The title of this article may sound confusing but not once I begin to explain what it is that I am really saying. It is pretty well evident that in athletics, different distances suit different athletes. The reasons as to why this is so are both long and complex and well beyond the scope of this article. Usually the body type of an individual and their overall physiological make up dictate if they can even be an athlete at all.

This is similar to Horse Racing as most horses are simply not cut out to be race horses in the same way that most humans are not cut out to be athletes. Then we start to become immersed in the rather complex study of which types of athletes are suited to which types of distances. This is usually achieved through trial and error but the chest cavity also has an impact as well.

So it is clear then that humans differ greatly and their capacities to do certain things differ greatly as well. So what this means is that all athletes can only be truly successful at a high level at certain distances. While it is true that some athletes can be successful at different distances, the other distance is not that far removed from the original distance. A top athlete may be successful at both 100m and 200m or 200m and 400m. Or it could well be 800m and 1500m or even 5000m and 10,000m.

But you never see a 200m runner at 800m or vice versa. These same principles apply to horse racing perfectly and they apply to distances as well. You never see a 5f specialist running at 1.5 miles. These are so different as to be identical to a 100m runner running at 1500m……it just doesn’t happen. This is not to say that a 1500m runner could not run 100m…..of course they could. What I am actually saying here is that the 1500m runner simply would not possess the explosive power and speed of a specialist 100m runner and therefore would never achieve a top level of performance.

So what all this is leading to is that when horses are either stepping up or down in distance for the first time then there are always possibilities for problems. Usually this stepping up or stepping down process is all carefully calculated and it is usually the case that this is being done simply because the trainer believes that it may improve performance and not lessen it.

So what this means is that you cannot always assume that just because a horse is trying a distance for the first time that it is going to struggle. Quite often there is a marked improvement in the performance level at the new distance. This can often be observed when horses have poor or indifferent form at another level. The time to be careful is if a horse has had good form at a certain distance and is then moving up or down to a new distance for the very first time.

Many people have often said that bookmaking is a licence to print money. Well I do not agree with that statement for several reasons and the main one is that bookmaking is a business just like any other and that business depends on people placing bets in sufficient quantity for the bookmaker to meet their overheads and then have enough profit left over to make it a viable concern.

So what this has led to in recent years is an influx of people who are going onto the betting exchanges trying to act as a bookmaker. This is fine to a point but there is far more to bookmaking than meets the eye. I would say that my knowledge of bookmaking is superior to at least 99% of the people who gamble but yet that isn’t high enough for even someone like me to operate on the exchanges as a bookmaker.

There is no doubt that many gamblers are becoming more sophisticated in how they gamble and that can be seen on sites like Racebook for example but the problem is that they are simply making sophisticated mistakes instead of unsophisticated ones. I have known many people personally who were seduced by fancy looking software in the belief that this was some Holy Grail of betting. The latest batch of trading and betting software that interacts with the API of the betting exchanges is one such example of this.

But yet I have been around the gambling industry for a very long time and more than long enough to know that software by itself simply will not do the job properly. Software will really only be of use if it supplements a proven winning method. Take BetAngel for instance what I use, that is a fantastic piece of kit that will help you in your horse racing trading but yet it cannot make you money without an underlying philosophy behind you.

So it is clear then that the betting exchanges are having a huge impact on how punters are betting and even though the average punter is becoming far more knowledgeable and sophisticated, in my view then they are simply making different and more sophisticated mistakes. What this tends to do is leave the punter in a situation where if you were to listen to them speak; they would sound as if they were a really successful punter. This is exactly the same with poker.

But as always the core element is in how much money you are making and most people who can “talk the talk” simply cannot “walk the walk”. So it then becomes clear that taking the next step in sophistication is not the be all and end all if all it does is lead to you making more sophisticated mistakes. This can be linked to someone who trades on stocks and shares to someone who bets on horse racing. One seems more sophisticated than the other but yet is simply making mistakes on a larger scale in what is or seems a more sophisticated environment.

