Little Experiment

We've gone to the dogs.
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MemphisFlash
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half way through the greyhound cards today, and not one of them is in profit!!!
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Derek27
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MemphisFlash wrote:
Sat Mar 09, 2019 4:35 pm
half way through the greyhound cards today, and not one of them is in profit!!!
Know nothing about greyhounds but I'd be amazed if any of them was in profit, I thought the idea was to see which loses the least.

If greyhound bookies operate similarly to horse racing, the outsiders are always grossly underpriced because bookies have little to gain by laying them, and the favourite is laid to make a loss, but at the same time it's over-backed by punters.

My guess would be the favourite or second fav will make the least loss as their odds are probably closer to their true chances than the rest. Will be interested to hear the result of your experiment. :)
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shortcut
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MemphisFlash wrote:
Sat Mar 09, 2019 4:22 pm
here is a little sneak preview of the sheet i am generating.


experiment.PNG
Is that at BSP?
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MemphisFlash
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Right, the results are in and it makes pretty dismal reading.
If you employ a strategy whereby you back the fav, 2nd, fav, 3rd fav etc all day long without exception
you will lose money.
This test was done by using 6 open versions of Bet Angel. one for first fav, one for second fav etc.
At 1 minute before the off a back bet of £1 was placed into each market. no conditions on the back rule.
I had a green up rule on each market to green up >£0.10p.
The excel sheet enclosed shows the results.
The yellow boxes are when a green up occured.
The rest of the time was a straight back bet as it did not green up.
Now for the stats:-

6th favourite returned a P/l of -£4.60
1st favourite returned a P/l of -£17.46
3rd favourite returned a P/l of -£18.49
2nd favourite returned a P/l of -£48.96
5th favourite returned a P/l of -£61.59
4th favourite returned a P/l of -£73.80

On the sheet i have recorded the odds that were taken at the time, blue being back and orange being lay.

I did not interefere with any of the markets, just let it do it's thing but unfortunately i missed out the meeting at Poole.
The 6th fav won 12 out of 138 races (there were 8 races where there was no 6th favourite as only 5 runners) which is 8%.
Of these 12 winners 3 of them were fully green.
Had they not been greened up the 6th favourite would have returned a healty P/L of £10.74


Have a look at the sheet if you want to draw your own conclusions.
The figures at the bottom of sheet 2 shows who was in the lead From Midday onwards.
Testing Strategys against each other 09.03.2019.xlsx
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Crazyskier
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This reminds me of a system I have that dutches the place market on the 2 outside dogs when they are above a certain figure. With a staking system and decent bank size and starting at minimum bets, it's sometimes / often possible to double the bank before going bust more frequently than the reverse.

The principle being that the 5th and 6th favourite are often very healthy odds to win (15+) and therefore quite generous even to place and get their nose into second place. This happens a surprising number of times. Of course the losing streaks can be quite long, so the DOB approach seems to work best I find, as opposed to any Kelly criterion loss recovery that can get very scary very fast.

CS :D
tootall
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Compared to Betfair SP historical csv files your results are different had you placed bets at SP on the 9th March would have given the 1st Fav an overall profit of £21.33 all the rest were loses (4th Fav minus -£38.95)
Over a 30 day rolling period 3 selections would be in the money, with only 1 selection making decent money.
eightbo
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Interesting results
spreadbetting
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I think it simply confirms that if you put no effort into your opening bet and take whatevers on offer you'll never win long term. Maybe you should simply compare the odds you took against the BSP and it'll show how bad the odds you were prepared to take were.
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Derek27
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MemphisFlash wrote:
Sun Mar 10, 2019 10:11 am
Right, the results are in and it makes pretty dismal reading.
On the contrary, I think those results are quite encouraging to dog punters. If you can make a loss of only £4.60 by blindly backing the favourites in each race it does show that the odds for the favourite are quite competitive and there may be some value to be found by a punter who's more selective.
spreadbetting
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You should know by now one day's results are hardly indicative of how a market will behave long term , Derek.
eightbo
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Hate to fuel the negativity fire but I must point out that you've fallen prey to selection bias there Derek in cherrypicking the 6th Fav's P&L.
Punters should in fact be discouraged because the average result of blind-backing favs was -£37.48.
From £179 total bets for the day — that's a 21% loss, worse than the average slot machines!

Only mention it as I know you'll benefit from not doing this in the future.

Also Memphis I'm curious why you hedged when profit achieved a 10% return, seems like it'd just skew the results unnecessarily.
I'm guessing this has proved favourable in the long run for you elsewhere.
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MemphisFlash
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no this was just a test as i wanted to know if people followed blindly any sort of thing like this,
like backing the fav or only backing trap 3 or only following one particular jockey would actually work.
i chose greyhounds for test as there are so many per day and things like weather and conditions have little or no
effect on dogs. This is not a strategy i have ever used. just wanted to know so i set the test up.
I was more pleased that my laptop
stood up to 10 versions of Bet angel being open, along with streaming, and excel all at same time.
eightbo
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That's cool and I get that but why did you decide to hedge for 10p?
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Derek27
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spreadbetting wrote:
Sun Mar 10, 2019 3:47 pm
You should know by now one day's results are hardly indicative of how a market will behave long term , Derek.
I never suggested they are indicative of anything. I was basically saying they are not dismal reading but encouraging.
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Derek27
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eightbo wrote:
Sun Mar 10, 2019 4:49 pm
Hate to fuel the negativity fire but I must point out that you've fallen prey to selection bias there Derek in cherrypicking the 6th Fav's P&L.
Punters should in fact be discouraged because the average result of blind-backing favs was -£37.48.
From £179 total bets for the day — that's a 21% loss, worse than the average slot machines!

Only mention it as I know you'll benefit from not doing this in the future.

Also Memphis I'm curious why you hedged when profit achieved a 10% return, seems like it'd just skew the results unnecessarily.
I'm guessing this has proved favourable in the long run for you elsewhere.
I misread those results, I thought it was the 1st fav that had a loss of £4.60. :oops:
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