Betting Strategy / Robin Keck / 25 August 2009 / Leave a comment

It's been a bad week for our blogger yet he remains positive with the National Hunt season offering another opportunity to turn a profit.

I’m promoting Andrew Balding to the hot list for the second time this year. His string have been running consistently well all season and are currently raising their game yet further as the Flat season draws to a close. The market still seems to underrate him compared to his more experienced peers and if I was buying a horse for the Flat he’d be my man.

Weeks don't come much quieter than this one for my stable of stables as they simply don't have good enough horses to run at high profile meetings like the York Ebor Festival. My combined trainer list only had four runners although even that allowed Michael Dods sacking himself from my list when Barney McGrew obliged in the very first race of the meeting. I guess it's good to know your fate early although at a place BSP of [3.6] the damage was limited.

I mentioned Linda Stubbs' prolific form last week and I'm hoping her quiet week (only one horse in action) will make her a little less obvious as her runners reappear over the next few days. Similarly, Debbie Mountain can stay on the cold list until her runners show signs of a re-emergence.

I'm promoting Andrew Balding to the hot list for the second time this year. His string have been running consistently well all season and are currently raising their game yet further as the Flat season draws to a close. The market still seems to underrate him compared to his more experienced peers and if I was buying a horse for the Flat he'd be my man.

The low volume week provides an ideal opportunity to discuss in-running punting based on stable form. I've been reluctant to get too involved in these markets before as I don't have the necessary state of the art technology to compete on a level playing field with the on-course specialists. I also feared the lack of liquidity in these markets may lead to potentially poor value when wanting to play in the small hundreds stake range. That said, I'm growing increasingly confident I should play this market for my win and place lay betting of cold trainers.

My rationale is that horses that are in some way suffering from a bug tend to run normally for 70-90% of their races before finding far less under pressure than an equivalent healthy horse. The logic of this fails me as if I'm feeling dicky I imagine I'd be off the bridle from the start but I plan to get stuck in with this strategy once the jumps season starts in earnest. I'm thinking through how to introduce this to my column PNL as I need to have a uniform system for betting blind that is resistant to specific circumstances making it unworkable i.e. it may work fine in a Grade 1 Saturday Chase but the lack of liquidity in the Bangor-On-Dee Tuesday bumper may flaw the latter bet.

Total Starting Bank = £250.00
Closing Bank after Week Twelve = £294.67
Week Thirteen Result = - £41.00
Closing Bank = £ 253.67

£3.67 up after thirteen weeks!!! I guess I could have earned the same return at a high street bank but I'm too risk-averse for that.

Tags: Andrew Balding, In-Running Betting, Linda Stubbs, York Ebor Meeting