Most Horseracing websites that offer tips or insights usually give profit figures that are set to a level stake plan such as £1.00 level stakes or 1 point level stakes where 1 point equals your set stake like £1.00, £2.00, £5.00 etc. Unless you have a high strike rate with reasonable odds then this is usually unprofitable. Backing favourites is a classic example of this where in UK racing the strikerate of winning favourites hovers around the 32% mark when you couple this with favourite odds that can be as low as 1.10 then you need a very high strike rate indeed. To illustrate this figures taken from Adrian Massey’s website that has logged the fate of favourites from the last 16 years, list that of all the favourites that had an S.P. (Starting Price) of odds below 1.5 or 1/2 over the last 16 years of which there were 6868 only 74% of them won which gave a win return of 97% in other words for each 100 bets of £1.00 you would net £97.00. over the 6868 bets then you would lose £206.04 if you placed a £1.00 win on each race. Baring this in mind we can approach the problem from a different angle, we can adjust our stakes to achieve a net profit of a specific amount such as £1.00.
To do this we need a target figure and for this example I will use £5.00. To calculate the stake needed you divide the target (t) by the decimal odds(do)-1 Stake = t/(do-1) So if the odds are 2.5 decimal (6/4 in fractional odds) then our stake to achieve a £5.00 net profit would be : 5/(2.5-1) which is £3.33 When we use this in a real life scenario the results can be quite surprising.
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The table above shows the tipster from The Times Newspapers’ NAPs for September 2025 and clearly shows the advantage of using a “Back to Target” staking plan as opposed to a “Level Stake” staking plan. The figures used are from Betfair historical data using BSP (Betfair Starting Price) instead of the ISP (Industry Starting Price) as a consistent base starting price and a 2% commission rate on winning bets Using a “Back to Target” plan and a target of £5.00 the profit over the month comes out at £7.33 while using £5.00 level stakes the loss is £19.54. His strike rate is 26% for this month which is no great shakes when you consider that he is a National Newspapers main Horseracing tipster and these are supposed to be his best bet of the day but this is a clear illustration that fortunes are not to be made following tipsters but a profit can be.
Putting my research into practice I set aside a £10.00 “Bank” and at the start of the tournament started laying the top 10 seeded players for a liability of £1.00. These were in order of seeding: 1. Sabalenka 2. Gauff 3. Pegula 4. Paolini 5. Zheng 6. Keys 7. Andreeva 8. Swiatek 9. Badosa 10. Navarro
Round 1
The 1st round saw 4 of the top 10 seeds lose, namely Gauff, Pegula, Zheng, and Badosa. Gauff, the No 2 Seed lost in straight sets to Yastremska and I laid her at 1.20 for a stake of £5.00. Pegula, the No 3 seed, lost to Cocciaretto, again in straight sets, 6-2/6-3 and managed to lay her at odds of 1.13 for a stake of £7.69 Zheng, The No 5 seed, lost to Siniakova 7-5/4-6/6-1 Laying her at odds of 1.60 netting me £1.67 Badosa, the No 9 seed was the final casualty of the 1st round losing to Boulter 6-2/3-6/6-4. She was the biggest odds at 1.70 and with a stake of £1.43 The other 6 top 10 seeded players all made it through to the second round which meant that these 6 cost me a total of £6.00 in liability stakes but with the afore mentioned players falling I had a profit of £15.79 from these matches which gave me a £9.79 net profit from the 1st round matches.
Round 2
6 of the top 10 seeded players were now safely through to the second round and this posed a possible £6.00 loss if all 6 won their matches. Paolini, the No 4 seed, who I had laid at odds of 1.19 for a stake of £5.26 lost to unseeded Rakhimova 4-6/6-4/4-6. Losing £5.00 on the other 5 top 10 seeded players this shock exit of the No 4 seed netted me a small profit of 26p to add to my £9.79 profit from round 1. Total net profit from the 1st 2 rounds now stood at £10.05 and only 5 of the top 10 players left in the tournament.