There is usually an old adage in Horse Racing that goes like this “don’t expect a horse to do something that it has never done before”. What this statement actually means deserves some sort of explanation. Usually there are reasons behind why a horse is doing something for the first time. It could be facing a certain type of going for the first time or a certain course for the first time. Maybe it is racing on a right or left handed track for the first time or even wearing blinkers.

Some horses will never have won before but whatever the reason, this can and does have a serious impact on the horse actually winning. This is where you can find good horses worth laying if you can find reasons for them to perform poorly. If you can find several reasons then so much the better. Other factors to take into account are if a horse is travelling a long distance for the first time.

Anything that is new to the horse can impact on its performance and being confined inside a horse box for periods that are far longer than what it has been used to could have a damaging effect. Usually the sensitivity of the betting on the exchanges finds these factors out as a rule and the price adjusts accordingly.

Another huge factor in why horses can perform badly is if they are experiencing a different distance to the one that they normally run at. If a horse has only ever run over 5f and is now running over 6f then this is a question mark against the horse in question. You can often look at the racing history of certain horses to see how they have performed and over what distances. Usually all these factors and more have been taken into consideration by the odds compilers and bookmakers but some manage to slip through the net.

The average horse is far more temperamental than what you think and it can be disturbed for a multitude of reasons and it will not always be visible to the naked eye. The key to all this is to look for reasons as to why the horse may do badly. If you are looking at a horse that is running over a certain distance for the first time then common sense has to be applied here if the horse is still vastly superior in ability to its opponents. You cannot lay a horse simply on this reason and this reason alone as the difference in ability is enough to offset the reason that you are trying to put forward for a poor performance.

Usually when it comes to laying a horse then I look for at least three reasons for a horse not to win and the race to be a competitive one with at least two or three other horses in with a serious shout of winning besides the favourite.

The way that the betting exchanges tout their product is that it is matched betting and that you are pitting your opinion against that of someone else. So it is your knowledge of sport or a sporting event or person against that of someone else. In a sort of loose fitting way then this is true. However the vast amount of liquidity on the exchanges these days is stemming from outside institutions, bookmakers and traders.

Skilled financial day traders have an edge on the exchanges because they are trained in their profession. But yet as a punter then you really shouldn’t be taking these people head on anyway. As a rule then the bookmakers use exchanges to hedge their own offline betting activities but they also back and lay for other reasons as well. However there are many institutions who are operating on the exchanges so you never really get access to individual money in the way that it is touted because the money is pooled.

However there are ways to circumvent this problem and trader and institutional activity may account for a large amount of liquidity in certain markets. But traders rarely understand tissue prices and what represents value and are mainly operating around their own individual strategies. What this means is that betting prices often oscillate either side of what are optimum pricing levels.

So it is possible to find very good value on the betting exchanges but it takes patience to wait and a good tissue price at hand that has a proven track record of accuracy within a few percentage points. The older strategies of using weight of money indicators have long since been dead in the water and I never really thought that they would work anyway as they were too well known. Trying to ascertain short term market movement is difficult because there is a tremendous amount of short term noise and manipulation of the markets from some very powerful sources.

However there is a difference between short term movement and longer term movement as in my opinion, it is easier to find longer term movement than short term movement on the exchanges these days. The bigger markets of Horse Racing and football are where the greatest liquidity is found and this is where the greatest outside influences can be found. In my view then it is important to elongate the trading process so that you can get away from traders and institutions who are driving prices in a certain direction based on their own short term strategies. It then becomes very hard to predict when and how far these people will drive the price short term and trying to follow them becomes difficult.

So one of the keys to making money on the exchanges is to highlight who you are going up against and what they are doing. If you can do that and then get your hands on a good tissue that accurately assesses true chances of winning then that is a very good start.

In all forms of gambling, the lure of winning immediate money is strong and in a roundabout way, this desire and fear of losing is what drives the betting industry to a large extent. People do not like losing money, they like winning money…..that much is obvious. But yet this desire of winning and fear of losing become so polarised that the punter ends up taking these two points to an extreme and their betting strategy and habits are formed around these emotions.

