31 replies to this topic

[terry-shep]

Hello, all

Has anybody tried VHF yet? I refer to the arbing program written by the Bet-IE team which is a more or less automatic arbing program.

Looking at the very informative videos on the Bet-IE site, it seems to be a dead cert for profit, has anybody any experience of it?

The only problem I can see with it is the same as with all arbing, you have to have considerable account balances with a lot of Bookies and keep shifting them around. Still, if you have the necessary funds it looks good.

TS

[clotty]

Terry, you may be gald to know that a review on the Value Horse Finder should be on the site soon. I'll be sending it over Gavin very soon and it should find its way on the site before long. Among the VHF, half a dozen other reviews will be coming out on products like Bet IE, Bet Angel and X-Bot.

Joshua.

[terry-shep]

Great, looking forward to that, Josh.

I hope you address something that doesn't get mentioned much in sales pitches or reviews of arbing programs: the amounts you need to have on deposit at lots of bookies and Betfair (this, to cover the lays, often at considerable odds).

If you do have enough of a bank and sufficient decent arbs are available it looks like a real moneyspinner.

Regards

TS

[laytheodds]

Hi Guys!

The Value Horse Finder can be found in the Betting Software Reviews category.

Any questions, or comments, please feel free to write them here!

Thanks
Admin

[clotty]

Great, looking forward to that, Josh.

I hope you address something that doesn't get mentioned much in sales pitches or reviews of arbing programs: the amounts you need to have on deposit at lots of bookies and Betfair (this, to cover the lays, often at considerable odds).

If you do have enough of a bank and sufficient decent arbs are available it looks like a real moneyspinner.

Regards

TS

I don't think this is mentioned in the review, but you do need a substancial bank account to really make a good deal of money out of this (but then I guess a 'good deal' of money is objective, I'd see it as thousands in a year, others as something with which toi pay for christmas, or a holiday).

I've spoken to a couple of people on this and the general consensus seems to be you want about £5k-10k starting bank....

[snook80uk]

Hi.

I purchased VHF and practiced for about six weeks.

My first full day of trading made me £75 but for this you do need a Betfair deposit of £2,000.

I kept running out of money and had to wait for bets to be settled before I could carry on betting.

I deposited £40 with 5 bookies, and added more as I needed them.

During the first week one bet I made a loss of £495. This was due to my backing a horse to which the bookie gave me a refund excuse was “They had posted the wrong odds”. Despite my having a betting slip accepting the bet there was nothing I could do. To add insult to injury the horse won meaning I had to pay out on the Lay bet with Betfair.

The next best day I had was £73.

Followed by another disaster made a loss of about .80 pence.

This came about once again by the bookies introducing their famous rules.

In this case apparently I placed a bet on a race at certain odds (once again printing out the betting slip) unfortunately for me once again the horse won.

Bookies excuse as you placed a bet on a race with certain odds one or more of the horses dropped out, (I say one or more because after 15 or so minutes on the phone I got fed up listening to the bookies excuses for their rules).

Anyway, what it boiled down to was this you placed a bet, printed out receipt, horse won. One or two of the horses dropped out. Bookie says we gave you unfair odds; we take .45pence in the pound of your winnings, nothing you can do thank you.

Once again what this meant was that I had to pay out on the lay bet with Betfair.

Had this not have happened and the bookies were made to honour their bets I think I would have made a profit of about £20 to £30.

To sum up; VHF is what I would call a mathematical program. As long as the bookie honours the bet you placed you will win. Providing of course YOU don’t make any mistakes.

As I am new to Racing and gambling can anybody tell me does this happen in betting shops or just the internet?

One would have thought that if you place a bet you are gambling on an outcome. The outcome being as in my case the horse is going to win or come second or third, for the odds you selected as written on the betting slip.