Round 3
The sixth casualty was Madison Keys, the No 6 seed lost to Siegemund in straight sets 6-3/6-3. Having laid keys at odds of 1.19 for a stake of £5.25 this netted me £1.25 for the round and a total profit for the tournament so far of £11.30 as the other 4 seeds made it safely through to round 4
Round 4
This round saw the match up of No 7 seed Andreeva and No 10 seed Navarro which meant that my total possible loss from round 4 would be reduced from a highest of £4.00 if all 4 won their matches to £2.00 if Sabalenka and Swiatek both won plus, either a net profit if Navarro (Odds 2.60) won, or a net loss if Andreeva (Odds 1.62) won. In the event Both Sabalenka and Swiatek did indeed win their matches and Andreeva dismissed Navarro in straight sets 6-2/6-3 this gave me a net loss of 37p on this match plus £2.00 loss on the other 2 players making the 4th round my first loss of the tournament of £2.37 making this a total tournament profit so far of £8.93. This also left 3 players in the Quarter Finals and a potential loss in that round of £3.00
Quarter Finals.
The quarter finals saw Sabalenka safely through to the semi finals as did Swiatek giving a loss of £2.00 but Andreeva lost to Bencic which won me £2.05 after laying Andreeva at odds of 1.49. This gave me a round profit of 5p and even though small is still a profit and my tournament total going into the Semi Finals stood at a healthy £8.98
Semi Finals
Sabalenka played Anisimova and at last the No 1 seed fell! Laying her at odds of 1.4 for a stake of £2.50 this gave me a round profit of £1.50 to add to my total as Swiatek dismissed Bencic in straight sets 6-2/6-0 Total profit going into the final now stood at £10.48.
The Final
The odds for Swiatek to win the final were 1.42 which I laid for a stake of £2.38 this meant that if she did win my Tournament profit would be £9.48 or if Anisimova won my profit for the tournament would finish up at £12.86. Swiatek demolished Anisimova 6-0/6-0 to become the first Polish lady to win the Ladies Title and reduce my profit for the tournament to £9.48.
Summary
I made the rules at the beginning of the tournament and kept my liability to £1.00 per player and not by market which would have made things complicated in “Match-Up” matches. The chart above shows P/L in £ of each player. It is not actually necessary to have an exchange account as a similar result can be obtained by backing the opponents of the seeded players for your desired stake. As a quick comparison in the Match between Coco Gauff and Yastremska in the 1st round. I laid Gauff at odds of 1.2 giving me a profit of £5.00 but the best odds available to back Yastremska at the bookies was 4/1 (5.0), if you had backed her at these odds your profit would have been £4.00 instead of £5.00
Had I have lost my £10.00 bank halfway through the tournament then I would have stopped and that would have been that, but having researched this, the trends suggested that the Ladies tournament provided the better chance of profit than the Gentleman’s tournament using this strategy. I am sure that many of you reading this will scoff at the stakes involved saying is it worth it. I don’t really care what you think! this was a practical exercise where I had an idea and put it to the test with a bank that I was prepared to lose. I have now increased that bank by nearly as much again of which I will utilise by increasing the liability to £1.20 for the WTA 250 Hamburg Ladies Open and laying the top 8 seeded players
Disclaimer
If you liked this content please “like” so I can get some feel for the effort I am putting into this being beneficial to others who are looking to make a couple of quid but no fortunes.
Please gamble responsibly and don’t bet more than you can afford. The content of this post is historical fact and in no way guarantees the out come of future tournaments.
The ASB Classic is the first WTA 250 tournament of the year on the WTA 250 Tour. Comprising of 32 players competing for tour points and prize money that will advance their world standings as the points accumulate. As with other posts in this series I will be looking at the fate of the top eight seeded players for each tournament furthering my own research into making small profits by laying these players to a fixed liability of £1.00 (which is 10% of a starting bank of £10.00) at the Betdaq exchange, where at present I enjoy a 0% commission rate. The top 8 seedes in order of rank were for this tournament as follows 1. Keys. M 2. Mertens. E 3. Anismova. A 4. Sun. L 5. Tauson. C 6. Raducanu. E 7. Osaka. N 8. Volynets. K
Both Mertens and Raducanu withdrew from the tournament before the start due to injury.
