Big Priced Winners….How do we find them???

I have mentioned in a few of the recent articles about the need to treat the current horse race form and performances with a pinch of salt. As we have seen, so many of the meetings have been lost to dismal weather conditions, and those that have gone ahead have featured the going description “heavy” in many of them.

When the going goes this way the form book really struggles to make sense of many of the results, as most of the more recent past runs will have occurred under different circumstances. Horses that have shown a preference for slow and softer conditions suddenly show much improved form and can be very difficult to find.

I have been keeping my stakes to the bear minimum and will continue to do so until the conditions improve. With this in mind I thought I would use the time to re-visit a couple of methods that specialise in trying to find those elusive really big priced winners, or in the case of the second method high priced place horses.

First of all I had a look at the performance of a method that arrived in a blaze of glory after last years Cheltenham Festival. Smoke and Mirrors uses the live market to make its selections and has a combination of triggers which I have found a little confusing when things can change quite quickly in the minutes and seconds before the off. I decided to stick to one of it’s method’s which is simple to use and in the past has highlighted some really nice priced winners.

Between Monday 1^st Feb and up to the end of yesterday’s racing (Thursday 4^th Feb) 25 horses were found using this one selection method, and amazingly amongst these were the following:

2^nd33/1 Adam de Beaulieu

Won 25/1 Hucking Hero

2^nd14/1 Jazrawy

Won 20/1 Gaily Noble

2^nd 9/2 Alfred The ordinary

Won 20/1 Viking Blond

Won 33/1 Roaming West

3^rd 16/1 Mister Teddy

2^nd 25/1 The Cuckoo

3^rd16/1 Muktasb

2^nd14/1 Sir Sandicliffe

Simply placing a £10 level stake to win at starting prices on all of the selections would have produced a staggering profit of £760.00, but forgive me for mentioning it once more, but on bigger priced fancies we really should be using the Betfair SP, if we had, the profits would have grown to £1311.16 which is 75.52% more.

Now as you can imagine backing at these huge prices Smoke and Mirrors can have quite long losing runs and it can also be a little frustrating when a 33/1 shot just gets pipped and you win nothing. So I much prefer taking the same stake and splitting it into two by placing a £5 win and £5 place bet. Using this method the profits @ Betfair sp after commission deductions(5%) would have returned £871.13, not quite as much as the straight win option @ Betfair sp but still 14.62% higher than backing at industry sp prices, and trust me it does ease the rollercoaster ride.

Now I realise that this test was over a short period of time, but it really has opened my eyes to an opportunity to potentially benefit by doing something “Out of the Box” when the form book simply can not help. When the going is variable I am confident that Smoke and Mirrors can pay for itself over and over again.

The second system The Easy Back Method concentrates on finding value priced horses that have a good chance of finishing placed at big prices. The place strike rate is around the 15-20% mark and the selections can be found in approximately 20 minutes each day.

The results can again be a bit of a rollercoaster, but the satisfaction, and sometimes bewilderment of grabbing a huge priced placed runner, again using the Betfair SP facility can make up for this. This week was not probably the best time to check the results as we have had quite a few races with small fields which is not to the best advantage of place backing methods, which benefit from the usual 3 and sometimes 4 places being paid. However even with that in mind the results have still been encouraging and are as follows:

	No of Selections	Placed	+/-
Mon 1st Feb	4	2 (5.15, 7.90)	+8.5
Tues 2nd Feb	11	1 (5.5)	-5.72
Wed 3rd Feb	16	3 (3.41,5.92,3.75)	-3.42
Thu 4th Feb	22	5 (15.5, 9.07, 2.28, 5.36, 3.6)	+12.27

In summary the method produced 53 selections during our test period, 11 went on to be placed and therefore winning bets. By placing a £10 level stake @ Betfair place sp would have given us a profit of £116.30 which is a very impressive return on investment of 21.94%, given that it only takes 20 minutes a day to find the bets. The Easy Back Method has only been available very recently and looks to have a very promising future, and is producing some really good results from what is a very simple but effective selection process.

Both of the above methods are examples of how at times doing something completely different can produce some unexpected results. After all the form book is king………………really?