Time to Give up the Daily Grind.

[Zilzalian]

Well I have just finished my accounts for 2022-23 (1^st Nov-Nov) and my profit was just over £17,000 which is a good return, one of my best to be honest, fortunately I reached my threshold by December of last year by way of a few good Lucky 15 results each £1000+ so thereafter everything was profit as long as I stayed within my usual staking pattern. I had 3 maximum bets of £200, two of which won, £200 at 9/2 & 7/2, one of which lost (9/1) although I did have accumulative bets of £150 on Corach Rambler in the grand national at rates down from 20/1 to 10/1 which boosted my profits somewhat.

 

Now here is the thing. Although on the surface of things £17,000 is a good few bob for what is in effect a hobby. Once broken down it doesn't look as good as it equates to about £325 per week, again that looks pretty good for a hobby but here is the rub, break that down to hours spent on inputting Information on spread sheets checking every result of every race and calculating the speed figures then checking every racecard against those thousands of results and times daily becomes not only tediously boring but takes a hell of a lot of time so much so that it equates to about a minimum of 40 hours per week and that excludes all the races I watch both on line and TV, Britain, Ireland, France, and Germany then add on Meydan and other UAE meetings and the total hours spent on racing is over 50 hours per week minimum which works out at just over £6.50 an hour, well below the minimum wage. The money isn't the problem, it is the repetitiveness of the daily grind that then can be thwarted by for example by rail re-alignments on the flat and missed out obstacles on the jumps all corrupting the standard times, we have to expect and accept trainer/owner manipulation of the handicap, what is harder to swallow though is blatant cheating using information that is not available to everyone (Barney Curley was a master at this) This smacked me in the face and brought home what we are up against this week with the Greatwood Hurdle, all my research five weeks ago suggested that the winner would probably be Nemean Lion and I advised and backed it accordingly at what I considered a cracking bet at 9/1 (fav) since then it was backed down to 6/1 and still thinking it was value backed it again at that price (anti post) it has now drifted back out to 9/1 due to the Mullins horse, there is/was very little in the form to suggest that the Mullins horse Onlyamatteroftime would end up 4/1 fav or be anything other than mid betting (should we just back it because Mullins has taken over its training and little else?) Okay Nemean Lion might still win and the Mullins horse be midfield but that's not the point.

 

Racing is in a bad way and my observations of the 2yo this year seems to suggest it is going to get worse, this year I hardly backed a 2yo simply because there was never sufficient form to give confidence to a selection, (so why put all that effort in to the daily grind?) Group races with small fields and horses that had not run more than twice is not a good grounding for decent bets. British jump racing is in a terrible state, come Cheltenham why would you back a British trained horse in a handicap let alone a graded race when you know the Irish are going to bring a horse over that no bugger has ever heard of 20lbs well in to win the pot.

 

So given all the above I have decided that I am going to scale right back and just have the odd sporting bet, I am considering a post naming the best/fastest horse at each AW meeting just to keep an interest so people might like to consider/follow over the next few months.

 

Nemean Lion which I tipped up weeks ago at 9/1 will be my last max bet before I lower that max down to £10 or a rare £20.

 

Yes you can make money on Horse racing but you better be prepared to work hard for it because there are very few if any short cuts other than Lady Luck.

Edited November 17, 2023 by Zilzalian
correction

[harry_rag]

24 minutes ago, Zilzalian said:

Well I have just finished my accounts for 2022-23 (1^st Nov-Nov) and my profit was just over £1700 which is a good return

 

24 minutes ago, Zilzalian said:

Now here is the thing. Although on the surface of things £17,000 is a good few bob for what is in effect a hobby. Once broken down it doesn't look as good as it equates to about £325 per week

To be fair a tenfold increase in the space of one paragraph is impressive by anyone’s standards!