In poker, many players like winning quick easy pots and do not value bet decent hands when they should mainly through fear. These emotions are prevalent in Horse Race betting too but the bookmakers know that it exists and exploit it. This is why the majority of punters back the horses at the top end of the market. They do not want to back middling to high priced horses because even though the pay-off is high relative to stakes, the chances of winning are slim at best.

So the first and second favourite in the betting becomes the target for many punters. This is just as well because the first and second favourites tend to be the horses with the greatest chance of winning. Because they have the greatest chance of winning then these two horses satisfy what the majority of the betting public crave and that is to have immediate success by way of winners and to avoid the pain of losing money. So in a way these factors feed on themselves but the effect is that because so many of the betting public want to back such horses then the prices can become shorter as a result.

This can lead the first and second favourites to be poor value if the price gets contracted in this way. But if you look at this situation for a minute then this not only highlights why amateur punters lose money but it also shows how professionals win money. If the favourites and second favourites are becoming poor value because the mass of the betting public is supporting them then by sheer definition, there must be value elsewhere in the market.

The amateurs are being seduced and shackled by their own greed and fear and it is greed and fear which drives the betting market. Even money favourites will win around 50% of the time but yet their true winning ratio will be less than that as the price of evens will more than likely be shorter than what it should be. But even though a punter is backing at Evens when the true price should be at least 5-4 or 11/8 does not deter them because when it wins a high percentage of the time, it feeds their desire for winners and fends off their fear of losing. The end result in all of this is a long and slow steady drip feeding of money into the hands of the bookmakers but as long as punters are greedy and fearful then it will continue to happen.

For the novice horse racing punter then it can be difficult to identify which horses belong in which class at first glance. In other sports like football then it is far easier to see the difference in class. Most professional teams play in leagues so in cup competitions where teams from different leagues compete against each other then the difference in class is obvious. It is also obvious in horse racing of course although less so to the novice. So when analysing form then one of the most important factors is in if your horse has shown any sort of proof whatsoever that it can win in the class of race that it is about to take part in.

Often a major question must be placed at the side of a horse that is moving up in class for the first time. In a way this is a trip into the unknown until further evidence becomes available. Often though the rise in class is justified and the horse often performs well in the next category up. Once again the analogy with football is clear as football teams in the lower leagues who have been promoted have also done well in the next league up and many times teams have recorded back to back promotions in successive seasons.

To help any novice to further understand a new sport when it comes to betting on horses then it always helps to make analogies with other sports and I always try to do this with my articles. To really immerse yourself in the complexities of form then I advise you to seek out a form book like Raceform for example.

However this can be very long winded and there are just far too many races in an average racing day in the UK and most other countries like Germany, Ireland and France for a bettor to be able to follow and analyse them all. Another option to short cut this process is to use an automated rating service or computer program that does this for you. There are also some good services out there that offer ratings as well for cheap prices and subscriptions to magazines like Smartsig and SmarterSig can become a good investment for those who are looking to break into betting on horses.

There are basically two ways to get good ratings and the first is to manually do this yourself the hard way or to develop a computer program to do this for you. Developing a program requires expert knowledge in its own right so that will not be an option either for the vast majority of novice punters. So short cutting the process and finding good reliable and accurate ratings without doing the necessary leg work then becomes a necessity.

There are numerous ratings systems that you can pay for but you need to be aware of a few things first. You need to know if the system has any track record that can be checked and also how expensive the ratings are. You can get your hands on good ratings these days for no more than $30/month which is basically nothing compared to the amount of time that you would need to put in manually doing this yourself.

Did you know that I used to work as a Deputy Manager at a high street bookmaker some five years ago? I suppose not, but I did and although it was not a career choice for me I certainly learned a lot about how Horse Racing works and how the mind of the average punter works. My job entailed taking and accounting for the money, paying out the money to customers (which was less than what we took of course) and cashing up at the end of the day bundling all of the money into the safe. I also had to help customers if they wanted to learn how to bet on horses and keep them smiling by being funny and interesting. This cunning strategy of being their friends usually led to them staying in the shop and continuing to bet. Now you know why betting shop managers are so friendly.

