Back the drifters - Lay the steamers. Testing the theory

[billydilly]

Hi everyone! I am a fairly new face in here, but nonetheless a very active punter. Betfair is my second home, although HR is not a speciality of mine, since I am from Norway and HR is not bigb here at all. However, the incredibly volatility of prices in the HR markets made me think that there must be some kind of way to profit from these.....when a runner can go from 5.00 to 2.00 in 20 minutes, its fairly obvious that in this intervall lies enormous value in either the early BACK or late LAY. What triggered this post was the Portugeese PINHOFAP and his test on laying the heavist fancied runners (fancied by newspaper tipsters atleast). I have since last spring (2006) been testing out some of the same theory. My background for testing the strategy was the below article: http://www.betfairpromo.com/tactemails/camb1a.htm I will assume you have read the article in the rest of this post. The theory behind is the same as Pinhofap utilises and makes very much sense, as long as the TRUE price of a donkey is very hard to say for sure (unlike footballgames etc). Its very likely that late drifters or steamers (say last 30 mins) drift or steam due to hysteria and herdmentality. I find it very hard to see how the physical conditions on course or otherwise causes up to 4-8 horses to change dramatically in their implied winning chance in that short period of time. So, nwhat did i do? Well i wanted to check out this theory, and got a programmer to make me an application that would look at odds in each race xx minutes before the off and then once more yy minutes before the off. If the difference in odds in this timeframe ( say 30 mins pre off and 1 min pre off) was bigger than a defined % ( say 5% change in implied winning chance), a bet would be placed. I wanted to test both place markets and win markets. THe application is of the kind "Start and leave running all day" , so i only had to fire it up in the morning and ome back at night for the results. It can place real bets or work in test mode. Obviously i used testmode in the beginning, i had no idea where this would head. Results were VERY encouragingn in the biginning. In fact the first 1000 bets showed these numbers: Stake : 1000 units Return: 1093.3 units Yield: 9.33% After Betfair commission!!!!! I was in heaven! If I had risked 100 GBP/ bet i would have won 9300 pounds in little over one MONTH! Surely you can guess what happened.....I started using real money. In the real money period, I placed 766 bets, and lost 66.7 units. I gave up then, this was spring 2006, but have now wiped the dust off this application again, after Pinhofaps findings, and thought i could keep you updated on the results here. The nature of the system makes it impossible to give tips on forehand, but i can post the results AFTER the are ready, and you can chose if you believe me or not :) Any thoughts, people? I know there are some great thinkers in here :) Thanks, Levi

[mowgli77]

Re: Back the drifters - Lay the steamers. Testing the theory I mentioned once before that someone I used to work with used to do a yankee every day with the most tipped up horses in the racing post, usually selected by nearly all the paper tipsters. He rarely broke even and it would have probably been the same if he'd backed them singles. I wouldn't try find just the one to lay, i'd try it with about 4 as I'd guess a lot of them will get turned over, and maybe use a cut off point for the odds such as 2-1. Try it for a week using the most selected horses, put your findings up to SP laying the 4 most selected horses and see what profit/loss is. I believe them being so well tipped up could have an obvious effect on the short prices they usually are. There was a fully exposed horse running on Monday at Pontefract, from in form Johnstone stable but looked terrible value at the price and never made the frame. (Always Best, finished 5th at 7-2 fav) I'll be interested to see how you get on. :ok Good Luck.