Horse Racing Strategies Megathread
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@Greg-Mitchell , probably. Interestingly, when I change my settings to run only on Saturdays and back instead of laying, "Lay the 3rd fav" becomes profitable. Up to £78 for £1 stakes.
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@Correa Saturdays are bad for quite a number of Strategies, I don't do 3rd Fav, Beaten Fav or DOBS on Saturdays..No idea why, guess the markets are affected by weekend "punters"
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@Correa said in Horse Racing Strategies Megathread:
One clear takeaway from last month's data is that Saturdays aren't particularly great for this strategy.
That's interesting, will see how tomorrow goes!
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Wow, great response, @Adam, thanks. I'm currently running two versions of it, both of which have been profitable so far. Over the last two days, I've been able to account for every selection difference between my two strategies and the backtesting, which is reassuring.
Thanks for the data. I'll compare it with mine to identify any differences. The strategy seems promising, and I'll definitely explore the ideas you shared. I also have a few other concepts in mind, although they're speculative right now since I'm not knowledgeable in horse racing.
One clear takeaway from last month's data is that Saturdays aren't particularly great for this strategy. In fact, based on the group breakdown by results, Saturday is the only unprofitable day of the week. So, my L3F will likely have Saturdays off very soon.
Mon 169.76
Tue 162.54
Wed 171.84
Thu 52.03
Fri 91.07
Sat -109.66
Sun 16.28 -
@Correa said in Horse Racing Strategies Megathread:
14:00 Southwell – "Eagle Angel" was the selection on my list, whilst "Queen Of Atlantis" appeared in the backtesting.
18:48 Hexham – there was no selection on my list for this race; however, "Prospect House" was in the backtesting.
20:00 – "Finest Leader" was on my selection list, but "Lion Kingdom" was in the backtesting.
In the 14:40 at Southwell (there was no 14:00), Queen Of Atlantis was 3rd fave to BSP, Eagle Angel was 4th.
Prospect House was 3rd fave to BSP.
Finest Leader was 3rd fave to BSP, Lion Kingdom was 2nd fave.
@Adam, could the reason those selections aren't on my list be that they qualified in the time between the last backend job's execution and the start of the races?
Possibly. Based on the above, the favourites move around a lot even in the last 10 minutes before the race. It's possible the daily qualifiers won't update even once during that 10 minutes. Unfortunately it's unlikely we'll ever reach a point where we can update everyone's qualifiers every time the prices change (once per second), so the best way to approach this is to have a "qualifiers" version of the strategy which ignores the favourites, and allow BFBM or whichever bot you're using to handle that rule.
It's also worth mentioning that fundamentally, the timestamp where any given horse is 3rd favourite, 2nd favourite etc is not going to affect the way the horse runs the race. In other words, there's no conceivable reason that betting on the 3rd favourite at 9 mins 30 secs before the race would be successful, but betting on the 3rd fave at 9 mins 12 secs should not be successful.
If the deciding factor is that the horse is the 3rd favourite, the most accurate representation of which horse was 3rd favourite in the race is actually the BSP, since that's effectively the final market sentiment based on all the money queued up on the odds ladder.
But of course we can't see into the future when placing the bets, so we can't really use that. When we release the next update in a couple of days, it will help us at least figure out the best time to bet on the 3rd favourite by allowing us to backtest it at different timestamps.
This is just food for thought really. If we do some analysis of the successful trades from the backtesting for this strategy, maybe we can figure out some more fundamental reasons why those horses should not go on to win the race, and then we can look at betting on them earlier in the day when there's more value in the prices.
I'm trading this strategy myself at the moment so will do a bit of analysis myself when I get a chance.
Actually Ryan and I are both trading it via a bot that I created. This is a dump of all the bets we've both placed. Notice there are some differences between which horses we bet on even though the bot works exactly the same way for both of us. It may be interesting to compare to your own list of bets too:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1GExWcyTdzAG5U1G9lCvYRwqddcRM34M8yA2qo1V_6Z8/edit?usp=sharing
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@Jonathan-Jones Yeah but it was the only race on the card not selected before it appeared later on so i suspect it's not that as the going before racing would be the same for all races on that course.
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@alexander-hughes That strategy has a going filter. Going can change.
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@alexander-hughes Double checked todays qualifiers.
1345 Southwell has qualified now but not last night ?
Wonder what changed ?
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Update Lay 3rd Fav at BSP
As suggested by @Joseph-Henderson, I have checked the BFBM manual and created a second L3F strategy for betting at BSP, but still placing bets only if the selection is on the tip list. All bets were matched yesterday apart from three that weren't listed on my tip list, but they appear in today's backtesting.
14:00 Southwell – "Eagle Angel" was the selection on my list, whilst "Queen Of Atlantis" appeared in the backtesting.
18:48 Hexham – there was no selection on my list for this race; however, "Prospect House" was in the backtesting.
