FREE BETTING INFORMATION

Have you considered keeping a betting record but not sure if you're putting in the right information?

In this interview on RSN - Radio & Sport conducted by Nadia Horne, Dean Evans from Winning Edge Investments discusses how to keep detailed betting records and why it is so important to do so.

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Interview Transcription:

Nadia Horne: Quarter past eleven and Dean the Trial Spy is with us.  How are you, Dean?

Dean the Trial Spy: I’m great, Nadia. How are you?

Nadia Horne: Extremely well. Today we’re going to discuss about keeping detailed betting records and, first of all, we do have to talk about the importance of them, A lot of people simply don’t do this, and to really get ahead of the game and keep a monitor on how you’re betting across the 12 month period or across years to come to see if it is working for you, you really have to do this.

Dean the Trial Spy: Yeah, absolutely. You know, it’s often overlooked by most punters as too much effort, but it’s a fundamentally important element of successful punting because, what it does is it gives you the opportunity to analyse, firstly whether you’re making a profit, and from there, where you’re making you profits and where you may be making losses, so you can adjust your strategy going forward.

Nadia Horne: Exactly and it all about tweaking isn’t it? You just don’t stick to one method and do it year in and year out and make the same mistakes. It does require a little bit of editing over time. 

Dean the Trial Spy: Well, exactly. It’s like anything. You sometimes have these beliefs that are based on the short terms results of what’s impacting your results or what the cause of your wins or losses are, but unless you’ve got a set of data in front of you that is over a statistically significant period of time, then really you’re not sure until you delve into it and it’s quite amazing the sort of insight you can get when you do that. 

Nadia Horne: Okay, well let’s talk a little bit about the basics. First of all, it’s probably best to use a spreadsheet?

Dean the Trial Spy: Yeah, so, you know, a betting record can be compiled in something like Microsoft Excel, and you know, in terms of the basics, you should be including information such as the date of the race, the time, the track, the race number, the horse number, the horse name, the type of bet that you’ve placed, the amount you’ve wagered, the finishing position or the result, and the win dividend. And, from there, you can sort of add some basic formulas. So, the total collected from the race, if it was a winning bet, which is your amount outlaid multiplied by odds of the winning bet, the profit or loss for that investment, which is any collect less your amount invested, the cumulative P&L which is the addition of all your profits and losses over the period, and the Profit on Turnover percentage, which is your cumulative P&L divided by your cumulative amount bet.

Nadia Horne: Do you analyse over a 12 month period, 6 month? How do you look at it, Dean? 

Dean the Trial Spy: Um, I sort of look at it ongoing. So, you know, a 12 month period is one way to look at it, but the longer you keep a set of data, the more of a record that you have. So, while it’s important to see what you’re changing over a period of time, whether you’d keep records for one year, then keep for a second year and then keep for a third year, you’ve just got more of a bank of data over a significant period of time to just keep analyzing.

Nadia Horne:  And what about additional information that may be added for analysis later on?

Dean the Trial Spy: Yeah, so personally, it can help to have just a comments section to include any sort of comments or lessons learned from the race and your selections for ongoing review to ensure you know what is working well for you, as well as what might not be working or situations to avoid in the future. In addition information such as the class of the race, whether it was, you know, a metro, provincial or country meeting, the distance and track condition could be interesting pieces of information for analysis later, as would be elements such as number of starters, the age and the gender of selections, barrier, weight, days since last start, beaten margin last start, jockey, trainer, number of days since last run or the change in distance on last run. You know, all of these factors can be things that, you know, might take a bit of work to enter them in there but, once you’ve got that bank of data, there’s some incredible analysis that you can do post, you know, the end of the year to determine whether there’re certain factors in your selection that simply aren’t working for you. 

Nadia Horne: I suppose also, your thought process in deriving how those investments do is quite important, because then again you can work out what’s working and what’s not.

Dean the Trial Spy: Yeah, absolutely, that’s absolutely key and it can just help identify areas to look at. You know, so for example, if you’ve analysed all your tracks and you find that you’re succeeding in, say Flemington and Randwick, but you’re not making any money in Moonee Valley and Doomben, it might be that you’re not doing your speed maps for those sorts of courses and you’re backing back markers.  So you might just unclear 4:15 somewhere, but not somewhere else, or you might just be finding that on good tracks and dead tracks you’re doing really well, but on the wet tracks you’re giving away all your profits. Once you’ve got that bank of data to really objectively analyse that, it can be a massive advantage. 

Nadia Horne: And what about factoring in price or prices that you’ve missed, because sometimes over a period, you can sort of see that, ‘okay the works right, but I keep on missing the top point of the market’, which, at the end of your period, could be detrimental to you making a profit and loss. So, how do you keep a record of the prices?

Dean the Trial Spy: Yeah, well this is really, really important because many only include the price they obtained in their betting records, either just to calculate their records, or you know, maybe to compare with results calculated by a service they’re following, but in truth this isn’t actually going to help you long term in improving your own results. Data that would actually be useful to capture for future analysis, in addition to the odds obtained for every runner, would the best possible prices with the corporate bookies & Betfair (including the times they were achieved even broken down into early opening markets, in the middle of betting or just prior to start time).  You can then also add things like best tote or SP and Best of the Best, for analysis. But, you can then use this information to determine at which times and in which situations it may be best to say take the best early fixed price in the market, or alternatively wait until close to start time and bet through potentially Betfair, particularly if the horse is drifting in the market.

Nadia Horne: It takes a long time to do the work prior to a meeting. It takes a long time to assess what actually happened. But this is a very important part of your strategy going forward, because, what it is, it’s a record of what you’re doing, and what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong.  

Dean the Trial Spy: Exactly, it’s an objective record and way to analyse, you know, for people who are serious about actually trying to improve their results, you know, this sort of data can really help you to understand where and when to bet in given situations on your own selections. 

Nadia Horne: Very good.

Dean the Trial Spy: Alright, thanks Nadia.

Nadia Horne: Dean the Trial Spy…
 

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