My Racing System Stats

Post Reply
User avatar
B-Rex
Posts: 27
Joined: Fri Jan 01, 2016 9:07 pm

Hello all - I've been working on a racing system for the last 6 months (looking at data spanning 10 months) and thought I would share some of my findings (but not the system, sorry ;) )

Interested to know what people make of it. To me, it looks "too good to be true" so I'd welcome some more professional eyes/brains to help me qualify this or to help me dig deeper.

There is a lot of stuff that went into this, I will not bore everyone with ALL the details (unless anyone is interested)

Some relevant details though, first:
- This is a completely automated system, based on data collected from my bespoke web app (so i believe it is probably unique data in the precise windows I am collecting it)
- It involves betting on literally every single horse, either Backing or Laying
- Results are not to be taken too literally, as they are based on £50 back bets, and lay bets of a more complex nature but ranging in £50-250 liability depending on odds. It might be that dumping £50 on an outsider may of course drop the BSP odds somewhat in reality, but for argument sake, you could knock a zero off all these numbers and assume £5 bets, it should probably be accurate for that to within 1% I would guess.

The Numbers:
- The top table reflects individual bet stats
- The bottom table reflects total race stats, but also shows a bigger total profit, this is because it also includes 'accurate commission' over the whole race, whereas the top table assumes 2% paid on all winners, regardless of reductions for losing bets on the same race
- The data spans every horse from mid march last year until the end of January (I've not finished adding Feb/March data to the database properly yet but i know it's not changed things too dramatically)

Now, seeing as some of these wins come from backing huge price outsiders that win, you could be forgiven for thinking that maybe this is probably just short term variance showing a positive result. But over this many horses, 106K bets in total, and commission included - what do you think the chances are that I have found something good here? Obviously it's hard to say for sure without me revealing the specifics of the system, but Grok told me that over this much data the p-value would essentially mean the chances this is down to luck is virtually impossible. Looking at the chart, it looks about as good as one could expect, doesn't it?? Or am I missing something?

I started live testing it at the start of the year with £1 bets, balance went generally slowly down by a few hundred over the first couple of months, but in the first week of April alone, it's gone up by £800 putting me in a good net profit for the year, and lining up nicely for what Grok told me: Generally systems that perform well over summer will NOT do well over winter, so expect an upturn in results again starting from the end of March/early April.

I would really appreciate any constructive questions I could be asking to figure out whether this data is looking reliable or if somehow the results could be too cherry-picked, even over data this size. The max back odds I am using for this particular set is 200 but it doesn't change much regardless of changing that to 100 or 1000. I'm not sure if there's enough data to consider the 3-digit odds data as being reliable, but I think you could remove my 10x biggest winners here and it would still be in a very nice profit.. and i'd take that!
You do not have the required permissions to view the files attached to this post.
User avatar
ShaunWhite
Posts: 10737
Joined: Sat Sep 03, 2016 3:42 am

£3 per £50.... 1.5% RoI passes the sanity check.
Best thing now is to run it on data that wasn't in the data you used to create the strategy. So if this was done on 2025 data then test it on 2024. That way you'll get some assurance that it's not back fitted and might work on other unseen data, ie next month /year. Apart from that liability staking removes variance due to price, and make sure you calc commission correctly..... And note your max and length of drawdowns so when it's live you know what to expect. Tests are fine but live is in slomo so can be tough to get through dips unless you expect them.
User avatar
B-Rex
Posts: 27
Joined: Fri Jan 01, 2016 9:07 pm

Thanks Shuan I appreciate the input.

Unfortunately I cannot back test it because the core data for developing the system is not actually available in the Betfair historic data (nor anywhere else, i'm 99% sure - i collect it with my own software) so live testing is the only real solution I think.

RE: Drawdowns, before the end of the year it was showing about 12K as worst drawdown (@£50 stakes ofc) but I think over the jan-march period this went up to about double that. So I am thinking, double it again to cover worst-case = about 1K bank per £1 stakes used, should be about right.

