horse-racing – Betornot

Timeform 5* selections for 8th June 2024

Timeform is a respected and well followed source of racing form and they rate each horse for each race by using a star rating. You may have read my post on using this rating system to pick your horses for the ITV 7 well what if you were to back each 5 star rated horse in every race for a day.
Below is a PDF of the 5 star Runners for 8th June 2024 and how they faired. The figures are based upon the ISP (Industry Starting Price) and the stakes reflect a £5.00 profit should the horse win. It is worth noting that at least one of these selections (Billyb) was available at odds greater than the starting price as I actually backed it at odds of 4.50 at 11am that morning.

08-june-2024-timeform-5-star-selections Download

If you had backed each 5 star rated horse that ran on this day to a £1.00 level stake you would have got a profit of £3.87 which is a 10.18% ROI (Return on Investment)
If you had backed them as I do to a £5.00 target profit then you would have a £24.93 profit but the stakes involved are greater! My total stakes for all races would have been £117.94 for that £24.93 profit but it is still a 21% ROI
After a quick analysis of the results there were a total of 38 runners of which 15 won which is a 39.5% strike rate.
More interestingly is the fact that if you had backed the horses which ran in just the handicap races then of the 31 handicap races run 27 actuall ran of which 12 won.
This gave a profit of £12.41 to level £1.00 stakes giving a 46% ROI. Staking the horses to a £5.00 target profit gave a profit of £32.52 for a total of £58.79 stake money yielding a 55.3% ROI.
This is just 1 days analysis but it seems that it may be worth pursuing further.

timeforms-5-star-rated-horses Download

The above file can be downloaded so you can do your own analysis

More on this to come
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My ITV 7 8th June 2024

Today I have backed each of my ITV 7 selections at available odds for a target profit of £5.00 for each winner. Each selection is timeform’s 5 star rated horse for that race
The first one is Maw Lam in the 14:05 at Beverley

Backed for a Stake of £1.67 at odds of 4.0

Next is Can’t Beat History in the 14:15 at Bangor-on-Dee

Backed for a stake of £1.42 at odds of 4.50 This I have backed with Coral as they are offering BOG on all of their races today

Number 3 on the list is Divina Grace in the 14:25 at Haydock.

This I have backed for a £2.00 stake at odds of 3.50

Fourth is at Beverley in the 14:40 with only 5 runners going to post at the time of writing the 5 star selection is Moving Force.

This is the shortest price of the 7 selections and is backed at 2.75 for £2.86

Race 5 is the 15:00 at Haydock 13 runners

Stake is £1.11 at odds of 5.50

6th on the ITV7 card is 15 minutes later in the 15:15 at Beverley with 14 runners going to post

£1.43 at odds of 4.50 would see a return of £6.44 giving a profit of £5.00 if the odds don’t drift.

The last to go on the card today is Ramazan in the 15:35 at Haydock an 11 runner stakes race.

I booboo’d on this one and had to put an extra 17p onto this to make the stake up to £1.00 at odds of 6.00

My total stake for this “event” is £11.49

Hugh Taylor – Dont be in a Rush To Back His Selections 5th June

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.

Four selections today and going into the 5th day with a profit of £3.78
First selection to run today is

4:27 Nottingham : Phoenix Passion
Advised Odds 5/2 (3.5)
Odds available at 10:00 : 13/8 (2.63)
Stake £3.07
Result –

Second to run is

5:35 Kempton : Remaat
Advised Odds 11/1 (12.0)
Odds available at 10:00 : 3/1 (4.0)
Stake £1.67
Result –

Odds of 3/1 taken as SkyBet are offering Best Odds Guaranteed

The third Selection was City House in 7:15 at Kempton but has been withdrawn and is a non-runner.

Fourth and Final Selection today is
7:45 Kempton : Miss Kubelik
Advised Odds 9/2 (5.5)
Odds available at 10.00 10/3 (4.33)
Stake £1.50
Result –

Good Luck all – need it – these bets take me into a Loss state 😂

Hugh Taylor – Don’t be in a Rush To Back His Selections 4th June – The Results

Yesterday I backed Hugh Taylors sole selection at S.P. Here’s what happened (If you have just happened upon this post and are thinking why would I back a horse at SP when the price is steaming in please read the post I did on researching his April Selections the link is immediately below and will open in a new tab)

Racing Tipsters and Bookies.

