Early Prices
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I thought that I would say something about this. I’m restricted on B365 but decided that I wanted to be in the BOG+ game and also thinking that I can still hit the loyalty bonuses they have which are usually pretty good.
My restriction seems to mean that I cannot win more than €12.50 on a horse.
My strategy is that I simply scan all the races on bet365 and smarkets the night before. If there is a small arb or the exchange lay is the same as the bookie back then I bet max. I’ll go e/w sometimes on longer odds especially if it look like it will be a bad e/w race.
I don’t see how you can lose as either the price goes down and you are on an arb, or it goes up and you get bog plus so you beat SP anyway. Only 10% of prices didn’t change at all.
The results are in.
I backed 200 horses since Dec 20-ish. Total stakes €800. Profit is €200. That’s a €200 profit on average stakes of just €4. (Amounts posted are not exact to protect my account from being identified but they are consistent with the exact profits).
No loyalty bonus yet! Do bet365 stop with the loyalty bonus after you are restricted?
Because my stakes were small I didn’t lay but of course you can lay when the price swings in your favour to cash out on the value that you created, or lay just before the off if the price has drifted to break about even as you will still be getting BOG+. Might actually work out more profitable to lay as a few of my horses came in during the morning for a big arb and then drifted back out before the race for BOG+ too.
I checked my price against the SP. If I had taken SP I still would have made a profit of €50 which I suppose shows that I got a bit of luck in the horses that I picked, or there is some mechanics going on that when a horse steams in that his SP price is still value. Its not a significant amount of luck anyway €50 profit from €800 stakes. Even if €50 of the profit was due to luck that still leave €150 profit from changes in price and bog+.
My average boost was that I was getting 1.4 times SP. So typically I would back at 5/2 the night before and the price would dropped to 6/5, my edge would be something like that. I got double odds or better on 20 horses for example I backed at 8/1 and the horse went off at 4/1. The best I had was a 4 times boosts with horse at 12/1 the night before and 3/1 at the off.
Comments from other forum users is that when they tried this that they got gubbed very quickly. I’ve had no further restrictions yet but its only early days. I think with small stakes you can go under the radar.
Yes its a lot of work as with small stakes I am looking to get a big volume of bets on the night before, usually find 10-20 horses.
The Christmas period with Limerick and Leopardstown 4 day festivals were great for races and may have exaggerated my profits. Irish races seem famous for huge fluctuations in odds.
Anyway its been two week and over 100 horses so I think its almost enough to prove that there is value in this. The only warning is that you will probably lose your account. And its quite time consuming work finding enough horses to make it worth while on restricted stakes, but I find that these days most strategies are quite time consuming now that all the low hanging fruit is gone. I’ve been trying it out on b365 which gives BOG+ but honestly that has hardly kicked in because most of the time the price shortens but on other bookies or where you are gubbed from BOG then the profits might not be quite as significant.
