Successful and Disciplined Betting

Accurate records of every bet that you place, updated daily are an essential part of successful and disciplined betting and will be invaluable when it comes to finding out what type of bet and races you are most successful in.

Imagine looking back at a year’s records and finding that you were successful in over 75% of all bets placed in Maiden races or Nurseries but couldn’t even hit a 10% strike in Group races and Novice Chases.

How much better do you think you would do the following year by concentrating more on where you bet best?

Here are some more positives that come from keeping a betting record:

1. Betting records can help determine briefly, the current size of your betting bank and whether it is running at a profit or a loss.

2. Betting records will determine your personal performance statistics, such as your strike rate overall and in bet/race types, the average odds of your winners and so on.

3. Keeping records encourages self-discipline and helps discourage the odd silly bet and ensures that you stick to your plan.

4. Betting records allow you to keep a close eye on your progress and watch your betting bank grow from your initial betting bank to something much more substantial.

I suggest that you get yourself an A4 size squared note pad if you can and write the following headings across the top forming separate columns. The underlined headings below are ones I strongly recommend, the others are headings that may be useful too.

Date

Course

Meeting

Race Type (Maiden, Handicap, 3yo’s etc.)

Horse Name

Distance

Trainer

Jockey

Forecast Price

Bet Type

Total Stake

SP or price taken.

Won/Lost

Profit/Loss on the bet

Total bank after this bet.

You can of course add as many other headings as you wish as the more that you know about each bet that you place the better.

I would also suggest that you highlight every line that is a winning bet with a marker pen so that you can see where your best bets are placed at a glance.

Summary of disciplined betting

There are many ways that this idea will help you, not least with discipline but also you will be quite amazed at just how much money you are betting with.

If you bet online or over the phone using a debit or credit card it is very easy not to see the money you are using as real cold hard cash. Taking £20 from an account and losing it just like that doesn’t really mean that much sometimes, unlike when you physically go to the bookmakers and hand over the cash.

After a few months of keeping a record, you may be surprised to see the amount that you have actually lost and in many cases, this can be enough to decide that you really are betting too much and should cease for good or at least take time out from your betting.

Another way keeping records will help is it should stop you placing so many bets if you are strict with your record keeping.

One because you don’t want to be writing hundreds of bets each day or week and two, if you can start to identify where your best bets are placed you will instinctively stop betting where you are not so good.

Once you start to do this and see your Total Bank column steadily increasing, you should gain great confidence from your successes and start to become more professional in your approach and going back to betting on ‘anything just to have a bet’ will become a thing of the past.