I don’s see how bookies can say we want so much of you winnings back as some of the other horses didn’t run. NOT MY FAULT YOUR IN BUSINESS YOU DO THE ODDS YOU TAKE THE CHANCE, I JUST WANT WHAT I PAID FOR.

If anybody else feels the same perhaps we can get the ball rolling on things changing and not letting them get away with taking some of our winnings.

Snook80uk

[terry-shep]

Hello, Snook

I feel for you in this situation, it's really hard when you make bets in good faith and get bushwacked by the small print. One thing I have to ask: did you make sure you had the two identical place settings before you placed the bets? The explanatory videos make a big thing of this so I guess you probably did.

As you will know now, bookies vary the places they'll pay out on with each way bets depending on how many runners there are and as you found out, when horses are withdrawn this can trigger this rule. This is why VHF makes such a point of seeing those figures match in the appropriate box and tells you not to bet if they don't.

I was tempted to buy VHF and had thought of setting the bookies EW figure at about £20 for a bank of £3000 spread across Betfair and the bookies accounts and hopefully, working my way up from there. However, you've shaken my confidence a bit with your experience. Your point about waiting to get bets settled is an important one, too. I think Clotty's advice about a bank of £5 - £10K is ideal but for us small bettors the way is a bit harder.

As a matter of interest, how many decent (over 4%) arbs might one expect to see in an average day? Obviously, the bigger the percentage the better and I see that the example on the sales page is of a 12% arb with £100 EW stakes. Adding up the figures shown, this one would need a Betfair bank of around £4000 just to cover the lay liability alone, so an experience such as yours would be catastrophic .

Are you still battling on with it or are you paper-trading for a while? Suffering a jolt of £495 would make anyone a bit thoughtful. It would actually be good to find that you had overlooked something yourself so you could keep your trust in the program. I certainly wish you well and it would be very helpful if you told us of your future experiences.

If it's any consolation I had a similar shock last year; I was trading the FTSE index and in my amateurish way I didn't keep a close enough track of which trades were still open when I signed off for the day; and when I came back the following day I found a loss of £550! The upside of this was such caution in my dealings thereafter that I never made any mistakes again and managed to recover my position.

Hope springs eternal!

Good Luck

TS

[snook80uk]

Hi Terry.

The £70 plus wins were all day trading with £2 to £10 each way bets.

I was on today and only had three bets as in total I only had 2 hours.

Bet one Chepstow 17.00 £10 e/w @21 Bookie win £250 Lay losses £240.63 Profit £9.37

Bet two Chepstow 17.00 £10 e/w @21 Bookie win £250 Lay losses £245.88 Profit £4.12

Bet three Chepstow 15.25 £5 e/w @26 Bookie lose £10 Lay winnings £11.35 Profit £1.35.

What I do now is sort out the races and leave the ones with 7 runners left and don’t back on them
until an hour before race starts (less time for another horse to drop out and bookies having some extra fiddle).

Also I sort out the ones that don’t place match write down times so as not to load them again in system.

Another one I have been caught out on is the place odds at bottom of “Oddschecker” screen; some bookies might say 4 places others 3 steer clear of them as well.

As for bets with a % over 4% there were loads when I was paper trading but hardly any now I am money trading. (But to be fair I have not been on it long).

As for how much to bet you are governed by the amounts there is to lay. If you check on Betfair how much money you can lay on a bet you will find in a lot of cases not very much.

This is why I have £2 bets if there is only £3 available on the lay side you can’t bet anymore than that.

Unless you want to submit a price but if the odds go away from you your worse off.

As you can see from the top two bets I got fewer odds on the second bet as there wasn’t the money there to lay any more than £10 on the first.

I find it very rare to be able to place a bet bigger than £20. (Repeat; but to be fair I have not been on it long).

Snook80uk

[terry-shep]

Hello again

Hmm, food for thought in your reply. I can see that if the arb appears on a horse well down the field that there isn't much money available at all, which obviously will limit what you can make on the bets.