Round 1
With just 6 of the top 8 seeds starting the maximum loss if all seeded players won in the 1st round would be £6.00. Both the 3rd and 4th seed lost their first round matches. Sun (4) losing 6-3/3-6/6-3 and Anisimova (3) losing 2-6/6-2/6-3. The table below shows the P/L of the first round matches where each of the seeded players were laid to a £1.00 liability.
Round 1 resulted in a small loss of 34p and 4 players advancing into the 2nd round.
Round 2
With 4 of the top 8 seeds progressing into the second round and a 34p loss from the 1st round our maximum loss if all players won the second round would be £4.34. Unfortunately for our laying strategy this is exactly what happened. The table below shows just this.
A total loss of £4.34 after round 2 still leaves us £5.66 of our £10.00 bank intact and is ample to now see us through to the end of the tournament.
Quarter Finals.
The quarter finals have eventually seen the match up of 2 of our seeded players, Touson and Keys so we now know that our Maximum loss for the Quarter finals is not £4.00 as in the second round but £2.00 plus whatever the outcome of the matched up seeded players returns. This could be a profit if the favourite has short enough odds and loses or a small offset loss if she wins In the event of it No 8 seed Volynet loses to Parks and in the Match up match between Touson and Keys, Keys was the odds on favourite to win the match but Touson won it in straight sets 6-4/7-6. This produced an overall profit of £1.95 for the Quarter Finals round as shown in the table below.
If we add this profit to our previous losses in the 1st and second rounds we still have a loss of £2.39.
Semi- Finals
With just 2 of the seeded players in the semi finals and each playing another player our maximum loss for the semis is just £2.00 if both players advance to the final. And this is exactly what happened unfortunately. Both players won in straight sets Tauson winning 6-4/6-3 and Osaka 6-4/6-2. This brought our total tournament loss to £4.39 with a similar situation as in the quarter finals where two of the seeded players play each other. The table below shows the semi final results
The Final.
The tournament organisers must have been very pleased with themselves as the seeding worked and 2 of the seeded players meet in the final but depending on which one wins will either increase our tournament loss or decrease it depending on the odds. Osaka was the odds on favourite at 1.53 and if she wins then our tournament loss would be increased. If however she were to lose to the “underdog” Tauson who had lay odds of 2.79 then we would win more from Osaka’s loss than from Tauson’s Win and it would decrease our overall tournament loss. The table below shows just what happened.
As you can see in the table we lost £1.00 with Tauson winning but we won £1.89 with Osaka becoming runner up. This gave us a 89p profit to add to our tournament loss of 34.39 giving a total of £3.50 loss. The table below shows all the lay bets made and odds with stakes for each match.
Summary
Over the whole of the tournament we would have made a total of 18 bets at £1.00 liability. The early exit of Anisimova and Sun helped preserve the bank to a certain extent and from this point a total loss whilst possible proved unfounded and left us with a workable bank of £6.50 of which we can take into the second WTA 250 tournament using liability bets of 65p.
Disclaimer
If you liked this content please “like” so I can get some feel for the effort I am putting into this being beneficial to others who are looking to make a couple of quid but no fortunes.
Please gamble responsibly and dont bet more than you can afford. The content of this post is historical fact and in no way guarantees the out come of future tournaments.
The Eastbourne Open is held each year at Devonshire Park in the week preceding the Wimbledon Grand Slam Tournament and is part of the WTA 250 tour. Open to 32 players in the singles tournament, I will be looking at the fates this year of the top 8 seeds in my ongoing research into laying seeded players on the WTA tour. This year the top 8 seeded players were
Kasatkina
Krejcicova
Ostapenko
Kenin
Linette
Stearns
Raducanu
Sramkova
The 1st round saw 3 of the top 8 seeds lose or retire through injury and these were Kasatkina, the No 1 seed who lost her match 2-1 to Sun 7-5/2-6/6-3 and was odds on at 1.39 to win. Next on the chop list was Kenin, the No 4 seed who lost to Birrell in straight sets 6-4/6-4, her odds to win the match were 1.52 The final casualty of the seeded players in the 1st round was Linette who after losing the 1st set 6-4 was also losing the second set 4-2 when she sustained a knee injury forcing her to concede the match and punters cash at odds of 2.28.
