Bet, Forget, Enjoy Life

Another work trip just wrapped up, and hopefully the last one for a few months. While I was away, Jackson wrote to me asking:

Hello Cassini. I have been looking for a piece you wrote on the benefits of bet and forget in comparison to in play betting without success. Kindly assist. I am an avid reader of your articles and also a pro punter. Many thanks.

It's a topic I've covered on many occasions, and I can't say I recall a specific post on the topic, but my immediate response was that:

Basically the benefits are that you don’t waste your life watching hours and hours of sport! If you have a few proven systems, although no system should last for ever, it’s far better for most of us to place our bets and get on with life, although in lockdown maybe that’s not such a great argument!

Another consideration is that pre-event, you have time to do your research, and invest an appropriate amount at the best prices available to you. When you are in the middle of an event, it is harder to think clearly with fewer options for placing your bets, as well as prices and events changing in real-time, which increases the chances of bad decisions and taking poor value. There's no stress placing bets pre-game.

The only way you are ever going to get good value when an event is in-play is either to get your data before anyone else (think courtsiders at tennis or cricket matches who are paid to transmit live data) or to understand the event better than anyone else, which is highly unlikely or you'd be very wealthy indeed. 

If someone is paying for this data, it doesn't take a genius to work out that it has value, and by definition once that value has been taken, there is none left.  

You are not going to make any money from watching say a football game, seeing a goal scored after a certain number of minutes, and based on historical records, having a bet.

If you think you can read a horse race better than anyone else, well good luck with that, because apparently everyone thinks they possess the same talent.  

You're wasting your life for one thing, and completely misunderstanding that the markets know the true price for all these scenarios. In the rare event that the market doesn't know, perhaps some South American third division match is in play late at night, then there usually won't be enough money in the market to make it worth your while. Occasionally there might be, but the risk is you end up spending half your waking life waiting for such rare opportunities.

As I've written before, in the early days of Betfair, it was almost easy money to trade some sports in-play, but after several years the liquid markets are now much more efficient. The introduction of the Premium Charge was the killer for in-play betting, at least for me, and it's so much calmer and less time consuming to take a look at the lines and prices as close to the start time as possible, and bet according to proven strategies.

Writing this on an NFL Sunday, and the Small Road Dogs System is an example in point. No luck last week, with a 2-3-1 outcome, but long-term this is a solid system. It takes a few minutes to run the query and put the bets on. 

One thing I've noticed, and it may well be due to the absence or reduction in home fans, but in matches where the road team is getting a very small number of points, i.e. fewer than 2.5, ATS this strategy is 9-2 this season, increasing the trend which has been present in this category of games since 2009 which is now 107-83-5 in all games, and with a slightly higher ROI in Divisional games. Good luck if playing the Small Dogs today.