Betting
Less To Win More On Racing
The more
bets you win, the more likely you are to lose.
That's
the findings of a study done by a Kyle Siler in the USA who used a
neat piece of software to analyse twenty seven million hands of on
line poker in a gambling study in 2009.
Siler,
whose work was published last December in the online version of the
Journal of Gambling Studies and will appear later this year in the
print edition, was not interested in poker alone but in the larger
idea of how humans handle risk, reward and variable payoffs. Few things
offer a better way of quantifying that than gambling — and few
gambling areas offer a richer pool of data than the Internet, where
millions of people can play at once and transactions are easy to observe
and record.
He found the strangely inverse relationship between the number
of hands won and the amount of money lost and also noticed
that it was novice players who lost the most.
Interestingly, he found in this poker
study that people tended to do better in the long term by betting
on smaller denomination cards. Huh? Easy to understand when you think
about it - because people tend to bet less on those than, say, a pair
of aces, so the risk of losing big dollars gets less. People with
aces immediately think they're unbeatable and so they bet more - increasing
their chances of losing more in a single hand than what they won in
a lot of smaller value hands.
This of course mirrors everyday events
in lives that traditionally are not thought of as gambling - crossing
the street, driving a car, buying a house. All of those activities
can be viewed as "gambling" because they all carry risk.
The more times you carelessly cross the road and get away with it
the greater the likelihood that a car is going to clean you up in
one of these escapades. The more times you get away with speeding
the greater the likelihood of getting caught by those greedy speed
cameras.
It's the same with having an adulterous
relationship. The more times you get away with those one night flings,
the more likely you are to continue. At the end of the day, when you
do get caught, you lose absolutely everything.
All very fascinating you say but what's
this got to do with getting on the 6th at Wangaratta? Simply this.
Is the fictional 6th at Wangaratta the very best bet you could have
today? Or is it just another one of an escalating series destined
to end in financial loss as you become more emboldened by some LUCKY
wins along the way?
Siler's study suggests you would be advantaged
in concentrating on the very best class of race at today's meetings,
have fewer more considered investments, and letting the "dross"
go by. The more bets you win the more likely you are to lose.
You may find there is an advantage in
ruling the "quality line" under races variously described
as 0-72, BM70 or Class 4, in weaker mid week races and betting no
lower class than that, or, on Saturdays, limit yourself to 0-86, BM89
or Class 6 and above as far as quality bets are concerned.
That choice is always yours but be aware
- you are making a choice. I believe that the more time you get to
spend on the higher quality races, the greater your chance of successful
analysis. It is why a lot of our successful methodologies concentrate
on the higher class of horse and race and why we immediately discard
the others.
If you are serious about gaining financially
from the great sport of racing, you have to put the time in BEFORE
you get to the investment stage so it follows that discarding the
lower class of races gives you way more time to concentrate on the
others.
As a far wiser person than me once said
" Fill your head with sh** and that's all you ever get to think
about!"