Can this advice help you gain more from your betting?
Paul has just turned 21 and likes a flutter at the weekends. He isn't silly with his betting but over time he loses what he has won and ends up a little frustrated.
His uncled Bernard is a full time pro gambler. Whilst this doesn't mean he has a number of lambourghinis sitting on the drive of a large home in the best area of town, he makes enough money not to have to 'work'.
In fact he lives a very normal life in a house that costs less than the average and drives a four year old Renault. Being a professional punter, doesn't mean being a millionaire, it means you have to work very hard just to stay afloat.
He told Paul from an early age that he is a very rare type of person. Unmarried, no children, all the time he needs to study everything in detail and a mature brain that keeps him from blowing his bank.
To be brief - it's not something that most of us could do - even if it sounds 'glamorous'.
Paul wanted some help, so he met up with his uncle one Sunday morning.
'How can I become a better punter like you?' he asked. 'I don't really think I could be a professional and I like my current work situation. I would just like to maybe make enough to pay the mortgage when I get my first house, or something like that.'
Bernard started talking. 'I’ll be straight with you Paul - aiming to pay a mortgage from betting while keeping a normal job is already walking a very fine line. Not impossible, but it’s closer to running a second business than having a hobby.
Most people who try, end up feeding the game rather than taking from it. So what matters isn’t knowing the basics, it’s avoiding the traps that quietly drain your edge.
The first thing I’d drill into you is this. Most races are designed to fool you. Not in some conspiracy way, just structurally. Handicaps especially are built to compress ability. If you’re looking at a 16 runner handicap thinking “I’ve found the winner", you’re already on shaky ground.
The edge comes from identifying when the market has mispriced uncertainty, not when you think you’ve found the winner. That’s a completely different mindset. You’re not trying to be right - you’re trying to be paid more than you should be when you are right.
Second, be very careful with narratives - especially the ones that feel logical. “Step up in trip will suit”, “better ground today”, “top trainer in form”. All of that is already baked into the price most of the time. The market is far sharper than people think, particularly in UK racing.
Where people go wrong is assuming they’ve spotted something clever when in reality they’ve just repeated a widely known angle. The money is rarely in the obvious story - it’s in the small detail the market has slightly underestimated.
Third, and this is one that separates long-term winners from everyone else - the odds matter just as much as making the selection. The same horse can be a brilliant bet at 6/1 and a terrible bet at 7/2. Most casual bettors don’t understand that the price is the bet, not the horse.
You should regularly find yourself backing horses that lose more often than they win, but still making money because the price was wrong. That is worth repeating or writing down Paul. You should regularly find yourself backing horses that lose more often than they win, but still making money because the price was wrong.
If you’re mostly backing short-priced horses because they “look solid”, you’re drifting into the lap of the bookmaer - and they always win that game.
Fourth, protect yourself from your own psychology. Your biggest enemy isn’t bad luck, it’s the urge to react.
After a losing run, people start forcing bets. After a big win, they start believing they’ve cracked it and both lead to poor decisions. You need a structure that removes emotion - whether that’s fixed staking, strict race selection, or walking away on certain days.
The pros don’t avoid losses - they avoid losing control.
Fifth, and this is the one almost nobody talks about properly - understand where your edge actually comes from. If you can’t clearly explain why you should win long-term, you won’t. “I’m good at reading races” is not an edge. That’s what everyone believes.
Real edges are specific and often quite narrow. It might be early-season 3-year-old handicaps, certain trainers first run after wind surgery, or mispriced front-runners at tracks like York where pace can dominate under the right conditions.
Until you find something repeatable, you’re just guessing with confidence - and one final thing, just so you stay grounded. Even if you do everything right, there will be long periods where it looks like you’re doing everything wrong. That’s the nature of this game.
Variance is brutal, and it doesn’t care how good you are. If your plan depends on smooth, steady monthly profits, reality will hit hard. The people who last are the ones who build in that chaos from the start, not the ones surprised by it.
If you treat betting like a side income that requires discipline, patience and a bit of humility, you’ve got a chance to make it work. If you treat it like a shortcut to easy money, it will quietly empty your account while convincing you that you were “just unlucky.”
Paul sat back for a moment and said, 'Can you explain a bit more about how getting a slightly better price can make a difference in the long term? Also can you give some positive warnings? I know that sounds a bit weird but what are some things I can do and not NOT DO, that will help me win more?'
'This is exactly the right question' said Bernard, 'Because this is where most people underestimate the game. Let’s start with a clean, real-world style example of price.
Imagine you back horses over a long period that should be priced at 4.0 (3/1), meaning they have a true 25% chance of winning. Now two punters. Punter A takes 4.0 Punter B consistently takes 5.0. Exactly the same horses selected via whatever means and the same strike rate. The only difference is the odds taken.
Let’s say they both place 1,000 bets. At a true 25% strike rate, they’ll win about 250 bets.