With a profit down to £5.01 today just 1 selection was tipped

Willowbank ran in the 8:15 at Lingfield last night

Profit is Plummeting and now stands at £3.78 for the month

Hugh Taylor – Don’t be in a Rush To Back His Selections 3rd June – The Results

Yesterday I backed Hugh Taylors 3 selections at S.P. Here’s what happened (If you have just happened upon this post and are thinking why would I back a horse at SP when the price is steaming in please read the post I did on researching his April Selections the link is immediately below and will open in a new tab)

Racing Tipsters and Bookies.

With a profit of £8.61 today saw 3 selections run

First to run was Gutsy Girl which was advised at odds of 4/1 (5.0) I backed it at 11:45 at S.P but the odds available then was 5/2 (3.5)
Unfortunately it could only manage 3rd place.

Profit is Plummeting and the next to run was Valkyrian in the 8:45 at Windsor Advised at Publication at 16/1 (17.0)
Stake was 67p at S.P. as available odds had halved to 15/2 (8.5)
S.P. Odds recovered to 12/1 (13.0) which would have been nice if it had won instead of coming 7th

With another 67p knocked off the profit the last runner on Hughs list was Coin Power. Advised at odds of 10/1 (11.0) by the time I got my 91p on at 11:45 the odds had dropped to 11/2 (6.5)
By Post time the S.P. was 7/1 so again disappointing not to have surpassed advised odds but had it of won instead of coming 8th then I would have a profit of £6.37 instead of my target fiver.

Numerous people have now pointed out to me that S.P. is a poor bet and I agree but in all of the runners so far this month all have been above the odds available at the time the bet was struck so that with any other bookie than SkyBet Best Odds Guaranteed would have been applicable and instead of backing at S.P. I would have taken the offered odds for my Guaranteed fiver if it won.
The sole purpose of this study if you like is to try and make people see that, yes the bookies decimate the odds to capitalize on the faithful which to my mind is despicable, but the odds can and do recover sometimes to a mark greater than the advised price at publication time.
Its a good job Hugh had a couple of winners Saturday because my Profit is now down to £5.03

Hugh Taylor – Don’t be in a Rush To Back His Selections 2nd June – The Results

Today I backed Hugh Taylors sole selection at S.P. (If you have just happened upon this post and are thinking why would I back a horse at SP when the price is steaming in please read the post I did on researching his April Selections the link is immediately below and will open in a new tab)

Racing Tipsters and Bookies.

Todays Selection was Cargin Bhui which ran at Hamilton this evening.
Advised odds were 11/4 but just 1 hour later those odds had been cut to 2/1
Working to a profit of £5.00 per winner I staked £2.50 to Win at S.P. in the hope that the odds drifted towards post time
A very close 2nd place has reduced my June Profit to £8.61

S.P. as you can see was 3/1
Another selection where S.P. was greater than the advised odds 👍

Hugh Taylor – Dont be in a Rush To Back His Selections 1st June – The Results

Yesterday I backed all four of Hugh Taylors ATR racing tips but instead of clamoring to get my money on before the odds disappeared I simply backed them at S.P. (If you have just happened upon this post and are thinking why would I back a horse at SP when the price is steaming in please read the post I did on researching his April Selections the link is immediately below and will open in a new tab)

Racing Tipsters and Bookies.

First in the List was Sea of Thieves in the 2:00 at Epsom Downs at an advised price at publication of 14/1. This was published at 9:11 and by 10:30 the odds were 9/1. I backed this at S.P. for 56p which would have given me £5.00 profit if the odds stayed at 9/1 or a bonus amount if the odds drifted and by some miracle the horse won.

As you can see from the settled bet that the price did drift, not to the advised price but close and if it had won would have given a profit of £6.72 instead of the £5.00 at the 9/1 price.

Second to run was Billy Webster in the 3:10 again at Epsom. Published at 9:24 at advised odds of 10/1. I again backed this at S.P. for a stake of 83p as the odds available at 10:30 were down to 6/1

The calculation for these bets is simple Target profit / Decimal odds -1
£5.00 / (7.00 – 1)

By Post Time the odds had drifted to 14/1 which would have given a profit of £11.62 if it had won.

Taylors next selection to run was also at Epsom and he tipped Relentless Voyager in the 5:15 at an advised price of 13/2 (7.5) at the publication time of 9:03. By 10:30 these odds had sunk to 4/1 or 5.0 in decimal. Backed at S.P. for a stake of £1.00 to reap a £5.00 profit if the odds didn’t sink further.

