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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Knighty Tin who wrote (88911)	1/27/2001 4:38:01 PM
From: Freedom Fighter	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

Mike, The serious horse racing season is pretty much about to start. I'm giving serious thought to stepping up my wagering level. Over the last 5 years I've made a profit of over 40% on every dollar I wagered. Granted, I don't bet all that much in dollars or races so the sum is not particularly meaningful. But nonetheless the sample size is large enough when backed by the 5 prior years to give consideration to playing more seriously. In the 5 years prior I had very mixed results and barely broke even most years. But there were two major contributors to those lackluster results. 1. I was wagering widely different amounts on individual races. I was betting a lot more on high probability (lower priced) horses than on longer shots. With low probability horses, the possibility of long losing streaks is very high. I was trying to put some stability in the overall results for psychological reasons. I was also operating under the assumption that my skill with both categories was equal. The results indicated that I wasn't all that much better identifying "value" favorites than the public. Yet that's where my biggest bets were. 2. I often made "saver" exotic wagers on some of the longer priced horses. Those tickets probably had a negative expectation. At a minimum they had a worse expectation than simply betting the horse to win. So they hurt my results. Pretty dumb to bet the underlay favorite over your 8-1 good value, but I did it all too often. It was only after relentless frustration (and the help of a successful bettor) that I finally realized how much my betting sucked. About 5 years ago or so he urged me to do a few specific studies on my results. When I did, I found my mistakes. On that back data I had somewhat similar results to what I am getting now by simply making flat bets, not betting the short priced horses, and avoiding the exotic savers. I'm not going to put a real lot of time into it. Still a weekend warrior, but it's time to step up the action. :-) Wish me luck! Wayne