The idea behind this little gem is to iliminate the dead wood of a race and just back your top 3 or 4 selections. I will show you how to work out the odds that you will use to make bets with bookmakers that will guarentee winnings if one of your selections wins. I know that that sounds like a sales pitch and in a way it is, you immediatley start dreaming of riches. The snag however is that one of your selections has to win. I will look at different selection processes after the maths is done.

Anyway if you are all seated comfortably we can begin.

To be able to understand the workings of this scheme we need to know how a bookie works out the odds for any particular race and use them to our advantage and not theirs. The main tool we use for this is a table of odds and probabilities shown below

Bookmakers use this table to calculate the odds for any given race to make sure that the “over round odds” add up to over 100% to demonstrate this lets look at an eight horse race run at Doncaster on the 2 May 2009.

The final positions and starting prices were as follows

DONCASTER 8:20 2 May 2009

1st Hawk Mountain 7/2
2nd Red Wine 16/1
3rd Eton Fable 14/1
4th Overrule 2/1f
5th Dansimar 9/2
6th Trip the Light 9/2
7th Monfils Monfils 12/1
8th Admiral 33/1

let us now convert the odds into probability percentages using the table above

 

7/2 22.2 16/1 5.9 14/1 6.7 2/1 33.3 9/2 18.2 9/2 18.2 12/1 7.7 33/1 2.9 Total 115.1%

  As you can see the total percentage probability is 115.1 percent this means that if equal amounts were bet on each horse the punter would lose and the bookie would win.

To turn the tables on these mean old turf dogs we need to bring the over round percentage to below 100%. To do this we need to pick only 3 or 4 runners from the field and work out our own odds and back the runners accordingly.

How you pick your selections is entirely your choice there is no magic formula to do this, however at the end of this maths lesson I will suggest and test some of my own thoughts.

Back to the maths for now though.

I have briefly shown how bookies make their odds in their favour. I will now show how we can fix the odds in our favour.
With the abolition of betting tax from our end, the sums we need to do are less complex but we do need semi stable odds (if you use this system for the dogs then you have to be pretty quick with the bets as odds can change very quickly)

If we have made our four selections and wager equal ammounts on each horse then our betting slip would look something like this :

1. Hawk mountain  £5.00 Win @ 7/2
2. Dansimar           £5.00 Win @ 9/2
3. Trip the Light       £5.00 Win @ 9/2
4. Overule                £5.00 Win @2/1

 As you can see this is not an ideal bet as you would only make a profit if Dansimar or Trip the light won in the event of things Hawk mountain won so we actually made a small loss!

We need to make the odds work in our favour and to do this we need to use the table of odds probability percentage table above.

We will use the same 4 horses even though we know one of them won. So the 4 odds used are:

• 7/2
• 9/2
• 9/2
• 2/1

 Corresponding probability percentages are

• 2/1 = 33.3
• 7/2 = 22.2
• 9/2 = 18.2
• 9/2 = 18.2

Total probability percentage is 91.9% (33.3+22.2+18.2+18.2)

We need to now multiply the total stake (£20) by the probability percentage for each horse and then divide this product by the TOTAL probability percentage of your “book” (91.9%) as shown in the formula below

• Overule @ 2/1 = £20 x 33.3 / 91.9= £7.25
• Hawk Mountain @ 7/2 = £20 x 22.2 / 91.9= £4.83
• Dansimar @ 9/2 = £20 x 18.2 /91.9 = £3.96
• Trip the Light @ 9/2 = £20 x 18.2 / 91.9 = £3.96

Total outlay = £7.25+ £4.83 + £3.96 +£3.96 = £20.00

Whichever horse won would return including stake money is approximately £21.75 giving a profit of £1.75
This is hardly a satisfactory return but it is a return

I will now look at some examples of selecting suitable races to use this system.

Click here to continue

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