Thanks again for your suggestions anyway. Not to be pedantic though but isn't £3 per £50, 6% ROI? :)

Incidentally I also started trading 3 weeks ago (about 10 years after doing Peter's live training!) got a real obsession for it already, was thinking about posting a monthly journal here to keep me accountable, so hopefully will be sticking around.
User avatar
Mr Undercover
Posts: 235
Joined: Thu Nov 03, 2011 7:22 pm

All comes down to how your bets are consistently beating 'true price' i.e. generating an over-round. You haven't given any detail as to how you are identifying 'value' and triggering a bet, whether in-play or pre-live, whether one or many horses per race. But essentially whatever your system is endeavouring to do it must be consistently achieving an over round (take the price of all the runners/selections convert decimal to implied probability %, sum them up and check how far they exceed 100%) or eventually it'll slip into the negative. Obviously you need to factor in the commission. The sequence matters, if you've devised a system that only wins rarely (selections that are 100/1 or higher) then you need a very large number of interactions/bets to understand the edge definitively.
tico
Posts: 195
Joined: Fri Sep 20, 2024 9:18 pm

sounds OK to me .Try betting for smaller stakes first thought.
User avatar
ShaunWhite
Posts: 10737
Joined: Sat Sep 03, 2016 3:42 am

B-Rex wrote:
Wed Apr 08, 2026 9:21 pm
Thanks again for your suggestions anyway. Not to be pedantic though but isn't £3 per £50, 6% ROI? :)
Errr yes :oops:
.... In which case it's a bit punchy.
User avatar
Acheron
Posts: 58
Joined: Tue Oct 07, 2025 1:11 pm

Those are some mighty impressive numbers, I'd be interested to hear how you get on. Best of luck!
User avatar
B-Rex
Posts: 27
Joined: Fri Jan 01, 2016 9:07 pm

Acheron wrote:
Sat Apr 11, 2026 11:40 am
Those are some mighty impressive numbers, I'd be interested to hear how you get on. Best of luck!
Thanks I'll post an update in a month or 2 i would expect by then i will have either given these profits back, or if it's still going up, then i guess i will have found something truly good.

Here's my month so far, not bad for £1 flat stakes at BSP, but small sample so not getting excited.
You do not have the required permissions to view the files attached to this post.
tico
Posts: 195
Joined: Fri Sep 20, 2024 9:18 pm

Hi Brex,
Any updates ?
Tico
User avatar
B-Rex
Posts: 27
Joined: Fri Jan 01, 2016 9:07 pm

tico wrote:
Fri May 08, 2026 10:33 am
Hi Brex,
Any updates ?
Tico
Hi - yes, absolute banger of a day yesterday, been a good week!

My balance has gone from about £270 at the start of April, to about £1,890 now, which is really very exciting when I think about it, but I am trying not too! I am still not getting ahead of myself, and going to employ strict bankroll management, but I think next time i have a couple of bad days 'retracement' I will up the stakes to £2. The good days and bad days seem to bunch up together. Maybe is just variance, but the big winning days almost always seem to be followed by bad days.

Just to give a very brief background on my experience, because despite lurking here for a while, I appreciate I am not active until recently.

I started betting & looking for loopholes/matched betting type stuff over 20 years ago, rode the MB wave a bit when it was good 10 years ago, and even went on Peter's live training course around a similar time. But my interests lied more in trying to find outside the box ideas and systems that worked. EG. I reinvented the each-way dutching strategy that then ended up being used by a lot of the matched betting sites, made a lot of money over the years, but ultimately ran out of 'friends and family' :D which makes it difficult of course. And finally ended up having twins 2 years ago that essentially made me decide to take most of the last 2 years off work to help with that, and now finally getting some time to work, I am looking to rebuild a new income in the trading & system development side of things.

This is just the first 'baby' of mine I have been working on, late at night for the last 6 months or so. Hopefully it continues to show promise, as (real) babies are expensive :lol: I am learning to use Bet Angel for trading as a more longer-term career venture, after being an entrepreneur (outside of the betting world) for the last 20 years, running a dozen businesses in different fields, i decided I want to focus on 1 thing now and the world I feel most at home from everything I've done in life, is the world of Betfair and the numerous opportunities it presents.

