It was in May last year, I was having a pleasant coffee in the sun on the sea front in Altea with John a good friend who I had known for many years in our previous working life in London. On the table was a copy of the Daily Mail which was opened at a page with a story concerning a firm of Bookmakers who were trying to expand their business into a small town against the wishes of the local community. They were protesting there where too many betting shops already in their high street.
John said something like “There is obviously a lot of money in being a bookie” And it was this remark that sparked the idea for our little joint venture. One that quickly progressed to give us a new interest in life and best of all a boost to our rapidly depleting UK pensions.

Neither of us knows anything about horse racing and we certainly don’t consider ourselves to be gambling people. However both of us having worked in the accountancy profession do know something about numbers and so for a laugh we decided to a bit of research, just for the hell of it.

The way people bet on horses and dogs, football matches and the like, in fact all manner of sports, has changed dramatically over recent years. This phenomenon is entirely due to the incredible modern day technology and of course, the internet. Not only are you able to bet on-line but you can also become an online bookie or if you want you can be both a punter and a bookie at the same time.

One of the first things we discovered was the unbelievably sophisticated hi tech online betting exchange known as Betfair. This website in itself is an amazing example of today’s technology. It takes a little while to get the hang of it but there are loads of help files and pretty soon we learned how it all worked and how we could use it in our new “investment” project.
Believe it or not horse racing happens all over the world, everyday seven days a week and the Betfair exchange takes advantage of this enabling people from every corner of the globe to follow the races in the UK, South Africa, USA and Australia. Altogether Betfair features about 100 races every day each with an average of 12 runners per race. A staggering 1,200 horses race every single day.
Now you don’t have to be a genius to work out that from each race there will be only one winner, meaning out of 100 races with a total of 1,200 runners there will only be a hundred winners. Given there are only 100 winners it follows 1,100 have to be losers. Its pretty obvious therefore that it must be much easier to pick a loser than to pick a winner. Look out William Hill we have you sussed!

The internet is full of websites about gambling as you will discover. Using the amazing speed and power of Google it’s relatively easy to obtain information about virtually anything including past racing results.
We found a couple of good websites and started to analyse the results of races going back 10 years. Since our plan was to act as bookies we had to look for situations where given pre defined circumstances the resulting selection would hardly ever win the race. We were basically looking for instances where given certain criteria the results showed very few winners consistently over a long period of time.
If you become interested in this and start your own investigations you will quickly discover many horse racing related websites offering to sell you tips, systems, methods and strategies, all of which sound too good to be true. (If it sounds too good to be true then it probably is).
The truth is most of these “Get rich quick schemes” are either an out an out con or just so unpractical that they cant work unless you have endless supplies of cash, or you have to sit at your computer 24 hours a day. However, to be fair there are one or two winning strategies out there that will work, but my advice is don’t waste your money, find your own winning strategy like we did - it’s really not that difficult as I will explain later.
One thing we learned in the early days was this. Whatever the idea, strategy or method you discovered and developed, no matter how good it appeared to perform during testing it would never be 100% successful, none of them are. At best you will come up with a system that wins 80% or maybe 90% of the time. Its important to be aware of this and work on a scheme which can handle a 20% failure rate. For us the answer was diversification, not to have all our eggs in one basket. For example if you employ a number of different strategies running simultaneously the chances of all of them failing at the same time are very low indeed.
So that’s what we did,  we developed and tuned up the criteria for our individual strategies and then five of us pooled together to form a syndicate with 5 different strategies, running automatically and simultaneously on Mark Bakers software.

Since we began in mid July on only one occasion did two strategies fail at the same time and on the same day - on that day we lost a little money? On a few other occasions one strategy out of the five would fail and on those days we didn’t win very much, but the plan was designed to cope with these occasional losses and taken over a month the end results were very good.

If this kind of thing interests you and you fancy have a go yourself then you can start with only a very small investment. First you need  to open an account with Betfair . You can use any currency however, the minimum investment is $25 (about 20€) if you use the promotional code AJ7KNWJMD when you sign up then Betfair will add an additional £25 to your account which will bring your betting bank up to $60, which is more than enough to get you started.
The next thing you need is the “Programme” (known as a BOT) designed to follow the rules you have specified and automatically lay the bets whenever your criteria is met.
You will need to reload the days races each morning, any time before lunch, it’s really easy to do and takes about 2 minutes, and basically that’s all there is to it.
It’s great fun and because it works like a robot you don’t have to make decisions or get involved. No emotions no stress, just start it up and let it do its thing!

Mark’s software requires a one time only investment of around 90€. However, if you are not sure right now whether or not you want to go ahead you can watch a demo and get a few days free trial to test it for yourself.
Personally I think the software is amazing, it has many excellent features including a simulation mode which allows you to test your strategies without risking any money.
Also when you start for real its possible to set it so that it allows you to stake much lower than Betfair’s minimum bet. Using the software you can bet as little as $0.10 US cents which is a great advantage when you are just starting off.

The other very useful feature is the Forum, where Mark and the other users, offer their help and discuss ideas. Its here you will find lots of new strategies to test on your own system.

Once you have established yourself with Betfair and you are familiar with the software, you can email me, let me know how you are getting on and if you wish we can discuss the possibilities of joining our syndicate.
Good Luck and enjoy!
Tom Roda
tomroda@googlemail.com

 

Other articles by Tom can be read by following the links below

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