I accept that I am being a little controversial here. There was one golden rule that the company drilled into every new starter in that we were not allowed to discourage nor encourage anyone to gamble. If the punters asked for a betting tip or what horse a punter on a hot streak had bet on unfortunately I could not say. Having a punter turn around and say “I bet on it because he (being me) told me to” was more than my job was worth, which was not much as it happened.

Despite us not encouraging betting, when punters are in a betting shop then they are surrounded by various opportunities and are in a betting environment when the number one topic of conversation is anecdotes by punters on that last bet that went so well for them. How rude it would be for me to point out the brand new interior, new TV screens and all manner of betting slips, pens and even my uniform was paid out of bets that did not go so well.

After being in the shop for so long and seeing the various subliminal tricks used to get people to bet made me realise that the online sportsbooks like bwin.com offer a more ethical service in my view because they do not use any tricks, they simply offer a user-friendly interface to have a bet should the punter have already made the decision to do so. There is no influencing of this decision no matter how indirect. I like that bwin relies on simply giving punters the odds in a pleasant way and allows them to play using easy betting methods. Everything is made easy for the customer not to encourage them to bet, but to facilitate them having a bet if they have decided to do that.

Ultimately I moved on to bigger and better things in my career but I did notice one strange phenomenon. In each and every Horse race there is one horse that when punters read the form they invariably bet on. This is the “gamble” horse that odds shoot in for no apparent reason. This horse does not always win, but there is usually a reliable tip or good information from a trainer that gets around and causes this action. Whilst I would never say that this can be a profitable way to bet, being able to spot this horse in the field does suggest that you are reading the form card in the right way.

What I like about betting online is you can have useful sites like Oddschecker or sporting life on your computer to get up to the minute information. This sort of information is all but stifled in the betting shop environment. Given the choice, I choose bwin because I am in control, not the betting shop.

By Malcolm Clarke

No matter how many of us want to believe it is not true, we all eventually lose something at some point in time when taking part in online gambling.  The online casino or land-based casino house does have an edge over the players in every single game within the casino; therefore, it means we will lose at some point in time.  Gamblers can take the time to learn strategies and tips that will help them tilt the odds in their favor and lower the house edge; however, it is likely that you will still lose here and there.  It is possible to hit a winning streak or hit a huge jackpot, but on average, someone always loses.

Normally when someone takes part on online gambling, it is for the pure fun of it.  Then, of course, if you play enough, you win eventually.  If you can’t keep playing until you do hit big, then it can make it difficult if you lose too much.  You need to learn how to gamble responsibly and manage your bankroll efficiently so that you don’t lose your money and find yourself completely broke.  If you do this, it could have been during that time that you would have won the huge jackpot or a huge amount.  You need to make sure that you are able to stay in the game as much as possible as the more you play the more chances you have of winning.  If you aren’t playing, you can’t win!

When it comes to online gaming, you want to play at all times.  You want to have the money to be able to play when you want.  You need to be in the game in order to win so you need to figure out how to make it possible.  You also never want to use money that you can’t afford to lose.  Figure out how much money you can use is the first thing that you should do.  Next, determine how long of sessions you can play and how many in a specific amount of time. Say, you want this money to hold you for a week.  Figure out how many sessions you will have the time to play and how long each session will be.  Remember, you have a set amount of money…so the next thing you will want to do is to figure out how much money you can spend in each session, or each hour.  Make sure you only use the amount of money that you can afford to lose over the course of this playing week. 

After doing this, you will know how much money you can lose each hour or session that you play.  This allows you to set a limit for while you play.  It is best if you manage your bankroll limit per hour.  This way if you are able to go play for two hours, you can figure up your limit and don’t take any more than that with you so that you don’t have the temptation to use it and possibly lose it.  Leave early if you use it all before the two hours is up.  It may not seem so fun at the time leaving the game, but you’ll be glad you did late on when you realize that you still have the rest of your bankroll.

 If you’re new to sports betting, a money line might seem like a foreign language at first. Actually, though, it’s a straightforward way of betting on a particular event and it doesn’t involve the handicapping of a point spread.

Point spreads are used to spread money evenly between the two teams, while a money line bet is only concerned with who wins.

