Messing around

As you can see I've not been making progress bankroll wise. To be honest I've been messing around a bit. But in a constructive manner I like to tell myself :-)

My obsession with the greyhounds is still there and I got it into my head that I should try some creative Dutching. My theory was that since you have 6 dogs in a race, them having on average a 1 in 6 chance of winning you have to gather more then 36 odds to be sure of profit in the long run. This is assuming that the Betfair market is efficient and the odds on each dog reflect his true value.

Now with Dutching you'd simply back the whole book when it's under 100% giving you a guaranteed profit. You'd use different stakes for every dog to make sure that the profit is the same whatever dog wins. I've seen some Dutching opportunities as BetAngel makes it very easy to do it automated but it's only there for a splitsecond and I'm pretty sure there are quite some people out there trying to earn easy money that way thus closing the window of opportunity real quick.

So this is where I tried getting fancy.

My idea was to try and back every dog as high as possible and thus getting a total sum of odds over 36. My goal being at least 40.

If this is still abracadabra to you I'll give a quick example.

Dog 1 I back at 3,8, dog 2 at 4,7 and dog 3 at 8,7 I now have gathered a total of 3,8+4,7+8,7=17,2 and will need to back the last 3 for a total of approximately 23.

My thought here is that if I succeed in this I should make money, in the long run, on the straight bets in itself but if I can green up before the start I'll do that. I fired in $5,- bets. It went well the first couple of attempts and I greened up for around $1,- But to my detriment I had a red screen on one, which also happened to be only 36,9 odds in total as I didn't manage to back high enough, which I decided to let run true to the system.

I didn't realise that one dog was only backed for half a stake and of course he won. I would've lost a bit if the favorite won but this should've showed me a small profit instead of a $12,57 loss.

I'm on to something I believe but there's a good chance that I'm reinventing the wheel or making something real simple real difficult for myself. It did get kinda hectic with all the bets being matched and if you try to hedge the 6 dogs in one go all the bets getting fired in with some being matched and some not. I also tried to simply hedge the dogs that showed profit and wait for the others to improve until closer to the off but that was messy too. I wish I could have 6 ladders next to each other (within the same software), that would make my life so much easier with the dogs. I have 2 24' screens so the real estate isn't a problem.

I've tried to connect BetAngel to Excel to gain better insight in the dogs but seeing as I have Dutch Vista and Dutch office it doesn't work. I think BetAngel can only deal with the English language package which sucks bigtime! Hopefully this will be fixed, I did notice that there were no replies from BetAngel staff in my thread so there's always a chance there stonewalling it. In that case I'll have to nag them all day when I finally get the money together for the course! :-)

So the dogs have been a losing discipline once again but I am enjoying thinking up strategies and giving it a go.

The $15,- I dropped was due to a thread on www.racingtraders.com/forum where someone pointed out that Bari was getting odds as a huge underdog while they were 1st in the Italian serie B and playing the number 18. I first backed them at 10 for $5,- and the draw at 19 for $5,-. Then just before the off I saw that Bari was up to 32! So I just had to stick another $5,- in. This match was attracting 4 times more the liquidity then any other match in the serie B was and it was all due to a LOAD of mony being layed on Bari winning and the draw so obviously someone knew something I didn't.

I was working and thought I'd just try to trade it out for a green screen early in the match. The draw had already come down to 10 and I was thinking of laying that but decided to wait for a couple of minutes as it was coming down so quick.

Well Bari scored real quick! So I quickly popped up the Betfair website to green up for a huge amount and was already composing a raving blogpost in my mind about what a great opportunist I was and how betting is all about finding edges and exploiting them when I found out that this match didn't go in running on betfair...

And not so surprisingly Bari lost 3-2, figures.

But I must say that it gave me a lot of entertainment and at least I could think of myself as really smart for almost a full hour before it went all pear shaped. I did decide though that with the start of the new season I'll be also betting as much football as I possible can is it gives me a lot more pleasure watching the game at the same time then the horses and dogs do where mostly I have no live pictures and I really don't get too excited over seeing them running.

I made some money back with the US horses which I haven't been trading seriously this month really up till tonight. I sat down and focused and get an easy $27,- proft and I thought that a lot of races weren't optimal tonight. So although I'll abandon my target of $400,- this month I will try to sit down for a couple of more nights and do some bankroll building with the US horses. Mainly so I can blow it on other sports again! But I'm sure all this practicing, number crunching and coming up with out of the box strategies will pay itself of in the long run. Besides it's fun!