never be a reason for you to say that again.

First of all let’s look at the reason why we must track all our bets. We track our bets so that we have a record of everything we’ve done, why and whether it won or lost. We can use this as a guide to both refine our selection process and also to use as a guide to enable us to know if the selections are having an expected losing streak or if something has actually gone wrong with our methods.

Most punters don’t know what they’ve been betting on in the past, so they have absolutely no idea of how to improve it.

Now let’s look at what we should be recording. We want to record:

Date, Time, Course, Selection, Bet Type, Odds, Win/Lose, Return, Profit

That’s the minimum information that you should be recording for each and every single bet you place. But then…

…we want to also calculate some figures to help us assess the success of our selection process. These are:

Winners, Losers, Runners, Strike Rate, ROI

The first three are fairly self-explanatory. The Strike Rate is how often your bets win, e.g. 25% of the time. ROI is the amount of return you make compared to your bets e.g. 50% means you are making 50% of your bets in profit. If you bet £100 then you would expect to make a profit of £50.

Once you’ve got all that basic information we can add in some more advanced details:

Average Losing Odds
Average Winning Odds
Average Odds
Expected Winners
Expected Strike Rate
Impact Value
Probability of Achieving a Negative Yield
95% Bank Low Deviation

I’m going to explain what these all mean. The first three explain themselves without need of more details and so we shall start with Expected Winners...

Expected Winners

We can work out how many winners we would have had assuming the odds we were taking accurately predicted the horses chance of winning. The lower the Expected Winners to the Actual Winners then the larger our profit.

Expected Strike Rate

As with Expected Winners, we can also work out what our Expected Strike Rate should be. The lower the Expected Strike Rate to the Actual Strike Rate then the more profit we will be making.

Impact Value

This is a very useful figure which tells you how much more often your selections are winning than if you were simply betting randomly. Anything less than 1 means you selections are performing worse than just randomly picking horses. Anything more than 1 indicates that your selections are better than picking randomly. For example, 1.10 would mean you are picking horses that win 10% more often than if you were to randomly pick selections.

Probability of Acheiving a Negative Yield

A bit of a mouthful and the title looks scary, but don’t worry. This is a very useful figure to know because it tells you how likely you would be to have gone bankrupt over the course of your selections if you’d had winners and losers in a different order. Because the figure is a probability it goes between 0 and 1. To make it into a percentage you multiple it by 100. So a figure of 0.50 would be the same as 50%. The lower this number the better and you will find the more selections you have the lower it gets.

95% Bank Low Deviation

Another incredibly useful number. This tells you, with a 95% confidence, how low your bankroll could have gone over these selections if the wins and losses had come out differently.

Back next Monday.

Michael Wilding