I think it must be a bit annoying to have to spread a large amount of money on banks and bookie accounts for meagre returns such as you've quoted, in order to cover the possibility of a decent arb showing up. Still, as you say, you haven't been using it for long and things may well improve.

Regards

TS

[jrp]

Hi terry-shep and snook,

I've just returned from taking my daughters on a five day trip to Euro Disney (talk about bookies ripping you off, you should see the prices over there!) and read with great interest your postings over arbing problems.

Leaving VHF and its merits (or otherwise?) to one side for the moment, have you considered the fact that the betting market is, just like all financial markets, a very fluid place in which most aspects of arbing are hard to come by? ie any bookie worth their salt will be keeping a constant watch over the likes of BetFair to make sure (to a certain degree) that arbing between them and BF is either small in terms of returns or, preferably, virtually non existent.

Just imagine for a moment that you are a bookie and are hell bent on protecting your over/under round positions in any given race, how would you price nags to compensate for arbers? I'm definitely not defending bookies here (they dont derserve any sympathy!) but merely questioning the way in which snook is going about trying to make small profits with large outlays that can (as experienced) be at "risk" due to circumstances beyond the control of the software app employed.

ts as you know arbing in the financial markets requires finding two opposing opportunities that have a direct relation or correllation to one another's performance, such as buy XYZ because its got the rights to deliver real time streamed films on demand and sell ABC because its going to lose rental income of films. Weight the two prices so you get the arb benefits if your hunch is correct, partially correct or the price correlation stays static etc.... The point here is that the two "opportunities" are in the same market arena and are thus not open to pathetic excuses such as snook has experienced.

Try going for situations within BetFair itself like the old sausage of lay low and back high and avoid those costly bookie excuses. I know this is not "true" arbing but at least you will be dealing with one exchange and, most importantly, eliminating those costly unforeseen profit eroding excuses. Arbing by its very nature is low in profits and high in capital commitment, so anything you can do to get rid of the unknown element will be a bonus to the former and easier on the latter....

Whatever you do trade well!

[terry-shep]

Welcome back, JRP; I've heard about those lovely prices, about all you can say is that you didn't spend the airfare and all that time in the airports to get to Florida.

I have come to the same conclusion as you, that trading is a better alternative to arbing. The attraction of something like VHF is the possibility that it will do it all for you without apparent risk. That is, of course, until you run into the problem our colleague Snook had, the bookies rules, when the automatic nature of the method can leave you stranded.

Mind you, even trading could have its pitfalls. Some time ago I had a couple of winners on Betfair (Yes, it does occasionally happen!) and noticed that the returns weren't as they should be. I queried this with customer support and received a very concise explanation of how they apply a reduction factor when horses drop out. This factor varies with every horse and has the effect of reducing the odds paid due to the winning chances of the remaining horses being improved when less horses run. This could happen just as easily in a trading situation, leaving you with a loss where you thought you had a gain.

I don't know what the probability of this happening is but I suppose one can guard against it by not trading on events with a small entry, where the effect would presumably be greater than with bigger fields.

I now prefer to trade, as I think that it is susceptible to more reasoned choices than attempting to pick a name to win or lose. I now only consider 'form' as an indicator of which side of the trade to open first. Note I say name, not horse. In fact, I really only look at the figures now. I don't care if the 3.30 at wherever it might be is won by Ian Botham or ABBA as long as I have a couple of ticks locked in.

Unsporting? Moi? Are bookies sports? In any case, I would contend that there is plenty of sport when you have set up a position and are waiting for a price to appear. If more excitement is needed, do it in-running!

Not shocked, I hope, JRP? No, of course not, you are already there.

Regards

TS

[clotty]

As I am new to Racing and gambling can anybody tell me does this happen in betting shops or just the internet?

Hi,

I've only been to betting shops on a few occassions, more as a social things with friends every now and then. It wouldn't surprise me if the betting shops did it, too. However, in the shops, as with race course bookies, odds will be lower than online.

