#racing5 – Draw Bias, Placepot dabbling and new reading material

I’m still heading in with using the Geegeez platform for my analytics and data for the racing, so far I don’t see the need to look outside the box with it.

I would say confidence in a race comes in all forms, don’t get me wrong, I still believe like any sports betting an element of luck needs to be on your side, nothing can be made concrete up to the last second, which is why it’s fun!

Money management for me is the main part of the whole venture, it’s easy to go and blow away hundreds on a single bet, contrary to belief it’s what I used to do and it never paid off, I mainly believe in balance, but also making sure you wager that right amount to make your losses count for something!

There was a saying that I’ve always come over in my past:

“Calculate your losses, the winnings will take care of themselves”

In short, you need to spend money to make some, in a calculated way… as an example, if I were to place 10 bets all at £1 a go, I would want to make sure at least 1 of those winnings would cover my loss (and more ideally), this to me is the smart way to start with, it gives you a little freedom to perfect a system, and from there it’s just a scale up.

So a few things in this round of musings I wanted to cover, I had my first go at the Tote and permutation betting last week which I will touch on…

As we are now heading into the flat season, I’ve been looking more in-depth about Draw Bias, this goes well with the Pace Bias from my last post.

I’ve also bought a couple of books recommended by Matt at Geegeez which I will touch on by Keith Hoffman, it goes well with my Tote play as well.

Draw Bias – Another arrow to the quiver!

As the flat season starts, some courses, horses, and jockeys favor a certain gate to help placement and pace at the beginning of a race, as many flats can be around the 7f mark it can make a good difference on the outcome of a race in general, the luck part comes with the draw being random.

Dave Renham explains this very well with logic and math in a couple of posts I will place below, but the short of it is that if a horse ends up with a low draw it usually has less coverage to follow up on, further away from the rail means vital movement and herd movement to contend with, albeit may be very insignificant detail to lean a whole race on but it certainly adds that extra confidence as I said above to a decision-making process.

As Dave writes in his articles, the bookmakers caught wind a while ago and now do factor it into the prices, and someday back it was a craze, but it’s still there, and stats don’t change, a win is a win, right?

It’s worth checking out a more in-depth write-up here: https://www.geegeez.co.uk/draw-bias-in-horse-racing

I’ve been using it now fully on the flats between a couple of prominent runners in a race to assign a score to who I think will land if it gets close, as we know with handicap racing, the job for the handicapper is the ensure the horses cross the line all at the same time (would be fun if they did) so the little bit of extra help around the track, nose or not won’t hurt, will it!

Tote and Permutation Betting

So far I’ve only been looking at Win or Each Way bets, I’ve purposely done this to make sure I’m getting to grips with the analytics correctly, it’s easy to become lazy and revert to just the raw form on its own, but getting my head down with the study has paid off.

I’ve been lucky enough for Matt at GG’s to come back to a few emails I sent him over the past week or so, he’s a cracking guy who is willing to answer any questions about his platform, he also pointed me toward a few articles about pool betting and the tote.

My accumulator betting history on horses only started with Lucky 15’s, my father, like I touched on in my previous posts would smack down a £1.50 bet covering 0.10p a line, I always found it amazing how if he managed to get 4 winners it could, depending on the price, rack up to a few hundred in his pocket, of course, it was far and few but he enjoyed it, and that’s why I started doing it.

The tote is a pool betting platform which is different from standard bookies, I won’t go into much detail as plenty of places show you how it works, but the short part is all money bet goes into a pot, the tote takes a nice sum as a commission (boo) and the rest racks up as the losers get picked out during each race, at the end you get a dividend (usually to £1) and depending how much you bet on a line to win, pays out against that £1.00 / dividend itself – at least that’s how I think it works!

What I’ve been learning of late is how to use permutations (different coverings of bets) to maximize my chances of winning, this does increase the cost of the bet so there is some math involved but basically, you’re covering the horses you pick for the pools or whatever type of bet takes your fancy.

The only issue here is that one selection can turn into a huge list of bets to place, and it can become quite overwhelming to keep track and work out the math, lucky there is a service I used from the same place where I get my race cards and it’s called Tix, it allows you to select your horses and perms but makes it pretty much automatic to work out the best perms using a system called ABCX, it’s taken me a while to wrap my head around it, and about 4 reads of Matts article but it’s worth a look over to see how it can help, along with a much better explication of the math around it:

https://www.geegeez.co.uk/exotic-betting-multi-race-bets-part-1

It paid off as my first go managed to pull me in a nice little return, BUT, I did spend a good hour and a half going over each race in depth, like it said, nothing comes easy and you have to cover your confidence well in these types of things!

Keith Hoffman (The Derbyman)

I’m a sucker for books in general, especially anything that I class as reference material so when a few books were suggested to me by Matt and also in his articles I grabbed them, the two I started with were:

Smarter Bets – The Exacta Way

This one goes into Keith’s beginning on the track, and also how he does his handicapping of horses over the pond (it’s just like I’m learning in general), I believe Exacta is the American Tote of our side, it’s all about perms to cover one of another bet. It’s certainly worth a read as it gives a good insight into all this additional information you can use and it’s worth learning how to use it over the cards, regardless of what platform you use!

I’ve also got his second book as well l, Inside the Sport of Kings which arrived today, so I shall report back on it and hopefully, it will be as good as his other!

I know I can babble on but it’s also a good way of cementing what I’m doing and making sure I’m also retaining what’s being learnt! I hope you take something away from it as well…

Happy betting 👍