As you can see the odds drifted out to 7/1 (8.0) at post time and the horse won giving a profit of £7.00 instead of the £5.00 target figure.

Taylors fourth and final runner was at Doncaster in the 6:15 and was published on the ATR website at 09:39. Wild Waves price was advised at 9/2 (5.50) at this time and an hour later was a mere 5/2 (3.50) on Sky Bet. Backed at S.P. for a £2.00 stake my target profit if the odds didn’t dip below this price and if the horse won would again be £5.00

As you can see from my settled bet slip This horse also won at 11/4 (3.75) and while the odds didn’t reach those of the advised price by a long chalk they did drift slightly from the 3.50 giving me a profit of £5.50

My Total profit from these four bets ended up at £11.11 from a total of £4.39 staked! Better than being poked in the eye with a sharp stick I think.

I know that if I had used another bookmaker that offered BOG then I would have had guaranteed odds and could have taken the price offered without fear of the odds dipping some more. As it is if I had taken the prices offered by SkyBet at the time of striking the bets then my profit would have been £8.61 – £2.50 less than my actual profit.
If you had used the same staking method AND had been able to get the ADVISED prices then the profit would have been as follows

Sea of Thieves Advised odds 15.00
Stake 36p
Lost P/L -36p
Billy Webster Advised odds 11.00
Stake 50p
Lost P/L -50p
Relentless Voyager Advised odds 7.5
Stake 77p
Won P/L £5.01
Wild Waves Advised odds 5.5
stake £1.11
Won P/L 4.99

Total P/L £9.14

Racing Tipsters and Bookies.

I recently watched a youtube video by Caan Berry, who, quite accurately, put forward a case for not backing online tipsters as the odds very quickly diminished as soon as or even before the tip was published online. Conspiracy theorists would have you believe that there may be some collusion between tipsters and bookies that would enable bookies to make a bigger margin on the tips that lose and perhaps cutting the online platform that published them a bigger affiliate payout. There is no doubt that odds do disappear very quickly but in the bigger picture of racing as a whole to keep the odds low on a horse just because a tipster tipped that horse could prove very expensive for bookies if another horse with better ability and was being backed towards the start of the race stayed at the bigger odds and went on to win. Bookies are scaredy cats, money going onto other horses will lower their odds, its a fact!
It is true that if a tipster has a big and loyal following then those punters will undoubtably blind bet on the selection for fear of the odds dropping even more, this is bonanza time for the bookies. They take pots of cash at crap odds on a horse trying not to split their sides laughing at all the punters doing their bank blindly. What is a little more concerning is that on some bookies sites “Best Odds Guaranteed” doesn’t kick in until an hour or more after the tip is published so they don’t have to payout at the bigger price if the odds drift.
That’s the conspiracy part over now I will look at some facts and as Caan Berry singled out Hugh Taylor of At The Races Website I will look at his results from April 2024 (His latest complete results available).

In April Hugh Taylor had 65 tips in total claiming a 30.09 point profit for the month at advised odds and stakes. Of these 65 tips 3 were E/W tips and for the purposes of this post I am going to discount them as I personally rarely back E/W bets. Many of you reading this may disagree, this is your choice and you could apply the same staking method that I will outline in this post to all of his tips, that is your own personal possible course of action.
The purpose of this post is not to condemn any one party whether it is Taylor himself the website for misleading information or the bookies for offering criminal odds, it is to analyze the timings of the tips published and the reaction of the markets to these tips and most importantly what the actual SP of the tip was at the off.
To make this a fair study I am going to stake each tip with a profit if wins of £5.00 on the advised odds, Industry SP and the Betfair exchange SP. I know that the minimum bet on the exchange is now £1.00 and the stakes you will see on many of these selections is way lower than that but these lower stakes are possible if you use software that allows this such as bet angel ( I will put a link to this at the bottom of the post)

To achieve a level profit target figure the calculation is simple.

