THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING DIFFERENT

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martinkil
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THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING DIFFERENT

Postby martinkil » Thu Jan 15, 2015 9:02 am

Another post from an old forum

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This article is from Practical Punting Monthly, Australia’s favourite leading horseracing magazine.

Leading UK pro reveals his betting secrets

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING DIFFERENT


* Practical Punting Monthly, Australia’s leading horseracing magazine

Most professional punters, whether in Australia or overseas, are very likely to emphasise the need to “be different” in your betting approach.

“Follow the crowd and you’ll lose just like they do,” says Tom Priestley, a Chicago bettor from the 50s. Priestley would have known. He maintained a profitable punting career for some 35 years until his premature death at 56. (Probably a dicky heart!)

UK analyst Jon Gibby, author of the excellent book Betting On Flat Handicaps, has much to say on this topic. Here’s a question and answer session with Gibby in which he expounds on his selection and betting techniques.

MARTIN DOWLING (MD): I note that in your book you go to great lengths to point out that even picking as many winners as possible is no guarantee of long-term success. Can you tell us more about this?

JON GIBBY (JG): Most punters mistakenly believe that the way to succeed at gambling is to pick as many winners as possible, and this desire to win in the short-term adversely affects their chance of realising a decent profit over the course of a season. To succeed at this game you have to think in terms of odds and chances and understand that if you consistently back horses at odds lower than their true chance of winning you will lose, irrespective of the number of winners you achieve.

MD: Do you think punters have an inability to deal with losers?

JG: Yes. This need for the security of winners means they are too quick to reject methods that do not select a good proportion of successful bets, irrespective of how profitable they might be over time. It also means they look for the obvious contenders in a race, the ones with the best recent form that figure prominently in the betting market.

MD; Agreed, this is a common failing, but it’s hard to woo punters away from the best formline runners in a race. I guess what you are stressing is the importance of good-priced winners, and not how many you might pick at odds which is less than value?

JG: I find any approach that targets short-priced favourites unadventurous and rather sterile. I can’t get excited about a 5/4 winner that, after all, will cover little more than my next losing bet, and any progress towards worthwhile profits is usually characterised by a rather unappealing steady plod.

MD: Punters, I suggest, fear losing more than anything else, which makes most of them cautious.

JG: Most of us have an in-built fear of losing and it can be hard to force yourself to bet when you know there is a good chance the horse will lose, irrespective of whether its winning chance is considerably better than its long odds suggest. This is a weakness that I am still struggling to overcome and I’ve missed out on some huge-priced winners as a result. Yes, I have also saved myself a lot of losers but I know that the winners I have missed would easily have compensated for them.

MD: How do you find an approach that finds those elusive value outsiders?

JG: You need an approach that is not only based on sound and logical footings but is also different to the methods used by the majority of other people. According to the Racing Post, after 6,223 races the tipsters involved in their tipping challenge had picked the favourite 47 per cent of the time. Interestingly, despite the fact that their average winning strike rate was a respectable 26 per cent, not one of them looked like showing a profit. The result of another tipping contest the Racing Post’s 2000 Naps Competition is a good example of how adopting a different approach to the majority of punters can pay dividends. The competition, won by Raceform’s Mark Nelson, demonstrated how important big prices are in the long-term when it comes to maximising profits. He ran out a clear winner having selected several outstanding handicap winners such as Lady Boxer 50-1, Premier Baron 33-1, Chorus 20-1 and Muddy Water 16-1 to name but four, despite having one of the worst overall strike rates and suffering a run of 16 losers at one stage; tolerating a much higher percentage of losers than most punters would find acceptable. Mark Nelson’s belief was that his strategy of backing horses at big prices in handicaps (the average odds of his winners was 5.8 to 1), would pay off over the course of the season. He was proven to be right.

MD: What about your own performance?

JG: I believe that the only reason I was able to make a level stakes’ profit of 134 points during a recent Flat season was that I adopted an approach that concentrated on outsiders in handicaps. Like Mark Nelson, I was prepared to accept a high proportion of losers, but the big-priced winners I was able to find more than compensated for them. Of course it is not easy to identify an outsider with an obvious chance of winning because the bookmakers are seldom that generous! Outsiders rarely have everything in their favour and usually there are one or two question marks about their overall or recent form, which can be off-putting. Such doubts, however superficial, can trouble the conservative side of one’s nature and it can be a struggle to see beyond them.

MD: And your advice for punters facing this dilemma in their every day betting?