Did you use 'reliable' bookies? If you stick to the trusted firms like Bet365, Coral, Ladbrokes and the other majors, you probably invalidated bets to be a rarer occurrence. Having said this, you'll sometimes have to sacrifice the best odds to go with these bookies.

Now, I haven't been on these forums too often lately, so I'm going to try and make up for it by revealing the following information. I've never read the VHF, so it may explain this and you may have read it and understood. I'm also going to make the assumption that it's similar to the VHM and tries to find value bets for horses on the EW market by looking at the 'place odds' of a horse on betfair.

If you absorbed what I'm about to write and apply it, you'll never even have to worry about losing £500 or so pounds, like you did, again.

YOU WILL MAKE MORE MONEY BY NOT LAYING THE HORSE ON BETFAIR.

People are scared to death of losing money and the people who wrote the VHF know that, so they designed the 'lay' feature, but, it's mathmatically proven that all laying the horse does is reduce your profits, over the course of the year.

You'll face long losing runs this way, for sure, but I can guarantee you'll win more money in the long run, with a solid staking plan and discipline.

You have to see betting as a business if you are to be successful. Big business are on the stock exchange, right. Sometimes a company goes down in value for a while, but if the company applies sound principles and good strategies, it will come back up and be worth more than before. If, however, the company drops down in share price, starts cacking their pants and making rash decisions to quickly boost share prices up short-term, they are bound to cause problems long-term that will take them back to square one.

Another analagy is to run your gambling like Bolton or Charlton. These clubs had good managers, a sound plan in place and they stuck with them. Both clubs won promotion to the Premiership and got relegated again. However, they just stuck to what they knew had worked in the past and both are now firmly established as solid Premiership clubs. On the other hand, there are clubs like Leeds and many other lower league teams who spent money they didn't have and are now in recievership. They went for the 'get-rich-quick mentality' and, guess what, it didn't work and their short-term thinking has brought them into all kinds of troubles.

I'm ranting on now, but is my message clear?

That is why, when I used to place EW bets on that I knew were value (my betting has stopped for the moment) and I knew would leave me better off, over the course of the year then if I were laying them on betfair. And I never did lay a horse on betfair, even when I'd gone days without a profit. That is why, instead of losing £500 like you did, I would have lost nothing and just had an invalid bet. Furthermore, because I'd have used a reliable betting firm, my bet wouldn't have been invalidated. No loss on betfair for me, because of bookies abusing their power.

I'm not trying to show-off. Please don't think that. I'm just trying to make my point.

You admit you are new to betting, so I'm sure you will learn from these mistakes, you've made.

Any questions, just ask.

Hopefully what I've written comes of some use,

Clotty.

[clotty]

I just realised I missed something.

There is another way to boost your ROI, over the course of the year from EW betting. First of all, I'll wait a few days, see if anyone can guess what that might be.

It will give you even longer losing runs, but, again, it's mathmatically proven you'll have more profit at the end of the year.

To put you on the right track, I'll remind you that the VHM and VHF work because they find vlaue horses. So... what tools does the punter have at his disposal to maximize their value?

Funnily enough, it's something most punters discourage...

[snook80uk]

Hi. Clotty.

Just a quickie.

Bookie used when bet not honoured “Total Bet”.

Bookie used when ripped off by No. 4 rule “Ladbroks”

Snook80uk

[terry-shep]

Clotty

If you are the Josh who did the review of VHF on the lay-the-odds site - which I found very informative, BTW - you will, of course, have a good knowledge of this program. Are you saying that it would be more profitable to not place the lay bet in VHF when advised to do so? I can understand that not placing the lay bet removes some liability so I suppose that you would profit more if the win or place bet came up.

It makes me think that you could structure this bet yourself provided you could find the arb in the first place.

Good to see your post, does this mean you are back from the sunny climes?

TS