What a week! I could see it before my eyes: years of work vanishing as quickly as the lovely Debbie Magee for one of Paul Daniel’s magic tricks. Yes, my computer suffered the ‘blue screen of death’. I could not get into my laptop for three days. Panic ensued. With thanks to Ubuntu, detective work via Google and an Internet café, I succeeded in gaining access into my laptop again, but the updates on horse racing laying I had pencilled in for this week will have to wait.
Each way strategies to try out
This weekend sees the Hennessy meeting. It begins today at Newbury and along with meetings such as these it’s the opportunity to try out the each way betting strategies I have often mentioned in eletters.
Look at the 12.30 Newbury today. Remember that for each way purposes the ideal is eight or nine runner races. Well, we have one today.
Our first stopping point is the Racing Post betting forecast:
This looks like a great race for each way purposes. Why? Well we have an odds-on favourite in the betting forecast. Note too, that there are only five horses under 20/1: the inference here is that these five should logically be the horses who fill the three places available for each way punting.
The next job is to look at the live betting market, using websites such as oddschecker, which makes interesting reading. Here, there are only four horses under 16/1, with Cropley apparently unfancied at 16/1. The three each way horses to choose from include Bold Cuffs at 7/2, Vasco D’Ycy at 6/1 and Pistol at 6/1.
It only remains to choose one of these three as a speculative but logical each way punt!
Tomorrow, you can try out this each way idea in the 2.00 Newbury as a pipe opener to the main event, the Gold Cup at 3.10 p.m. A 16-runner Grade 3 Handicap Chase is predictably a bit of a puzzler. There are ten horses under 20/1 – are these the ones to focus on? Here’s a great review of the race ohracing. Good luck if you’re getting involved.
If this tough Gold Cup doesn’t float your boat, there’s always the football – and, of course, you can read my research for free currently at whatreallywinsmoney. The research on the 28th November 2012 was particularly accurate and I hope it will be the same concerning this weekend (disclaimer – if my girlfriend drags me off to do some God-forsaken dull activity, such as shopping etc, then this will affect my ability to research, so please bear that in mind).
FORE!
Carrying on the golfing theme from last week (no, I won’t regail with you with stories of my heroic 11 on the par 5 last weekend), we see the Nedbank Challenge, which is on this weekend. Logically, a golf tournament of 12 players and a favourite at 4/1 affords us an opportunity for more successful punting than at a 150 field mid-year event.
Here are some ideas if you have a bit of imagination and suitable software to help you engineer interests bets, at betfair especially. Here’s an example of the kind of bets that you can engineer:
Here, I am using Fairbot and a £100 stake to dutch four players at the Nedbank Challenge Tournament: Lee Westwood is a multiple winner of the tournament; Justin Rose is in great form; Oosthuizen and Schwartzel are the locals. And we are covering 1/3 of the field.
I’ll be looking out for tournaments like this next year and mentioning any interesting punts at whatreallywinsmoney.
How about this for a punt: if you want to cover seven of the twelve players in the Nedbank, you will need Fairbot to engineer a bet in such as way that you will break even on four players and load profit on three players.
The chance of losing this bet is small – it’s still there, but it’s small. This kind of software allows us to be creative and opens up a whole new world of betting techniques in judiciously chosen events or races.
Look out too for superb opportunities in 2-ball and 3-ball betting. Quite simply, 2-ball betting involves two players and three bets: Player A to win the round, Player B to win the round and the tie; ditto for 3-ball betting, except that Player C now becomes involved.
In some country-specific tournaments you’ll find a local player invited to fill in the ranks. This was the case in the Nedbank, where Martin Kaymer – an experienced tour professional -was involved in a two-player tussle with invited South African Garth Mulroy. Kaymer was 1.56 on Betfair to win. Short odds granted but a solid bet isn’t it? The invited South African plays Justin Rose today, and ‘Rosey’ (as us showbiz types like to call him) is the same price as Kaymer to beat the Mulroy. Looking out for little niches like this in the lower-profile tournaments, especially at season end, looks a good start to a golfing betting career – we saw this with the Australian tournament last week (incidentally, it was Steve Palmer in the Racing Post who highlighted Kaymer v Garth Mulroy, so make him required reading this new golfing season).
I think there is a betting research template that can be constructed for the new season based around my, ahem, world famous football betting research template (incidentally, it’s been performing well this week – Wednesday in particular: research really can highlight angles other punters might not see, and flag up potential tough matches for the short priced favourites).
With golf, players have certain characteristics. Some play better at some courses than others. So we need to look at past form on the course. We also need to see if a player is in good nick. So recent form needs to be investigated (and here, a focus on top 10 and top 5 finishes will serve well). We should focus too on nationalities at their local tournaments, as I touched on last week, and on players playing in events sponsored by their main sponsors (if that makes sense).
Stats are available at pga and europeantour. I’m going to develop a research template for the golf and hope it can highlight strong players in certain tournaments.
I hope to update you on horse racing laying next week, having lost three days this week.
Have a great weekend.
Clive