For instance, say there was a hockey game between the Bruins and the Blackhawks. If you saw the money line, it might look something like:
Boston +110
Chicago: -120

If you’ve seen point spread odds, the minus and plus signs should already be familiar to you. The minus denotes the favorite and the plus the underdog. It’s the numeric portion that confuses some people. In this case, it signifies that in order to wager on Chicago, you must risk $120 to win 100. Accordingly, to wager on Boston, you’d risk $100 to win 110.Don’t worry; just because the money line is denoted in terms of $100, doesn’t mean you need to bet that much to participate. You can bet as much or as little as you wish and the same ratio will still hold.

So why is a money line used? Sports like hockey and baseball don’t typically have wide enough margins of victory to make a point spread practical, and sports like auto racing, horse racing, boxing and tennis are structured in such a way that a point spread is not possible. . This is another way for bookmakers to collect bets on both teams; only this time, he can’t realistically expect to get an equal amount of money on each, so he uses the money line to inflate the risk amount for the favorite to the point that if the underdog wins, he can use that money to pay the few gamblers who bet on it. However, if the favorite wins, he only needs a few underdogs to bet in order to pay off the winners, since they’re only winning $100 each. If a baseball team has very long odds of defeating their opponent, you might see something like:
New York Yankees -250
Pittsburgh Pirates: +200

As the Pirates get worse and the Yankees get better, the difference between those two numbers would continue to grow. In this scenario, if people wager $5,000 on the Yankees and the Pirates win, the bookie pays out $4,000 and keeps the rest. If the Yankees win, the bookie doles out $100 to each of the bettors who picked the favorite and doesn’t lose any money. This is assuming 20 people bet on each team, but in reality, it’s much more likely that many more people will bet on the favorite than the underdog, so the bookies profit would likely be higher. The only way he loses money is if, for some reason, the ratio of people betting on the favorite to those wagering on the underdog gets extremely low, but he’ll adjust the odds to prevent that from happening.

The money line can be used in any sport. It is just another method of betting the odds; albeit one that confuses many a new gambler.

When it comes to betting on the greyhounds, gamblers can take advantage of a number of different tips in order to maximize their chances of winning more often than not. The first thing to do is to look for value odds as often as you look for probable winners in a race. By continuing to look for such odds, you will likely become more and more accustomed at spotting them quickly.

It is also a good idea to take a careful look at the age of the dog you are thinking of betting on. Generally speaking, a racing male dog is more than likely to reach its peak at the age of two whilst a bitch (female dog) will generally peak at around the age of three. Also, be sure to take a look at the dog’s last few races and ensure that they have run a few good, recent races. As a general rule, it is not such a great idea to put a large wager on a greyhound that has decent form but is also hit by regular poor form.

It is also advisable to place your focus on the trap draw when you are evaluating information regarding potential winners. For instance, a greyhound that has a decent record running from trap one might not run so well when drawn to run from trap four or five.

After this, be sure to weigh up the odds carefully. Straight bets are straightforward and easy to manage and are often not too hard to win. Generally, do not bet on either favorites or long shots if you want to maximize your chances; be sure to be selective as well. You should also pay close attention to the odds determined by bookmakers and sports books as these individuals are experienced in the industry and their prices are often very good indicators as to which greyhounds are most likely to do well in a race.

In some instances, a large amount of gamblers will shift their support to a greyhound that will subsequently elevate to a false price. As a result of this, the prices of the other dogs in the race will get longer. Additionally, because of this, the greyhound that was initially the favorite in the race will most likely drop down the listing as the race approaches which will significantly improve that dog’s odds. This is not a particularly regular occurrence but when it does happen be sure to bet on the greyhound that was the original favorite.

Further, in the event that a greyhound is backed substantially just before a race starts and its odds are heavily reduced, be sure to bet on it. This type of possible event is a real indicator that a knowledgeable person has information on the greyhound that no one else knows and could turn highly profitable for you if you move accordingly.

Pay attention to other indicators such as whether or not a particular greyhound has run recently, as a period out of competitive racing may indicate either an illness or an injury, which might affect a greyhound’s chances.