JG: Well, it is one thing to be able to think differently to other punters and quite another to act differently! An unwillingness to place a speculative bet on a horse, even when you feel sure that the available odds will more than compensate for the level of risk involved, will be the stumbling block you are most likely to have difficulty overcoming. To highlight value outsiders, you need an approach that is not only based on sound and logical footings but is also different to the methods used by the majority of other people. When I studied the methods employed by most British tipsters and racing commentators, I found that, notable exceptions apart, the majority placed the most emphasis on the same factors such as good recent form, final time ratings, how horses are weighted in relation to each other and trainers and jockeys. I identified several shortcomings in their methods. Of course the fundamental weakness was that they were making very similar selections and they were accepting short odds as a result, but I also concluded that one of their basic beliefs was flawed.

MD: Well, this sounds interesting, tell us about it.

JG: The accepted way to comprehend and quantify form in Britain is centred on the premise that it is possible to measure the ability of horses and that those differences in ability can be expressed in pounds. The idea is logical enough. If you have one horse that is faster than another, you should be able to negate the difference between them by putting more weight on the back of the faster horse to slow it down. If it takes 20lb of weight to bring their abilities together then the faster horse can justifiably be described as being 20lb better than the slower horse. The logical extension of this theory is that if the faster horse only has to concede 15lb to the slower horse it will beat it every time, but if it has to concede 25 pounds it will lose. This logic has led to the widely held belief that a horse’s chance in a handicap race is determined by how much weight it is carrying in relation to its rivals. Although there is no doubt that weight has an influence on the outcome of races, its impact has been exaggerated and is not as important as the majority of punters consider it to be. If races took place under laboratory-style conditions I am sure that weight would have the effect it is supposed to, but in reality there are other equally important factors influencing a horse’s performance and the theory is regularly undone by them.

MD: Quite a few analysts have come to the same conclusion, not that I personally agree 100 per cent with them. I still maintain that weight rules as far as racing is concerned. I have often heard speed fanatics say that a selection lost because it had to concede too much weight, and I take pleasure in pointing out to them that they have been claiming that weight doesn’t matter!

JG: Back in 1992, Nick Mordin suggested that punters should ignore weight and the method for producing speed figures that he espoused in Betting For a Living deliberately made no mention of it. Although his advice was largely ignored, of late there has been a noticeable reappraisal of the impact of weight and how it affects the accuracy of ratings that incorporate it.

MD: What about form, and what can the average punter do about it when assessing a race. It obviously holds the clues to all the winners somewhere in its labyrinthine darkness!

JG: During its racing career a handicapper will inevitably produce poor performances, moderate performances and good performances and will attract very different ratings for them. The horse’s actual ability can only be measured on those occasions when it produces its best. Its other performances are meaningless as a guide to its capabilities, other than to confirm dislikes and limitations. Although this is obvious enough, too many punters waste their time using past results and literal interpretations of who beat who and the distances and weights involved to determine how well handicapped horses are in relation to each other. More often than not the difference between two runners on the day can be explained by the fact that horse A was more favoured by the run of the race, the prevailing conditions and/or the track biases.

MD: So what you are saying is that attempts to use a formline approach are flawed. We can’t really say this or that was a potent formline?

JG: The use of collateral form as a tool with which to interpret handicaps simply compounds the error manifest in the above approach by adding another link to an already flimsy chain. Anybody advocating its use, or heard to utter the words “on a line through . . .” when referring to handicap form deserves to be ridiculed! The theory suggests that if horse A has run against horse B and horse B has run against horse C then it is possible to determine the outcome of a contest between horse A and horse C. The belief is that by taking into account the distances between A and B and B and C, the weights each horse carried and the weights B and C are set to carry, it is possible to determine which of the two horses is better handicapped. Again, under laboratory-type conditions the theory might just work but there are simply too many factors influencing how each horse performed, particularly from one race to another, for it to work in practice.

MD: I’d tend to disagree with you on this one, because I believe that such thinking has to be adopted in order to get a clear picture of a race and its runners. Comparisons need to be made.

JG: I believe that the logical way to determine how well handicapped horses are in relation to each other is to decide how well treated each horse is in isolation, rather than drawing dubious conclusions from their past meetings or from meetings between them and a third horse.

MD: What’s your overall view of the way punters operate then? You are obviously critical.

JG: British writers such as Nick Mordin and professional gambler Alan Potts have drawn on the works of the Americans for much of their inspiration, but despite their best efforts to educate the long-suffering punters in the UK, the majority remain uncomfortably tied to their systematic methods and unshakable beliefs. In his book Fast Tracks to Thoroughbred Profits, the American writer Mark Cramer took this idea a stage further. He introduced his concept of opposite logics to show that there is no right or wrong way to approach form study, and that in fact methods commonly held to be “wrong” often present value opportunities simply because they are ignored by the majority of people. He argued that there is no permanent right way because the betting market will in time inevitably turn a winning way into a losing one. The Americans have come to recognise that this situation exists and that it calls for a fluidity of approach.

