After a couple of weeks banging the drum for our bookie fairplay campaign in these columns, I am getting back to basics today with a focus on betting trends – including how one simple set of analysis helped boost the ROI punters can enjoy on one top tipster to as much as 15.4%!
First of all though, a little education on what to watch out for when it comes to trends and avoiding being sucked in by something called the ‘Gamblers Fallacy’.
To briefly explain using the coin toss analogy (a cliché I know but it’s easy to understand!) If I were to toss a coin 10 times and each time it were to come up heads, many people would automatically think the 11th time MUST be tails.
This is the fallacy in action as the 11th coin toss is completely independent of the previous 10 and there remains a 50/50 chance that it will be either tails of heads. You can find a more detailed explanation of this courtesy of Kieran Ward’s post here.
You Are Never ‘Due A Winner’!
The gambling fallacy often catches punters out during both winning or losing runs, when they mistakenly link totally unconnected recent form with future results. You might start to think you are ‘due a winner’ and up stakes accordingly or even give up entirely during a particularly bad run.
It might seem obvious but you will be amazed how this can impact your thinking and all of us get caught up in it from time to time, especially when in the thick of a losing run!
During the middle of March this year I could not pick a winner with my own football betting approach for love nor money and wondered if I would ever enjoy a profitable weekend again!
‘Sensible Pete’ knew it would come good (and it duly did again in April) but when you are in the midst of a bad run, you can’t help but question yourself. ‘Panicky Pete‘ couldn’t bear to listen to the classified football results on a Saturday for fear of having another bad run!
The key point about my own bad form football betting last month, is that there was clearly no logical reason to expect all football systems to lose money over a couple of weeks in March each year.
Similarly, you wouldn’t expect a horse racing system that picks out horses beginning with the letter P to work or by simply backing all favourites on a Tuesday.
Sometimes, however there are patterns and trends we can use that do make logical sense and identifying these can start to make a difference to your betting output.
Look For Patterns When Comparing Tipsters By Race Code
One prime example often comes when analysing racing tipsters and their performance over the 3 main forms of racing – All Weather, National Hunt and the Flat. I often find that clear patterns can be distinguished (once you get enough stats) that might reveal a tipster is stronger on the flat or should be avoided on the all weather for example.
A telling example of this came from the cover review of the latest SBC Magazine. The headline of our review was that here was a tipster with a phenomenal record tipping over 7 years (a 12.1% ROI), but yet delving into their stats on racing code revealed even more of use!
Check out their stats on performance across all 3 racing codes as taken from SBC 87 below:
After nearly 3000 bets on the AW over these 7 years, the service has actually made a loss of 300 pts (-1.1%) indicating you should avoid them altogether on this form of racing.
Contrast this with the excellent profits from betting on both their Flat and NH tips – which have made 18.6% and 12.5% ROI respectively. Combined if you simply followed this tipster in these 2 racing codes, your ROI would jump from 12.1% to 15.4% – a very significant increase.
The key thing about this trend is that it is both logical (some tipsters have very specific strengths when it comes to code) and the fact there are several thousand bets here. Enough to suggest this is no fluke and is a genuine trend.
Always Striving To Improve Your Betting
As punters we should never stop looking for angles to increase and improve the efficiency of the money we are betting with and the above is just one way to do this.
This is one reason we perform the above analysis on racing code as standard on all tipsters we review, alongside many other key statistical measures.
You can read more on this tipster in the very latest SBC magazine, plus also save 20% on the cost of subscription to them via the SBC Discount Club link.
Click here to sign-up as a Smart Betting Club member today.
