Horse Racing: Pick a value bet at Royal Ascot
"The logic behind this is that punters tend to underestimate the probability of such horse becoming a winner in the next race, so its price will likely be higher than the actual odds of winning. This creates an opportunity for a high value bet."
As Royal Ascot is about to open, you might have already drafted a betting plan for this season. Try a new one based on the previous year's winning jockeys and horses' form, says Oxana Savostina...
Back horses who are in the first N favourites where N is the number of winning places. The horse must have taken the 2nd or 3rd place in the previous race where it ran. Green up at five ticks (you can set your own offset).
Betfair provides racecards for UK and IRE horse races, including high-profile events like Royal Ascot. So it is easy to extract the past results of each horse from its form.
Here is an example of a qualifying horse:
(Click to enlarge the image)
The logic behind this is that punters tend to underestimate the probability of such horse becoming a winner in the next race, so its price will likely be higher than the actual odds of winning. This creates an opportunity for a high value bet.
To be on the safe side, we'll skip the races where one of the top favourites is ridden by one of the winning jockeys of the previous Royal Ascot. The list of these jockeys, cross-matched with this year's participants, can be easily googled.
- James Doyle
- Ryan Moore
- Jamie Spencer
- Tom Queally
- Neil Callan
Now we need to program these prerequisites into MarketFeeder Pro, known for its Triggered Betting feature. It'll easily process the whole day's markets and pick the ones that match our criteria.
I won't go into technical details. Suffice to say the program can do all those operations automatically if supplied a trigger file, or a set of instructions in simple English. You can download the ready trigger file from this link.
Having loaded the file into the program, I will configure my default bet size, then add all Ascot races to my list, set them to start refreshing at one minute before the off and...will be off to the park with my son, only to check my P/L in the evening.
Of course, I'm being so relaxed because I've tested this system on historical markets using Time Machine - our special tool for backtesting strategies relying on real historical market data. Based on five days' worth of testing horse races that took place in May 2014, the average strike rate for this system was 71%, that is, there was profit in 37 markets out of 52 where the bets were placed. You have to remember though that revenue from greening up is substantially lower than the liability of the bet, so it may not always cover a losing sequence.
Try MarketFeeder Pro and Time Machine today and you can enjoy Royal Ascot even more - and no hat is required!
For a selection of Betting Apps for Betfair.com please see the Betfair App Directory.
Prices quoted in copy are correct at time of publication but liable to change.