So a quick summary of round 1 would, if we had laid each of the top 8 seeded players for a liability of £1.00, our maximum possible loss would have been £8.00 if all seeded players won. As mentioned above, there were 3 of the top 8 seeded players who were knocked out in the 1st round The table below shows, working from a bank of £10.00, a slight (15p) profit if we had laid the players at the exchange for a £1.00 liability.
Going into the 2nd round with our bank in profit the remaining top 8 seeded players just tumbled from the tournament as the following table shows with the only survivor being Krejcikova and a second round profit for us of £6.67
The last of the top 8 seeded players, Krejcikova, sustained an injury before the Quarter finals and withdrew from the tournament Leaving us with a Tournament profit of £6.82.
In Summary
Just as many tournaments before, the Eastbourne Open is not immune to seeded players falling at the 1st or 2nd hurdles. We can take advantage of this by either Backing the underdog at a sportsbook or laying the seeded player at an exchange such as Smarkets, Betdaq or Betfair. Please subscibe to my blog to get regular updates on my research into the WTA tour and the fate of the favorites.
If you liked this content please “like” so I can get some feel for the effort I am putting into this being beneficial to others who are looking to make a couple of quid but no fortunes.
Disclaimer.
Please gamble responsibly and dont bet more than you can afford. The content of this post is historical fact and in no way guarantees the out come of future tournaments.
I have recently subscribed to the Sun’s Templegate tipline where I get his next day tips before 6pm the previous day to running. This costs just £3.00 per month which is a whole lot cheaper than buying the paper everyday. Using the secure staking plan on TSM (The Staking Machine) and editing the settings to a £10.00 Bank and a Maximum stake percentage of 10%. This staking plan graduates the stakes used in relation to the odds. On Monday 17th March 2025 Templegate tipped 21 horses of which 10 won with an average of winning odds of 2.91 (In Decimal Odds). The highest stake used was £1.00 and the lowest stake was 30p with a total money staked over all racing of £12.90 producing a total profit of £7.70 giving a ROI (Return on Investment) of just under 60% at 59.69% and a strike rate of 47.6%.
The excel file available to download above details the horses and odds with the stakes involved and a total cumulative profit. They are not in any particular time order except for race meetings.
Yesterday I showed you how to create a basic query in TSMs’ Selection Hunter to find some likely winners using the back test mode to discover any trends and it came up with the following 3 horses The selections are 13:50 Stage Star 14:25 Copperhead 15:00 Sunray Shadow.
13:50 Stage Star Stage Star met the provisional odds criteria of between 2.00 and 2.99 but went off at a BSP of 3.21. Our conditions of placing a bet with betangel were that the BSP had to be between 2.00 and 2.99 for the software to trigger. 3.21 was out of our range at 3.21 so no bet was made.
Stage Star only managed 4th out of 5
14:25 Copperhead Joe Tizzards’ Copperhead also qualified as the provisional odds were posted as 2.85 but again the BSP was outside of the criteria and went off at 3.5 giving us another miss fire from Betangel. Copperhead Won by 14 lengths!!!
15:00 Sunray Shadow The final selection was the Skelton trained and ridden Sunray Shadow who’s Provisional odds were posted at 2.5. Winning by a length and a 1/4 the BSP was well within the range at 2.23 and Betangel Fired the bet in 10 seconds before post time catching 2.25
Summary 2 of the 3 selections went off at odds outside the criteria one of them winning but alas one losing 2 of the 3 went off as favourites despite all 3 being ranked as provisional favourite. Betangel fired just one bet and this returned 125% ROI Given the strike rate of the criteria when back tested (68%) 2 actual winners from our query seemed to tentatively back this trend.
Cautionary note While this was a completely genuine test run you should not go out and back every Aintree runner with a BSP of between 2.0 and 2.99 even though I back tested over a period of nearly 2 years results you should always do as much research as you can and start with stakes that you can afford to lose.
