Although this blog is about my footie systems this season, as many of my readers are aware, I used to run a successful horse racing tipping service in the past. My passion will always be horseracing and I can't imagine me ever getting too passionate about a football game I've had a bet on!
With last week being Cheltenham week, it's the biggest week in the sporting calendar for me and I look forward to it immensely. Due to the fact my last couple of years of enjoyment were spoilt by tipping or being too heavily involved financially, I decided that since I haven't been too close to the racing this winter, I would keep stakes to a minimum when I was punting. However, I always like to have a go at the Racing Post's Select A Stable competition each year.
In 2007, I finished 8th in the competition and there was a bit of a hard luck story as I had weighted my lines towards the first 3 days and when the final day came, I had no runners but was top of the leaderboard. In reality, I was a sitting duck in the game and I didn't really think I had much chance of winning even though I finished a close up 8th.
Well, I did my usual research on Monday night for the upcoming week and entered my 5 lines like I usually do. It only costs £20 for 5 lines. On the first day, one of my lines hit 4 winners from 4 runners and it soon grabbed the attention of the guys in the TFA forum. Although I was only about 700th after day one, I knew I was in with a real shout after that start as not many would bit sitting with a 100% record after 4 runners.
On day two, I hit a winner, a 2nd and a 4th to push me up the leaderboard further and I was about 200th at the end of day two.
Day three was a key day for me with 3 runners including my banker bet, Big Bucks. Loosen My Load was 3rd in the first race, Alberta's Run won the Ryanair and then Big Bucks just got over the line in the Stayers hurdle.
10 runners, 7 winners, a 2nd, a 3rd and a 4th. Could anyone beat that?
Well, I waited anxiously for the website to be updated that night. I was 4th. I bought the Racing Post the next day and it showed the stables for the top 3 in the game.
All of the top 3 above me had no runners left. Hence, I needed a winner from my final 2 runners on day 4 to overtake them and hopefully win the £15k first prize.
In the Gold Cup on Friday, I had plumped for Kempes but it ran an absolute stinker and pulled up. This meant it was all down to Sir Des Champs in the 23 runner Conditional's race. Easy peasy!
Well, here's the race http://horses.sportinglife.com/Video/Racing/0,27770,420103_4,00.html for anyone that didn't see it but Sir Des Champs managed to get up to win.
It simply came down to whether anyone had overtaken me on day 4.....Unfortunately, someone had. It was in the Racing Post on Saturday but someone hit 3 winners from 3 runners on Friday to beat me by 5pts in the game. He ended up with 9 winners from his 12 runners at Cheltenham compared to my 8 winners, a 2nd, 3rd, 4th and one pulled up.
So close, yet so far. I still won a decent sum for 2nd place but the first prize was 10 times more!
Anyway, that leads us onto this weekend on the footie. As I said on my last post, I wasn't too confident as there were a lot of marginal value bets that appeared and so far this season, they haven't exactly set the world alight. Hence, I was worried about what may happen this weekend. As it turns out, I shouldn't have worried.
There were 24 unique bets thrown up as value this weekend on my ratings. I hit 13 winners, 7 losses and only 4 draws. As you would expect, this translated into a very good profit for the ratings.
The profit was 8.6pts and this produced an ROI of 35% this weekend. Great going.
On any other week, you would expect this to translate into a great profit on most of the systems but as I said on Friday, the selective systems didn't like a lot of these bets and therefore, the profits varied across systems.
System 6 made 8pts profit, system 7 lost 1pt, system 8 made 2.67pts and system 9 had no bets.
System 21 made 4pts but systems 21 and 22 lost 2pts each.
The other systems all made small losses or profits.
Due to the fact the selective systems didn't have a good weekend, this meant the multiple systems had a nightmare weekend again and they continue to haemorrhage points at the moment.
The more I see of the multiple systems 16-20, the more I think they are simply the sort of systems that can be followed on paper but even with small stakes, you can do some damage to your bank with these systems. The returns are so variable and the strike rate is so low at times, it simply feels like you are throwing good money after bad at them.
Overall then, the singe bet systems made a profit of 14pts and the multiple bet systems made a loss of 84pts.
The month has been very stable so far and a quick look at my personal results sheet shows that the single bet systems have made a profit of 66pts so far in March from 313 games. That's an ROI of 21%.
Those who have been reading the blog regularly will know that the single bet systems lost 66pts in February and therefore, it is quite freaky how similar this month's profit is at the moment!
We still have a set of 15 games this midweek and 29 games this weekend as well as a midweek set of fixtures next midweek to play this month. Plenty of time left for the systems to win more profit this month or loss the profit they currently have but hopefully this month will go a long way to showing that February was a one-off month for these systems.
The multiple bet systems are down on the month amazingly even though they are picking from a pool of bets that have made large profits. I think reinforces my points about these systems being too random to be followed as part of a portfolio but I'll keep tracking them until the end of the season at least.
Anyway, I'll be back later tonight with the bets for the midweek games. There won't be too many bets.