20:00 – "Finest Leader" was on my selection list, but "Lion Kingdom" was in the backtesting.
@Adam, could the reason those selections aren't on my list be that they qualified in the time between the last backend job's execution and the start of the races?
I'm going to let this new strategy run for a couple of days to see how it goes.
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@Fearghal-Downes no just shared strategies that have performed well at present
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@Martin I'm a little confused. Are these the top 4 recommended methods in horse racing trading?
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Lay 3rd fav today 6/9
Downloaded last night for use on Betdaq. All races that qualify.
BA results from Betdaq.
Results from BFBM on Betfair using API link. Seem to have missed some and strangely the 18:18 & 20:30 which weren't on exported list has appeared.
I didn't think the odds changes made any difference to races that qualified ?
BFBM seems funky so not sure if it's me, BFBM or the data connection
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@Greg-Mitchell you can set the bot to place the bet after the race goes inplay after a couple of seconds to ensure it places the bet on the horse that goes off third fav based on BSP. Mine took Eastern Charm at 5.80 yesterday in the 18:30 at Ripon.
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@Greg-Mitchell same here. I'm data-driven, and to be honest, my intention was to review the backtesting results every day in the morning and then compare them with the outcomes from my automation. However, now that we've pinpointed the issue, perhaps I'm going to try to have the bot place bets as close to the race start as possible, and accept that for some races the results are going to be different, but hopefully more profitable.
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@Correa That was a strange race yesterday for me. My Bot based on selections that were 3rd Fav pre-race in the software placed the bet on Casilli, the other placed the bet on Eastern Charm, however it placed it "in-running", no idea why.
According to BSP, the bet should of been on Eastern Charm, however the odds were very close.
I'm beginning to think the same on the "overthinking", both bots are making money. I'm just a control freak.
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Taking a closer look at the situation involving the 3rd favourite, consider the 18:30 Ripon race from yesterday. On my tip list, I had both "Eastern Charm" and "Casilli" for this race.
The bot placed its bet at 18:29:58 on "Casilli". Average odds at 6.6, with the required odds at 7.
Timeform indicates that "Casilli" was at 6.4 odds, whilst Eastern Charm was the 3rd favourite at the start with odds of 6.22.
Given that the bot is placing its bet just 2 seconds before the race starts, I'm wondering if it truly matters whether the bot's selection ranks as 2nd or 4th on the start of the race. The difference in odds is minimal, and since the selection is on the tip list, it does meet the criteria. It could go either way. Maybe I'm just overthinking this issue?
@Greg-Mitchell , did you get the same selection as me on this race yesterday?
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@Adam Having slept on it, I guess the whole point of my post was that there may be something in Laying the 3rd Fav as picked by the software at a given time instead of the 3rd Fav at bet time. Guess the Phase 2 update of the software will provide the answer
Although yesterday they both proved fruitful - Taking the 3rd Fav as identified at some point by the software if it was actually 3rd Fav at the time of bet was 9/9, whilst taking the 3rd Fav at the time of bet (2 secs before start time) was 8/8.
6 Selections appeared on both, there were 2 that were not 3rd Fav in the software pre-off that ended up being 3rd Fav and 3 that were 3rd Fav in the Software and also at bet time. (I'm not sure why these weren't picked up by the bot, because they should of been, looking into it)
Edit - well, of the 3 that allegedly weren't 3rd Fav at the bet time so weren't picked up by the bot, two of them were actually the 3rd Fav in terms of odds, but not in terms of position, with there being joint Favourites or 2nd favourites, so they were actually 4th Fav. The other one actually industry SP'd at 3rd Fav, but was Fav on BSP. Still doesn't explain why they weren't picked up, both bots are exactly the same apart from the URL tip code.
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@Greg-Mitchell said in Horse Racing Strategies Megathread:
if we use the first option and upload the selections to BFBM via URL then the selection has to be 3rd Favourite at the time of upload and also 3rd favourite at the time of bet, so how often is the price updated in the software?
The daily qualifiers background task that generate the URL runs every 30 mins to 1 hour.
For very price-sensitive rules, you're best to remove those rules from our software and rely on BFBM to manage them.
I'm running the 3rd fave strategy at the moment in my own bot and doing a kind of halfway house between those two things. It basically runs the qualifiers query in our software a couple of times in the last 10 minutes (including the favourite rule) and places bets accordingly.
It would be much more price-reactive to let the bot handle the favourite rule itself and I'm planning on moving to that, but I mention it because the strategy's doing well despite only updating the favourites a couple of times during the betting window. About 40 points last month and 10 so far this month.
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@Greg-Mitchell the bots are out to get you!
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Strange going ons today, had 2 bets placed in-running on Lay 3rd Fav strategy, and one on Lay Short Odds, even though BFBM bot is set to not do that. Just loves costing me money.