Build your bank steadily Racing is not going to finish tommorrow!!!
The staking Machine software has limited use for free but If you want to take advantage of the Selection Hunter you will need to pay – It only costs £24 for 1 year – Twenty Four!! this is not a typo and can be paid via paypal That’s only 2 quid a month and if you had backed Sunray Shadow for a quid you would have made over 1/2 a months subscription already.
There is a new addition to the TSM armoury called the Selection Hunter and it does exactly what it says! By entering criteria in a series of easy to use drop boxes in its user interface you can quickly build a module/query that shows the runners for today. As a demonstration I will build a query for todays racing at Aintree using the backtest mode and then post the selections before racing starts. We need to open the selection hunter first and this is achieved by opening TSM and then clicking on the racecards tab at the top and then clicking on the “UK/IRE Horse Racing Selection Hunter” shown below.
This will open the selection Hunter Interface as shown below.
As you can see I have already produced some queries but for this demonstration I will start from scratch.
To start a new query click the first tick box and then, under criteria, select RaceMeet from the first dropdown box make sure “Like” is populated in the String Op box and Type the race course name into the value box as shown below.
Make sure the Back Test Mode switch is set to on and the date range is Jan 23 – Now by selecting it from the date range drop down box and then Click the run query using settings below at the top of the interface. This has produced 991 results which in effect is the number of horses that have run at Aintree since January 2023. We need to now analyse this queries results by clicking the box which is arrowed above. This will open the screen shown below
Next click the additional breakdown button arrowed to bring up the following screen.
We can now drill down our query to specific criteria such as Jockey, Trainer, Racerunners etc. For this demonstration I will select odds from this dropdown list to produce the following screen.
From this screen we can determine the optimum odds that produced the greatest strike rate and in this case with a strike rate of 68% odds of 2 to 2.99 BSP produced a return on Investment of 61.4% We can now enter these figures into the Selection Hunter interface as follows.
Under criteria and in the second dropdown box select “Provisional Odds” then in Num Op select >= then in the value box type 2 – this tells the query to look for horses that raced at Aintree in this period that had odds of 2.00 or more In the next box down select provisional odds again but in the Num Op box select < and the value type 3 – this tells the query to look for horses that had provisional odds of less than 3 Make sure both tick boxes are filled nest to provisional odds and click the Run Query button again This will bring up the next screen shown below.
This is a very basic query which when run with the back test mode switched off will list all todays runners at Aintree that have a provisional starting price between 2.00 and 2.99 as shown below.
Thre are 4 runners today that meet this criteria and if you notice there are 2 selections for the 3 o clock – Sunray Shadow and Takt Des Touques. In the column next to Prov Odds you will see Prov Odds Rank and this is another factor that you can drill the criteria down by as shown below
In the screenshot above I have expanded the interface so this picture is not vey clear but if you click the image you will see a lot more information is readily available for each runner So we have our short list of runners and with the strike rate of this query being 68% we can expect 2 of the 3 to win as long as the BSP is between 2.00 and 2.99 We can use Betangel to place or bets for us at the BSP range specified. ie 2.00 – 2.99
The selections are 13:50 Stage Star 14:25 Copperhead 15:00 Sunray Shadow.
Further to my post on Bookies and Tipsters I will be following Hugh Taylors Tips and Backing each one for a £5.00 Profit with SkyBet. Not at the advised odds but at whatever odds are available at the time but because Skybet like to pay out on extra places and offer few races with Best Odds Guaranteed I will be backing them at SP with a stake that will give a £5.00 profit at the odds given at the time.
Yesterday Hugh had 2 selections, both at Thirsk and the first was a non runner. Miss Bodacious was tipped to win the 3:38 but was withdrawn The second Lord Abama ran in the 4:40 and was advised at 11/2 (6.5) I backed it late with a stake of £1.81 at S.P. to win £5.00 at the available odds 11/4 (3.75) My Profit for the month before this bet stood at £11.30 Lord Abama won at an S.P. of 4/1 (5.0)
This gave me an additional profit of £2.24 over my £5.00 target figure
My total profit for the month now stands at £18.54
Betornot 