Stake = Target / (Odds-1)

If we look at Taylors first tip of the month which was Twilight Madness in the 16:05 at Kempton on 1st April he advised odds of 12.0 (11/1) so the stake for this bet would be

Stake = 5 /(12-1) = 45p
Unfortunately I have no way of knowing how far the odds dropped just after tip publication but the horse did go off at the same odds and on the exchange the BSP was 15.67. Figures courtesy of Timeform who publishes these figures for reference purposes)
The horse lost of course (Last actually) so our losses would have been
Tip publication Time (If actually available) -45p
Bookmakers SP -45p
Betfair exchange SP -34p.
As you can see we would be better off by 11p if we had used the excchange to place our bet.
The following excel sheet lists all of Hugh Taylors tips for April except for the E/W bets.

Of the 62 remaining tips after discounting the E/W bets you can see that a total of 15 won and using the staking method outlined above the profit to the advised odds of just £6.01. If we had backed the same horses at the industry S.P. you can see that we would have won nearly twice as much and better yet before commission is taken from the exchange bets three times as much. So, there is a case for backing Taylors tips. He has a strike rate of about 25% but the profits are not breathtaking.

Conclusion.
Hugh Taylors tips are for free, there is no subscription to pay, and if you keep your stakes to a manageable level there is no reason why you shouldnt have a couple of bets each day.
There is however another option – we can lay these tips and then back them just before post time!

We know that the bookies lower the odds just after publication and that perhaps the more savvy amongst us back them on the exchange to get a closer price to advised odds than backing them at the bookmaker. This acts to cause the exchange market to react in the same way as the bookies price lowering and the exchange market starts to reflect the industry prices more closely. If you look at the spreadsheet above you will notice that in most of the tips the exchange S.P. is quite a few ticks higher than even the advised price earlier in the day. This means that there is a possibility of a viable lay to back trade opportunity here.

Follow for his June selections and results

Greyhounds Backing The Favourite Day 1 (2nd March 2024)

For a while now I have been pondering the possibility of backing the favourite at the dogs to see if there is any money to be made. Even though the rumours that greyhound racing is not the most virtuous sport you can make a wager on it is certainly the most abundant sport with over 140 races each day and that is just the UK. According to the Oxford Stadium website 35% of all favourites win! This however is across all tracks, distances and, classes of race. To this end I decided that the only true way of sorting the wheat from the chaff is to back every single favourite in every single race and use the power of excel to weed out losing statistics from the more profitable. So without ado I will post day by day findings on this blog

My criteria is simple I will back each race favourite 20 seconds before the post time to a liability of just £1.00 so in effect my average stake should be kept to about 30p per race. This means that should the favourite win then the Profit will be £1.00 and if loses the stake determined by the odds that are available at that moment in time on the betfair exchange. There have been instances where the odds of two of the dogs have been exactly the same at the 20 second point and no bet was struck. This is unfortunate but one of those things. After testing that the software worked as required on March 1st testing began in earnest on March 2nd and showed an overall profit of £13.41 with profits showing from all meetings except Crayford and Hove.

Starting with Central Park, there were a total of 6 winning favourites giving a small profit of £2.66 The rest I will put into a table for easy reference.

Track	Winning Favs	Avg Stake	P/L
Crayford	1	45p	-£3.85
Doncaster	9 (2 Meetings)	69p	£4.73
Hove	6	£1.43 **	-£0.51
Monmore	10 (2 Meetings)	57p	£2.44
Newcastle	6	48p	£1.69
Oxford	8 (2 Meetings	63p	£1.26
Perry Barr	8	47p	£1.48
Romford	10 (2 Meetings)	53p	£3.03
Swindon	4	49p	£0.48

** Quite a few Odds On Favs Lost!!!

Crayford was quite obviously not a track to back the favourite on this day as just one favourite won, Hove had a few odds on favourites running hence the average stake of £1.43 with the shortest priced favourite of the day losing costing a massive £3.12 All in all not a bad day for the first day.
There were a total of 160 races of which 64 favourites won giving a 40% win rate.

Lets go on to look at the best performing meeting of the day which was Doncaster. Producing an overall profit of £4.73 with 9 winning favourites at the 2 meetings.
Of the 8 winning favourites 4 were in OR class races or Open Class and scored a 100% strike rate as did the OR3 class which accounted for 2 more winning favs.
The sheer volume of information I have collected just over the last 20 days is by no means enough and in subsequent posts I will delve a little deeper into which tracks are more profitable than others using this system and which Races should be avoided on all counts after looking at the stats.

Just as a Taster the best performing track using this system between 2 March and 22 march is Nottingham with a profit of £15.89
The worst Track for winning Favourites is Sunderland with a loss of £22.03

My total profit for this period backing every race is £38.28