Laying Horses

I once tried laying long shot horses. I used to check the book is odds and anything over 66/1 I would lay. Lay odds were usually around 100-150. My aim was to lay 5 a day at £2 giving me an extra 10 a day to add to profits. Things were going marvelous……then disaster struck. A horse won that I had layed. Odds were in the 180 region and had £3 on it. Weeks of profit wiped and I was about £20 up overall not including commission.

Next race. Layed £2 on a 120ish odds. Horse comes second (luckily) by a nose length. I decided to give it up and took it as a warning sign.

Good to hear you are doing well though. There are a few data mining sites which will tell you everything you need to know. Which horse won at where over what length under which conditions and how fast they ran it in. These websites are subscription only. I would like to try the laying low odds horses but couldn’t be bothered registering and paying for the info, at least not yet anyway

Gambling is all about value. If you can lay horses a 4.0 and choose horses that should have higher odds then you will win in the long run

I don’t necessarily agree that it’s gambling. As a random bet, then yes, of course it is.

It’s just like the stock market, you could also say that that’s also gambling. However, if you apply a working edge, knowledge, system etc etc I don’t think it’s pure gambling.

As stated above, it’s all about value. The SP regularly does not reflect the true chances of an event occurring and therefore you can find the “value” in a bet. It’s something I’ve been looking at (although yet to get anywhere!).

Just look at any horse race…. Something may start the day at 20, come in to 10 and then drift to 15. It’s still the same horse running the same race.

From all your previous posts Ice, you seem to have a reasonable knowledge of the horses so I’d say have a go. Good luck!

And me ?

Yes. I think traders jump on a favourite and the price is artificially forced down.

Good work! If your average odds are 4 you’re only going losing around £30 a time even if you hit a winner. Keep it up mate

Good luck with this Ice, if you have a very good knowledge of horse racing then you might make money long term laying horses, but its extremely difficult to do.

There are numerous forum threads all over the net where people start off doing really well laying horses, but the vast majority hit a loosing run or say 4 or 5 losses in a row and wipe out weeks of profit.

If you do have some kind of system that can be back tested have you checked out the Adrian Massey web site (its free). This gives you access to a horse racing results data base, you can customise your searches, perhaps search for the type of races you are interested in and the going that you think suits your system the best and see what the results are.

It’s generally the case that the shorter the odds are the more accurate the probabilities of the horses success or failure is, and the opposite is the case for the longer the odds are. As has been pointed out elsewhere on this site however, if a horse is say 25/1 at the bookies its true odds should probably be over 30/1. When it comes to trying to lay it however there will either be no money available, or it is often something like 40 or more to lay it.

Ice if you have several gubbed accounts but they are currently not restricted then you might want to look into the following, (don’t do this with healthy accounts though because they wont remain healthy for long).

BTW the following method has been mentioned on other forums, I am not claiming to have come up with it.

Get a copy of the Racing Post early in the morning. Check out the Pricewise selections for the day and see who is offering the best prices on the selections. Check out the terms of each bookie regarding Pricewise selections (they are available on the RP web site or on lots of forums).

Many bookies will have the prices stated in the paper available for a short period of time from around 8:30 in the morning. Check out on BF or Smarkets what the lay price is, and you will usually find quite a few decent arbs available at that time.

A more risky strategy is to back the selections anyway even if arbs aren’t available (I don’t do this), and lay later when usually (but not always) the prices will have shortened due to all the mugs backing the Pricewise selections in the shops.

As mentioned above though, bookies will soon get wise to what you are doing so don’t do this with good accounts you want to keep.