Punters need to be prepared to change tack each time the door closes on one avenue to profits and to understand that there are many logical approaches that can be adopted that are neither inherently right nor wrong. Some will fail because the selections are overbet while others will succeed only because they are overlaid. The bookmakers can close several doors at any one time but there will still be overlays for they cannot cover every angle without betting to grossly unfair over-rounds. In The Inside Track, Alan Potts proved this very point when he detailed how the betting market had squeezed the profitability of the successful methods he had described in his earlier book Against the Crowd.

Although Potts has successfully made a living from betting for many years, he has been forced to adapt and develop his approach over that time in order to stay ahead of the game. For whatever reason the market was no longer allowing Potts to obtain sufficient value about his selections to realise a profit and he was forced to accept the inevitable that he needed to develop a new approach. He had no clear idea of what that new approach might be and it was not until after he had read a number of books by some of the US authors that he found a way forward. To succeed you have to be prepared to adapt and evolve your methods to ensure that they remain different to those employed by other punters.

Betting On Flat Handicaps by Jon Gibby is published by Raceform UK.

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Martinkil
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Joined: 30 Oct 2005
Posts: 6692

Posted: Thu May 12, 2011 4:27 pm Post subject:

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Nice read

If you're looking for unique ways to view and interpret form you're in the right place with patternform and moneyform to add to you armoury.

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cardreader



Joined: 08 May 2011
Posts: 153

Posted: Sun May 15, 2011 5:02 am Post subject:

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Martinkil wrote:
Nice read

If you're looking for unique ways to view and interpret form you're in the right place with patternform and moneyform to add to you armoury.


Thank you for your kind attention..

Martinkil wrote:
patternform and moneyform.


Easy questions :

Please compare two or more things and decide which is best.
Please explain advantages and disadvantages.
Please suggest solution.

Why the patternform important.
Please describe the main points.

First of all, these qustions are often clamed. I would like to point out that there are several ways of looking at the picking winner.

Secondly, this bring us to the question of "How tu use Patternform". Is there any stat?

However, the opposite may also true.

Lastly, please bring us your conclusion. My personal option is that "using right key factor(s) when i try pick the winner.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Thank you in advance.

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Martinkil
Site Admin


Joined: 30 Oct 2005
Posts: 6692

Posted: Sun May 15, 2011 5:20 am Post subject:

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There's no single way to use Patternform which is it's beauty. What is does do is allow the user to select those factors which they feel are most important (limitied of course to the available filters). So if you consider recent form to be most important you can only look at form from the last month or so. If class floats your boat then filter on price money etc...

There are no stats for Patternform since there is no single way to use it. There are though some How to use patternform articles in other parts of this forum which some king members have put together.

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cardreader



Joined: 08 May 2011
Posts: 153

Posted: Wed May 18, 2011 7:44 am Post subject:

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Martinkil wrote:
There's no single way to use Patternform which is it's beauty. What is does do is allow the user to select those factors which they feel are most important (limitied of course to the available filters). So if you consider recent form to be most important you can only look at form from the last month or so. If class floats your boat then filter on price money etc...

There are no stats for Patternform since there is no single way to use it. There are though some How to use patternform articles in other parts of this forum which some king members have put together.


I am seeking for 'improving' race horses. How to use Patternform figures to identify "improving" horse?

Thanks in advance.

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voodoo



Joined: 02 Apr 2008
Posts: 6

Posted: Wed May 18, 2011 7:11 pm Post subject: improvers

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Read the above ref- true odds and how the market shapes...
u cant just find a improver by looking at numbers alone, a little gut instinct, knowing the horses [viewed replays] the trainers methods, horses going up in distance/down in distance, there pedigree, ground preferences,course suitability, how will the race play out - front runners, pressers or hold up types who will it suit... etc etc etc

in short there are a multitude of ways to spot possible improvement, the trick is to spot the ones that the majority of the market may of missed, VALUE in your opinion...
Martins site is excellent for getting races down to so many contenders, the rest is imho getting your nose in the form book and watching replays etc and finally going with your gut, sometimes that feeling will be strong about a selection, sometimes it will be a just a dull ache lol, but the odds met be so big that it will be worth the risk [in your opinion] to back or lay...

so loads to learn, easy game this punting lark..

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Martinkil
Site Admin


Joined: 30 Oct 2005
Posts: 6692

Posted: Thu May 19, 2011 2:38 am Post subject:

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Sometime you don't need improvers. If a horse is placed and drops in grade that is sometimes enough. I use the WINVAL column or CLASS filter for this.

