The usual groans will emanate from your mouth as you work your way through the drivel of a sales page that comprises the Odds Crusher website.
You know the drill; outlandish monetary claims, unnecessary and probably fictional biography of the vendor, screen-grabs of bank accounts and bookie accounts that are as full as eggs with money and ‘100% verified’ strings of testimonials. There’s one-time payment of £29.95 payable through Clickbank (with its applicable-to-all 60-day money-back guarantee that all those who sell through it make such a song and dance about).
Odds Crusher is from Liam Daley, who claims to be an ex-mechanic-turned-pro-bettor and who has been using this system for five years. I’m not sure why, if that is so, he’s only just decided to sell it.
It’s a backing system for use with horse racing, comprised of a selection process that leaves you with horses that have a good chance of either winning or placing in their respective races. It’s called ‘Odds Crusher’ because you’re essentially looking for horses that are steamers, thus the odds given for those horses shorten as you near the start of the race.
Letscomparebets.com defines steamers as ‘A horse that has a trend of shortening odds is called a steamer. The odds shorten because predicted likelihood of that horse winning increases. This can be for a number of reasons.’
For your £30 you get access to a PDF manual that divulges the system. It’s a trying read – poorly written and more fluff-filled than the world’s biggest ball of belly-button fluff. It claims to be aimed at people new to betting but it’s just an excuse to pad out the pages of a tedious PDF.
That said, the system – once you’ve stripped everything else away – is interesting and original. Various filters are applied to the horses of a meet which are designed to locate steamers, based on the prices of horses on Skybet at midday. There’s no clarification given regarding the possibility that the system is not useable if you can’t utilise it at midday every day.
This is the first of many question marks that arise regarding the system as once you begin to use it and work out your selections, more and more niggling little kinks refuse to be ironed out. Any emails we sent to Liam seeking clarity were ignored and unanswered. Different selections arise at differing times of the day, and so there seems to be a lot of scope for varying results and outcomes.
The selection process takes about 20 minutes, normally there is one selection per race, and it’s certainly not a case of always going with the favourite. You can either back the horse to win, or to place – it’s up to you. Unsurprisingly, the system found place winners better than actually finding the first place winner.
During our 6-week trial, 194 selections were made and 79 of these provided some monetary return, giving a 40.7% strike rate. There was a successful flourish at the start of the trial that saw the bank very quickly swelled by 29 points profit, however, the inevitable slump followed and point diminished to hovering above and below the zero mark. The longest winning run was 3 and the longest losing run was 7.
Winning odds were at an average of 4/1 and most races resulted in at least one selection being made. There were between 3 and 7 selections in total every day. Uncertainty relating to the finer details that dictate whether or not a particular horse should be a selection always made me use the greatest shortening odds as the clincher factor.
There’s an irksome comment on the sales page that reads: ‘and you’ll always show a profit at the end of each week, that I can GUARANTEE’. How Liam can guarantee this is beyond me and such blasé hyped-up statements merely reflect a desperation to sell and indicates firmly where Liam really intends on making money; through online selling. His sales page is a typical internet marketing template and when you try to leave it without buying the product, the price is slashed by £10, making the system yours for £15.
This reduced price of £15 makes me think the system is actually value for money, despite the mediocre results.
Though it could benefit from a rewrite and a more definitive explanation of the selection system, there’s enough in it that you could hone and use in your day-to-day betting. As it stands at the moment, Odds Crusher is far from a great system and the trial wasn’t massively encouraging, but there are kernels of useful information and it’s a simple way of highlighting potential steamers in any given race.
