Pete Pays The Bills

A late comment on Tuesday's Out Of The Stretch post deserves to be published in full as a post of its own. Hopefully, many of you should remember Pete's thoughts on baseball and the home favourites phenomenon from back in early June, (this blog really is a font of useful knowledge, even if I do say so myself) and Pete continues with excellent advice with this:

Hi Cassini,
As always an excellent blog that always fuels some good debate. It’s interesting how these baseball ratings seem to have grabbed some people’s interest.

As a bit of background I first started looking at baseball around two years ago and as you point out the beauty of the sport is the home favourites that are already being offered at poor prices by the bookmaker offer no real value anyway.

At that time I initially just looked at laying any favourite between 1.30 and 1.80 and after a little success this then led me to develop various ratings systems and since then I have been experimenting with various timelines to see if I can gain even more of an edge.

Due to certain commitments I dropped this process last season but this year I decided to experiment with the ratings throughout this season and I am now at a stage where I am convinced this will remain profitable long term.

Now this is all very well and good but you would not believe the number of people whose eyes are dominated by the end result rather than giving any thought to the roller-coaster ride and process it takes to get there.

These people who generally only see the headline profit do not bet with a betting bank, they are in most cases betting out of their pockets and when they have a losing run of 10 bets they instantly give up on the system.

Unfortunately people don’t understand that when embarking on this type of betting you are going to go through good and bad patches and when they do go through these bad patches they sure like to let you know about it.

I call this form of betting a bill payer however although the current profit of 42 points looks impressive there have been ups and downs along the way and I would state that this sort of betting does not suit everybody and as can be seen by the results table you can go through a losing spell which can take over a month to recover from. And if you are unprepared and betting out of your pocket a month can seem an awfully long demoralising time.

This season I am going to keep the ratings on this site however next year although Mr Stretch will carry on providing selections my ratings will only be available to readers of my newsletter as these people generally understand that the value of your investment may go down as well as up.

If following a strategy like this you have to allow for a bank of 50 points and this should be money that you can afford to lose. Then and most importantly you have to have the discipline to follow the system through religiously without question.

I also do a similar system where I identify tennis tournaments where there is a history of outsiders winning and again although this is profitable long term there can be and are many weeks where you are either taking a loss or simply treading water.

The moral of the story here is these systems can and do produce very good profits. At the time of writing the baseball and tennis are 70 points in profit this year, which is again a nice bill player but before embarking on such ventures people must ensure that they are correctly capitalised and prepared for an emotional rollercoaster that is bound to come into effect once the inevitable losing run hits.

Keep up the good work

I think it is Peter who should keep up the good work. Every month this season has seen a profit, starting with the half-month (as the season got started) of April's 11.05 points and followed up with May 6.3 points, June 11.16 points and July 12.23. For anyone running a betting portfolio, these picks would make a nice addition, and far more sensible than trying to win at horse-racing. One observation I made back in June was this:

Almost all the research shows that a system backing the underdogs will be more successful than one backing the favourites, but as in football, there is a point where it pays to back the short-priced favourite. I first identified this back in the 2001 season when I had too much time on my hands, and I believe it still holds true - probably for the same reason that I suspect it holds true in football

and if you look at the sub 1.5 picks, 21 of the 28 would have been losing lays. Perhaps the tide has turned though, as 5 of the last 8 at this price would have been winning lays!