Betting Strategy / Editor / 26 August 2009 / Leave a comment

The latest Betting.Betfair blogger, Paul Jacobs, gives us his thoughts on ante-post betting, ahead of his new weekly column looking at the forthcoming big races...

"The simple fact of the matter is that to make ante-post punting pay you only need to collect once in a blue moon to make it worthwhile."

It's an area of punting that many professionals seem to totally ignore. Their gripe is that their horse may never 'get a run', it's no value for money and is a dangerous game to play.

But the simple fact of the matter is that to make ante-post punting pay you only need to collect once in a blue moon to make it worthwhile. And furthermore, should your selection ever reach its race of destination in one piece and go off at a much shorter price than the ante-post mark you originally took, you can, via Betfair, take a profit before the race is even run!

Having looked back at my records just over the past five years, that latter scenario has occurred six out of every 10 times I have bet ante-post - a fair strike rate and on each of those occasions I have banked my original stake by laying off before the race is run. Sounds cushty huh?

That is one of the two golden rules I use for ante-post betting. The second is a more general punting law to abide by, quite simply, the bigger the price the bigger the stake.

If like me you like to source a horse at a big price ante-post, gleefully watching those odds get smaller and smaller as the weeks go by, and you hit the target on the big day then one such successful wager can cover a whole year's betting.

And so it was with Big Buck's (pictured) for last year's Stayers Hurdle. After the horse had jumped like a pregnant cow in the Hennessy and with his stable having an abundance of riches for the Gold Cup, it seemed a fair punt to assume that the youngster could be aimed at the Stayers Hurdle where his jumping wouldn't come under so much pressure.

So after a word with someone in the yard and by backing my own judgement I placed a bet at around 20 on the aforementioned sloppy jumper.

Normally I would have a couple of hundred pounds win and place, tops ante-post, but his price allied to the fact that I thought ante-post favourite Kasbah Bliss would be better suited to a speed track pushed me into having £300 win and place at around [20.0] and [4.1] respectively - the rest as they say is history!

Of course such punts don't always have a fairytale ending, but if I can refund my stake back six times out of every 10 before the event is run then you can clearly see that there is money to be made going down the ante-post path.

Tags: Ante-Post Betting, Betting Strategy, Big Bucks, Cheltenham, Stayers Hurdle