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!"