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.
Only one selection today and is as Follows
6:10 Hamilton Cargin Bhui Advised Odds 11/4 (3.75) Odds available at 10:30 : 2/1 (3.0) Stake 2.50 Result –
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)
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
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.
Todays Selections are as follows
2.00 Epsom Downs : Sea of Thieves Advised Odds 14/1 Odds available at 10:30 : 9/1 Stake 56p Result –
3.10 Epsom Downs : Billy Webster Advised Odds 10/1 Odds available at 10:30 6/1 Stake 83p Result –
5.15 Epsom Downs : Relentless Voyager Advised Odds 13/2 Odds available at 10:30 4/1 Stake £1.25 Result
6.15 Doncaster : Wild Waves Advised Odds 9/2 Odds available at 10:30 5/2 Stake £2.00 Result –
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.
Betornot 