For a few months now Grey Horse Bot owners have been able to test a system (“Make a Living”) that bets on two horses in four races a day. One runner is a lay bet and the other is a back bet.
The system was a pairing of two ideas. We appeared to be able to pick winning favourites quite often, but the prices didn’t allow us to make a consistent profit. So it seemed a good idea to try and gain some extra profit, through laying one of the other runners in the same race.
Initial testing was very positive with very few losers and a lot of profit and so, after about six months of watching them daily, we decided to let Grey Horse Bot members join us in our next stage, which is testing live with small stakes and of course with the normal warnings and disclaimers.
I think that live testing with small stakes is fundamental to testing a new system or even tips from a service. This is where you can find out if what you thought was going to happen…actually does.
Our staking was worked out on the basis that the lay bet usually won. So we felt that we should have a stake value of 1pt on the lay and 0.5pt on the back, then the lay would cover any losing backs, but when a back bet did come in, the extra profit would be a welcome bonus.
During our original paper testing of the system we would select the runners in the morning and then check the results at night. This showed us that the results were showing a strong profit, but once we went to live testing a number of problems started to show up.
Firstly we could not always get our lay bet on, but would still manage to back which meant we would often be out of profit as our back bet didn’t win and we had no lay to back it up.
Secondly we have found the reduction factor has certainly played a part in the races where we have lost. Losers are great in some ways because they allow you to see where you may have made mistakes with your form analysis.
Our first loser came after the 10th day of testing, but we were up 30pts by this time so although we lost half of this, it wasn’t the end of the world (although some people do not like losing!).
This was at the end of October during the season change over so we thought it may just be an odd result, but we had expected some losers. We still ended October, 17.49pts up after commission.
November was a little more turbulent and we had a couple of more losers, but we still had the problem of missing lay bets and so we were still losing money on the backs. We still managed to finish 14.52pts up after commission though.
By this time we started to see some patterns with the losing selections but we wanted to continue testing for a bit longer, because we felt the profit was still pretty good.
December proved to be our worse month so far, ending up only 6.94pts in profit, but there were fewer betting days because of Christmas and we also had our biggest priced loser at 23.13.
January finished up 11.27 pts up (after commission) and considering it was a difficult month with snow and abandoned races I am very pleased with the result.
Through testing with very small amounts (The Grey Horse bot bets under £2.00) we have been able to gather some very important information about the system and actually betting on the selections.
We have been able to decide on the best way of staking and establish a couple of important rules that should help us avoid some losers.
But more importantly (and I think this is the lesson I am trying to give you) is that through actual low stake testing we can see exactly what we are likely to achieve profit wise from the selections.
If you looked at our SP results compared to our actual results then you will see two entirely different systems, but more often than not many people reading this will just jump in when they get a new system and risk a lot of their cash based purely on what they have been told.
You can download the results and screenshots here:
http://www.greyhorsebot.co.uk/mal-results.zip
Patience may or may not be a virtue, but with sports betting it really does help!
We are always trying to give Grey Horse Bot subscribers something to try out and although many of these ideas don’t always work out how we were expecting, they often give the users other ideas to try.
Thanks for reading.
Malcolm Pett
http://www.greyhorsebot.com
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