Horse Racing Strategies Megathread
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Interesting when breaking down the results of the LTBF over the last 2 years - odds in the range of 14-15 have been tapped into more than any other - +466 times with a 96.35% SR. Actually increasing the fixed stake on these, and scaling down the stakes as the odds get lower (and therefore more likely to win), has yielded some pretty incredible results in the the back testing just food for thought for those considering adjusting stakes based on odds... requires some pretty solid courage though!
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@emily-knowles sorry to go off topic with the poker chat, it's something I got into over the last year. Is it something you still do? Finding that having a trading + bankroll management background extremely useful, just the GTO stuff which is a bit over my head still.
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@andy-donnelly said in Horse Racing Strategies Megathread:
Ah I’m not using automation yet, and conversely laying to fixed liability is actually harder than to a set amount when doing manually, which is one of the reasons why I’m following a Maria style format.
Played a lot of poker myself to decent stakes in the past but probably not to same stakes as yourself. May need to take some of that learning here myself, good point!
There is a very natural progression/cross over from reasonable stakes poker to trading horses, same sh*t different game that's all. Good bank management, stable staking (with incremental growth,) understanding variance (learn to embrace not fight it,) discipline to do the same thing over and over, (place Martin's Lay bets even though you know hardly any will meet the criteria at the off to trigger the bet) and continual education via forums like this. It's simple to know harder to implement!
I'm building my racing bank the same as did for poker. I've started with £100 and my aim at the end of each day is to have 5% more than my opening balance. I withdraw any profit over this 5% into a completely separate bank account which I use to buy a treat for myself (it reinforces good behaviour subconsciously) - I'm on day 13 and cashed out enough today buy my family of 4 a take away pizza for £43. Some days I've cashed out just a pound, but so far I've made my 5% each day and my bank is growing and now stands at £188.56. It compounds very quickly!
I always stake the same way and update it daily while in the growth phase. I scalp and swing pre off racing getting in and out of each trade using no more than 2% of starting daily bank (rinse & repeat in each market) and I back or lay my strategy horses with 2.5%
It probably sounds micro managed, tedious and geeky, but it works and it takes a lot of the emotion out of staking and growing your bank.
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@emily-knowles said in Horse Racing Strategies Megathread:
@andy-donnelly It's really hard to automate using the Maria staking, or rather it's too time consuming and lots of faffing about. Personally I just keep all lay bets to a liability of 2.5% of my bank. Yes some losses can be a bit painful but the recovery is much quicker and feels easier.
I've managed to get my automation setup with BetAngel reasonably well using Maria Stakes. I agree it can be abit of a faff though updating stakes when increasing them with the 'ratchet' approach although not a deal breaker for me personally.
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Ah I’m not using automation yet, and conversely laying to fixed liability is actually harder than to a set amount when doing manually, which is one of the reasons why I’m following a Maria style format.
Played a lot of poker myself to decent stakes in the past but probably not to same stakes as yourself. May need to take some of that learning here myself, good point!
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@andy-donnelly It's really hard to automate using the Maria staking, or rather it's too time consuming and lots of faffing about. Personally I just keep all lay bets to a liability of 2.5% of my bank. Yes some losses can be a bit painful but the recovery is much quicker and feels easier.
I'm new to this world of horses but I played some big stakes poker. I only survived mentally by learning not to see the chips as money, so a call of £1000 was just two red chips for example. If it was a mathematically correct play I made the call, if not I didn't. I'd win far more than I lost because maths doesn't lie over the long term if. The variance of an expensive loss or losing run sorts itself out...always . We have to treat bets as the same, just a horse our strategy says to back or lay using a % of our bank with no specific monetary value.
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So I have actually been using a slightly modified version of Maria staking.
Odds between 3 - 3.5 - 1%
3.55 - 5 - 0.8%
5.1 - 7.2 - 0.6%
7.4 - 9 - 0.5%
9.2 - 11 - 0.4%
11.5 - 15 - 0.3%Sounds complicated but it’s easier than it looks and the profit gradient feels a bit smoother between the ratchets than Maria.
I agree that generally it’s more profitable to do fixed staking but I think compounding alongside it is more sustainable long term. As an example say I’ve gone through the levels, not sure how I’d feel about losing £1400 on £100 fixed stakes even if I had the bank to cope with it.
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What did you mix with LBF on Maria? Its going to be profitable either way but with average odds of over 7 your only betting 0.6 (or in most cases 0.4). If your mixing with backs (which you will probably be betting at 1 and they have a poor win rate) thats going to be a very slow burner for account growth needing up to 5 LBF wins for every 2 back losses. And, a lot of the ones you are losing are at full stakes anyway (just on a probability basis). I did see some big losses that were mitigated by using Maria for sure (even a couple almost in a row) but the recovery was painfully slow and resulted in an overall negative month for me (though on its own LBF performed amazing as always). For me Maria really doesnt fit into my mix of strategies.
