Betting System reveals trends to profit by

05 December 2014 10:41 AM

The GTO team was lucky to catch-up with a professional punter on a recent trip to Melbourne who we will call Matt in this article. Matt is a fairly humble bloke. Not a 'Big Noter' and very open about how he makes money from betting on horses. After receiving some insights into his racing form analysis and betting procedures we can see why he isn't too worried about disclosing the information that he did.

Like most of the successful professional punters that we have met, their punting success isn't like a code that when found, will allow any punter who receives it to go on and replicate it. But rather it is an involved process that has been tuned over many years, where learning has led to modifications that has delivered their success.

Learning to Bet

Although he looks like an average Australian punter, Matt's profile is a little different. He is in his early thirties and finished his VCE in the top two percent in mathematics. He went on to do a degree in Computer Science at a prestigious Melbourne University where he got more heavily involved in complex mathematics and software development. A keen racing enthusiast, he told us how at each stage of his career he continually thought about new concepts that he learned and then thought about how he could apply them to horse racing to achieve better results from his betting.

At the age of 23 he graduated from university and held various roles with large financial institutions where his focus was on automating processes that priced risk in financial markets. Like his university days, he relayed this knowledge straight back to betting on the races. At work he was thinking about the risk associated with the Bank's assets or positions in certain markets but it was no different, he says, to looking at the risk that a horse may not run up to its full potential in a race.

Horse racing and Financial Markets are very similar. There are hundreds and thousands of factors that have the potential to influence the outcome. The trick is to come up with the odds that accurately reflect these outcomes.

The Betting System

With a strong mathematics background, a Computer Science degree and seven years of knowledge around pricing risk and turning it into an automated process, he felt he was ready to take on the Australian bookmakers. Since his early days in the banking industry Matt had started building what he refers to as a Learning Betting System for horse racing. When he started developing it, he was working with 23 factors that he had identified as quantifiable from racing information that was available in the market. Today, with the assistance of more resourceful racing information services and a team of professional racing analysts, he has expanded that number to 74 factors. These factors include the obvious ones that most punters consider when they study form like, weight, form over the distance and race tracks, however as we learned, he goes into a lot more detail. Some factors that he analyses are not obtainable from a public racing source but rather rely on trained racing analysts to watch every race, every day, in slow motion, real time and fast forward and accurately assess various aspects about the race and each horse's run.

Betting Factors that Matter

It's amazing how racing result trends appear when you identify and measure a factor that you were not considering before.

Matt wasn't giving too much away but he reflected on the times over the past nine years when he successfully improved his profitability by identifying new factors which he subsequently introduced into his betting system. The identification process sounds like a police investigation where he is looking for a clue that is missing from the 'who done it' puzzle. He starts by collecting vision for races where his learning system had significantly under performed. He copies between six to ten races onto a USB, or DVD in prior years. Watching each race over and over, he looks for some factor that is not being considered in his system that may have impacted the outcome of the race and discounted the other factors he used for his assessment.

He recalls one time recently when after reviewing footage continually for three weeks, he was at a loss to identify the missing factor that he was looking for. He knew there was something there but couldn't put his finger on it. With a sly grin and a gaze into the air, he described the moment when the penny finally dropped. He was out with his better half and two other couples. They had been to a show and were having a few drinks at a small bar in Melbourne afterwards. He was looking over at the bar and saw an incident where a guy was carrying three drinks and bumped into another guy and dropped the drinks on the floor. Something immediately hit him. He told his wife he had to go to the bathroom, he sat in a cubicle and started typing everything that was in his head into an email and sent it to himself. After a solid month of searching, he had finally identified two new factors. His team went over past footage and ran the numbers over past races to tune the weighting to be applied to the new factors. Within weeks his betting profits lifted two percentage points and by the time his averages had settled down he had lifted his real profit on turnover by three percent.

A Few Gems for Punters

Matt's betting system quantifies between 60 and 74 factors for each race that he analyses. Based on almost of decade of results his system identifies the most profitable weightings to apply to each one of these factors taking the race day conditions into account. After applying these weightings it produces what he calls true odds for each horse in the race. He then has another process that he uses to optimise his staking strategy based on the value horses in the race. With the complexity of factors, weightings and their relationships to track conditions, we asked him if there were any trends or rules that he had noted that he could provide to our readers. With a warning to be wary of looking at anything in isolation, he provided these gems for punters to take away.

The risk associated with a horse stepping-up in distance is often miscalculated by betting markets.

Horses with good form and class over the field who are stepping-up to a distance for the first time or have not been proven over the distance, are often unders in the betting market. This usually means that there is greater value amongst the other runners in the race.

Barriers, speed and track characteristics, the elements of most speed maps, are basically useless if you don't factor in the jockey's strengths and weaknesses.

Matt applauds the fact that speed maps are readily available for punters but comments that in his experience they are often inaccurate or misunderstood by punters. The speed map is one of the tools we use to determine what we call 'race pattern risk'. Which essentially means the risk that a horse who has the ability to win the race is hampered significantly in the running, he Says. In isolation, however it is useless. He went on to talk about one example to support this assertion - jockeys.

Every jockey in just about every race is doing speed maps too. If you don't consider what they are likely to do and how this will impact the running of the race, you're only getting a one dimensional view of the racing pattern.

We asked him if it was realistic to expect a social punter to start developing a strategic view of the race like the jockey's do. He replied, It doesn't really need all that much effort. Every jockey has a riding style and with that comes his or her strengths and weaknesses. Keep those in mind when you look at speed maps and see how much better you go.

Give each horse a consistency rating when you assess their odds.

Matt's thinking on risk extends to the horse itself. He says that there is greater inherent risk backing some horses than others. It's not a complex thought here really, you just have to look at their last five runs to get a reasonable view on their consistency, says Matt. He believes horses are like people. Some blokes who play footy are consistently delivering week after week while others tend to be off then on their game all the time. Horses are similar. It doesn't mean they have to be winning each week to be tagged as consistent, but rather it's about how often they are running to their full potential.

Most punters can probably understand why Matt asked us not to disclose his real name. He is currently going into his fourth year as a full-time betting professional and although he didn't disclose it to us, we worked out that there are at least three other people working with him.