I’m excited about starting up my betting again. I’ve missed it. Never have words rung truer than Joni Mitchell’s when she sang about not knowing what you’ve got ’til it’s gone, when viewed through the prism of the pandemic and its affect on sport and betting. It’s inevitable that as soon as you have no choice, when you can’t bet, that you quickly forget about the dreariness of losing runs, the constant rush to secure the best prices, or anything else that we tend to moan about when we ARE betting. Nope, all those things are forgotten for now, and instead it’s with an eager sense of anticipation that I’m looking forward to striking my first bet in quite some time tomorrow.
So I’m giving myself a slap on the back for exercising self-discipline and refusing to get drawn into betting at the earliest possible opportunity, and instead have waited until the start of July to get back to it. I explained my reasons for doing so in last week’s post. Although I stand by my reasoning, I didn’t have any particularly strong conviction that my chosen course was the correct one. So it’s been interesting to see since I wrote that post, a couple of things that back up – in a far more scientific and statistical way – my decision.
The first comes from newly reviewed racing service Flat Race Betting, which uses artificial intelligence and modelling to identify value selections. Although it is possible to sign up for the service the first month has been provided for free with strong advice not to bet whilst the models are able to utilize more data and get back up to speed, as it were. You can read a lot more about it here. In a nutshell, you will find a diagram that shows how the algorithms are proving to be no quite so powerful since the resumption of horse racing than they were prior to it, the salient issue being a relative lack of recent data. It is notable too that the performance of the models is improving day by day.
The second comes from the following tweet from @stevectilley:
If you had backed every horse that has run in June so far at Betfair
SP you would have made +13.5% ROI. 2019 June blindly backing every
horse at SP 34.5% loss. 2020 June doing the same 15% loss
Clearly more unfancied longshots are winning than is the norm!
Anyway, this is all rendered a side issue as of tomorrow, when the betting boots will be dusted off and into battle I shall go. Looking forward to it.
Next week I’ll have the first results update from the various services in the portfolio. Let’s hope we get off to a flying start.
Until then…