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cardreader



Joined: 08 May 2011
Posts: 153

Posted: Thu May 19, 2011 3:09 am Post subject:

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voodoo wrote:
Read the above ref- true odds and how the market shapes...
u cant just find a improver by looking at numbers alone, a little gut instinct, knowing the horses [viewed replays] the trainers methods, horses going up in distance/down in distance, there pedigree, ground preferences,course suitability, how will the race play out - front runners, pressers or hold up types who will it suit... etc etc etc

in short there are a multitude of ways to spot possible improvement, the trick is to spot the ones that the majority of the market may of missed, VALUE in your opinion...
Martins site is excellent for getting races down to so many contenders, the rest is imho getting your nose in the form book and watching replays etc and finally going with your gut, sometimes that feeling will be strong about a selection, sometimes it will be a just a dull ache lol, but the odds met be so big that it will be worth the risk [in your opinion] to back or lay...

so loads to learn, easy game this punting lark..


Martinkil wrote:
Sometime you don't need improvers. If a horse is placed and drops in grade that is sometimes enough. I use the WINVAL column or CLASS filter for this.


WELL APPRECIATED .. ..

I know how to use RPR and TOPSPEED (both Racingpost), I am new about "Patternform SPEED, MULTI, RAN TO" figures. Any technics? and/or any sicience? and/or any practice? and/or any mechanism? and/or any style?

Thanks in advance.

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cardreader



Joined: 08 May 2011
Posts: 153

Posted: Thu Jun 09, 2011 5:05 am Post subject:

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Some of my experience is just posted here

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Aubrey



Joined: 26 Oct 2006
Posts: 74
Location: Edinburgh
Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2011 6:46 am Post subject:

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THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING DIFFERENT
Some of my experience is just posted here

Verrry goood!!
"cardreader"
Hi folks,

These are the thoughts ! You May not now work on this from my work field.
WINNING WITH PATTERFORM IN ALL WEATHER RACING
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However is that the perfermance now from effectively as good turf and also jumps his now practical because the "Surface " and "Config "
THE HUGE HUGE of the Win% pla% These this is good that winning.


Also is that the final having the Ireland makes the "Going"
The perfamnce is also huge now.

The basic info is talk on the if also "Patternform a logical approach"
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The effect of AW is set is groups we now I will make special groups for example - Galloping with Sharp bends , - Galloping - Uphill Finish - Sharp - Uphill Finish, - Very sharp - Uphill Finish
and also these surface such as ,- Undulating - mainly Downhill,- Severe Undulations
Why ?? Well, These that many types horses have oh have courses are like to make the seem to win very close the fade sometimes we can also see horses that from the course versa "pace" that shows slower in the beginning of the course and will run very long then finish ( CHELTENHAM ) and at AW LINGFIELD.


Now any particular thoughts then will add as I can but my Stroke makes my words a wee bit slow now.

Aubrey

_________________
"if you are a horse the most important thing to remember is that you are almost completely defenceless and you taste good!!" Lucy Rees in "The Horses Mind"

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Martinkil
Site Admin


Joined: 30 Oct 2005
Posts: 6692

Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2011 7:09 am Post subject:

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Nice to hear from you again Aubrey - hope your rehabilitation is coming along nicely.

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cardreader



Joined: 08 May 2011
Posts: 153

Posted: Sat Jun 11, 2011 6:22 am Post subject:

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Thanks to everyone for very usefull posts .. ..

Cheers .. ..

Methods can vary greatly .. .. The Key Factor is not same for every race due to Special Situations (track, race type, going, distance, surface, trainer, jockey etc., etc.) .. .. Also, The First Fundamentals are not same for everyone .. ..

Best Regards.

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cardreader



Joined: 08 May 2011
Posts: 153

Posted: Mon Jul 25, 2011 5:54 am Post subject:

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Just updated with new post.

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brumbie



Joined: 18 Aug 2010
Posts: 218
Location: Brisbane.Australia
Posted: Wed Jul 27, 2011 3:38 am Post subject:

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A reletively simple way of identifying horses that are coming good is to study the dob overview card.Any horse which has recently ran a few 2's and 1's is running well.

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cardreader



Joined: 08 May 2011
Posts: 153

Posted: Wed Jul 27, 2011 7:13 am Post subject:

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brumbie wrote:
A reletively simple way of identifying horses that are coming good is to study the dob overview card.Any horse which has recently ran a few 2's and 1's is running well.


How to use it? Any simple techniques? Methods can vary greatly .. ..

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