Sorry for that long winded answer!
Just thought I would merge it into an extended introduction whilst I am at it. The races are about to begin so good 'luck' to all who are partaking in it!
You do not have the required permissions to view the files attached to this post.
User avatar
B-Rex
Posts: 27
Joined: Fri Jan 01, 2016 9:07 pm

By the way, if anyone happens to know:
I'd be very interested to know how the last 12 months have faired in terms of number of 3-digit odds winners, versus other years.

I can look into it myself at some point, but if anyone happens to already know then it might save me a couple of hours poking around! Thanks
User avatar
Acheron
Posts: 58
Joined: Tue Oct 07, 2025 1:11 pm

Nice to hear your story. Are you sure it's too early to break out the bubbly?

As a suggestion (though not sure if it's a good one) do you think it would be worth posting up a profit/turnover chart from the start of the live test? As a non-numbers guy I'm struggling to assess what the early losses in the first couple of months might mean for 'proving' the edge, given the spectacular run of late after many more 000s of bets.

Without the data and a t-test to hand I'm inclined to follow PW's approach shown here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-i3fSkT9LI
User avatar
B-Rex
Posts: 27
Joined: Fri Jan 01, 2016 9:07 pm

B-Rex wrote:
Mon May 18, 2026 1:27 pm
Maybe is just variance, but the big winning days almost always seem to be followed by bad days.
Sure enough, right on cue, today sucked! -£85
Acheron wrote:
Mon May 18, 2026 3:45 pm
Nice to hear your story. Are you sure it's too early to break out the bubbly?

As a suggestion (though not sure if it's a good one) do you think it would be worth posting up a profit/turnover chart from the start of the live test? As a non-numbers guy I'm struggling to assess what the early losses in the first couple of months might mean for 'proving' the edge, given the spectacular run of late after many more 000s of bets.

Without the data and a t-test to hand I'm inclined to follow PW's approach shown here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-i3fSkT9LI
Tbh i haven't had time to assess the live testing properly yet, beyond checking the balance trending upwards. Most of my time is spent on my full data set. I import the API data once per month, upload it to my app, then it exports the data with my added "special sauce" data, and add it to the 1 year collection so far.

A couple of things then:
  • The chart in the initial post shows the 1+ year data so far, and no reason to believe the real performance would yield a different line chart at these £1 stakes, if i had started live from the beginning
  • The image/table under it shows nearly £3 profit per £50 staked, so kind of already assessed the turnover, in that sense
I enjoyed the video, watched a few years back iirc, but i believe the video is essentially teaching the concept of variance, and the importance of having a large data set (as well as a few other things, like staying the course!) and I can only presume having a dataset that is significantly larger than the one used in the example from PW that I've hopefully crossed that barrier of reliability already. The only question mark that could challenge that, that i can think of, is that the average odds of bets taken is quite high (about 30 i think) for the Back bets anyway, which is where most of the profit comes from. If I had therefore ONLY the live results to go off, i would not trust it at all, because of that. But given the huge volume of data, it is now starting to becoming hard to doubt. The live result is just the cherry on the cake / proof of the pudding!

The poor run at start of the year (now dwarfed by april/may profits) can be explained 2-fold: until April I was using a more primitive version of the system that projected only about 30-40% of the one I am showing here. And secondly, there appears a noticeable downturn through winter. The system started very strong in march/april last year and seemingly done so again this year, putting me way over EV for the last 6 weeks. Let's see how it's going another month from now, after I have hopefully doubled stakes soon!
User avatar
B-Rex
Posts: 27
Joined: Fri Jan 01, 2016 9:07 pm

Also, I only recently realised how much non-UK / "Rest of World" racing there is, so started collecting data for all racing a couple of months ago, and applying a variation of my core system to those.

VERY early days on these, but showing reasons for optimism here too..
The black lines show the calendar months. First 2 are very short because i started end of December, and then had technical issues in January / lost most of Jan data. Going to be adding April soon

Looking at trying to find some lower variance / favs only type variations, but not finding much so far that comes close to the core system.
You do not have the required permissions to view the files attached to this post.
User avatar
Acheron
Posts: 58
Joined: Tue Oct 07, 2025 1:11 pm

Well if the nuts and bolts are the same and backfitting isn't an issue then it looks like a dead cert to me - hats off to you!

Let us know when you've reached a milestone that gets you celebrating :)
Post Reply

Return to “Sports betting strategies”