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Done some analysis of the pace lays and looks like adding in a parameter to remove horses that have won one or more races at the same distance seems to improve the strategy. Being careful not to back fit and looks like that trend does run through when testing against different years and random months previously. Wouldn’t change up this months fortunes greatly but would have reduced the damage a little. Will monitor for a bit and then may apply to my own trading.
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Yep interesting because I did LBF last month using Maria staking and ended up with a healthy profit. I thought key advantages to laying to liability or Maria staking was that it was a bit easier to scale.
March worked out well on the horses for me but April (so far) has fallen off a cliff. Just checked various different staking methods and there’s no real difference for this month. Pace lays in particular having a big rough patch. Going to do a bit of a deep dive on the data and see if I can find anything.
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@jonathan-jones I thought the idea seemed sound - with fixed liability you are staking far less on the horses most likely to lose. Staking to a fixed percentage of your bank is fine but it would need to be a pretty small amount to make the liability tolerable. In my view there's nothing magic about Maria staking, it just allows more balanced liability across different odds ranges.
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@greenie
I have just removed Maria staking. It was partly the cause of a totally screwed up March. Lay beaten Fav is a star performer but maria staking completely kills it. Normal stake would of easily made up for the losses on the poor performers but because i was using maria staking it didnt come close. Thing is if you are using sensible stakes in the first place (so the liability doesnt scare you) why the hell would you want to use maria? It takes full loss on the bets that you are most likely to lose and limits your profits on the bets you are most likely to win.it would take 5 winners on LBF at the higher stakes using maria (so the better probability of you winning) to make up for 2 losses on one of the back strategies. And, the back strategies have a LOT of losses.
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@adam said in Horse Racing Strategies Megathread:
We're working on adding maria staking :thumbs_up:
Awesome! I know you probably get sick of being asked this for everything, but any rough timescales on when this may be likely to be added in the future?
Thanks
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@greenie said in Horse Racing Strategies Megathread:
Thanks very much all - appreciate the help.
I'm assuming there's not currently any way of back testing with different stakes dependant upon the odds of the selection?
I'm thinking along the lines of the old Maria Lay Stake strategy.
We're working on adding maria staking :thumbs_up:
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@nick-allan said in Horse Racing Strategies Megathread:
@greenie said in Horse Racing Strategies Megathread:
@nick-allan if you don't mind me asking out of interest which automation bot have you been trying?
bet angel
I'm happy to help share some of my Betangel Automation files once I've finished tweaking a few bits if that would help. Obviously you'd probably need to tweak them further to your own preference
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Thanks very much all - appreciate the help.
I'm assuming there's not currently any way of back testing with different stakes dependant upon the odds of the selection?
I'm thinking along the lines of the old Maria Lay Stake strategy.
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@nick-allan I don't think I say 'just look at the rules' I try to help as much as possible but I can make another one if you let me know what you need help with, have you watched my walkthrough video?
Create A Strategy With Me!
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@greenie said in Horse Racing Strategies Megathread:
@michael-meier said in Horse Racing Strategies Megathread:
@greenie
As I understand it, the back testing uses the odds 10 minutes out (like Martin said) BUT base the favourite on BSP.
Atleast it says so below the box here.
This is my reason for letting my bot fire 10 seconds before the off instead of 10 minutes. Different odds but much better chance of correct horse being layed.
Thanks chaps, it's giving me plenty to think about.
I interpreted the favourites rules as it selects only favourites amd second favourites. Does it actually mean it avoids them?
Sorry for all the questions!
You can see in the Match Type box it say NONE.
So when laying the horse it CANNOT be the 1st or 2nd favourite.
I recommend to look through all the strategies you're looking to create bots for and understand exactly what makes a selection qualify. I missed this part at first too and couldn't figure out why my selections were so different to the software. Keep at it and you'll get there.
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@martin said in Horse Racing Strategies Megathread:
@nick-allan these are members who shared their successful strategies so they have worked for many people.
The strategies are also fairly new, so part of the process is learning how to use them to best effect etc.
Ultimately you don't want to be relying on other people's strategies when all is said and done, how has the work on your own ones been going?
i dont create my own startegies as i dont know enough about the software to create one, I dont find it as easy as the footaball software IMO. In your videos you say just look at the rules but if i honest i dont get the rules, perhaps horse racing isnt for me as to be honest i only did Dobbing and L2B goign into this and maybe need to understand more. Its why i use the staregiues here but again i struggying to make money with these