A (price 4.0): 250 wins × 4.0 = 1,000 return Total staked = 1,000 Profit = 0 He breaks even. He’s actually doing well - most people would lose!
B (price 5.0): 250 wins × 5.0 = 1,250 return Total staked = 1,000 Profit = +250
Same horses. Same skill. One makes nothing, the other makes serious money.
That’s the entire game in one example. And the key point - punter B isn’t “better at picking winners”. He’s better at refusing bad prices and waiting for value. That’s what most people never quite grasp.
Now the second part - what you called “positive warnings”. That’s actually a great way to frame it, because there are things that people can actively do to tilt the game in their favour.
Here are the ones I’ll pass on to you.
Specialise earlier than you think you should.
Most people spread themselves across every race, every code, every distance. That’s a mistake. The opportunities live in niches. It could be 7f handicaps, or sprint handicaps around at least one turn. It could be 3 mile plus chase races, all weather racing, Group 1 and 2 races or understanding and following certain trainers at certain times of year, or when they use certain jockeys.
When you narrow your focus, you start seeing patterns the wider market misses. That’s where confidence comes from - not guessing, but recognition.
Treat odds like a market, not a label.
A lot of people see odds as a reflection of chance. Professionals see them as a reflection of opinion. And opinion can be wrong. Your job is not to agree with the price, it’s to challenge it.
If you start thinking in terms of “this should be 6/1, they’re giving me 10/1”, you’re operating on a completely different level to someone just picking horses they like - and then backing that 6/1 chance at 4/1 just to get the bet on.
You have to make peace with backing losers.
This sounds counterintuitive, but it’s essential. If you’re doing this right, you will regularly back horses that finish nowhere. But over time, the prices you take will more than compensate. Most people sabotage themselves because they want to be right more often thatn wrong.
The better mindset is to aim to be profitable, even if that means being wrong most of the time.
Use the market as information, not instruction.
Late moves, strong support, drifters - they all tell a story. But they are not commands to follow. A drifting horse isn’t automatically a bad bet. In fact, sometimes the opposite. If your assessment says a horse should be shorter and the market drifts, you’ve just been handed a better price. The trick is knowing when to trust your view and when to step aside.
Understand that patience is a weapon.
There are days - plenty of them - where there is nothing worth backing. The best bettors I know are completely fine with that. They’re not trying to extract money from every race or every day. They’re waiting for the right opportunities. The more selective you are, the more those small edges start to matter. And here’s probably the most important “positive warning” I will leave you with.
There is opportunity in this game. The markets are strong, but they are not perfect. Mistakes happen every day - small ones, but consistent. The people who do well are the ones disciplined enough to only engage when those mistakes appear. The danger is not that it can’t be done. It’s that most people approach it in a way that guarantees they won’t.
So remember this: Don’t try to be right more often. Try to be paid more than you should be when you are right.
That shift in thinking alone will change everything for you.Enter your text here...
Follow on I took some of 'Uncle Bernards' advice myself the day after posting this blog and played around with some £2 stakes, to see how things would pan out and the upshot was quite similar to how Bernard had suggested it should be. More losers than winners but a decent profit overall. In fact two winners from 20 bets (I backed more than one horse in three races), was a healthier strike rate than I would have expected, but the odds of the winners certainly covered those losses and more. I also should have backed Classic in the last at Newbury and was close with a couple more including Hale End, second at 13/2. |
Brief explanation I was following the Inform Racing Rankings cards and the value scores in particular. The ranking cards combine over 35 race form criteria which we monitor and give weight to depending on the strength they have in finding winners. These weights are updated each month and the aim is that the ranking positions become more and more successful as more and more results are measured. We aslo show this value score which is a calculation against everything we combine and run against the betting forecast odds price with a minus score being better than a positive one. Mo Ghille Mar and Song Of The Clyde The first winner was Mo Ghille Mar at Wexford, Won 22/1 (I got 32.75 on Betfair). The second was Song Of The Clyde at Newbury, Won 18/1 (I got 26.9 on Betfair). Take the Mo Ghille Mar ranking card as an example. As you can see both Mo Ghille Mar and Dontdooddson were top 3 ranked runners and both had a good minus score for the value. Minus scores are better than positive scores in the value column - and I did back both of these horses. |
With hindsight and a lesson for future bets to be placed, I shouldn't have backed the top one as it was value at odds of 23, however I took odds of under 12 so I wasn't getting a value price at all. Mo Ghille Mar, however, was value at odds of 19 and I got over 32. Now I am not saying these are all horses to be backed and some I left out as I thought the odds were too large compared to the value odds against the betting forecast. One of those was Classic I mentioned earlier. Classic, who was second ranked and had the top speed rating, was shown as a small -1 value at odds of 7. He won with a Bsp of 19, although was only 10/1 with the bookies. This is where your gut feeling comes in and it doesn't always work in your favour. I felt that at odds of 19 or so it was too unfancied after having a betting forecast odds of just 7, or 6/1. Previously I had backed the Wexford winner at 32 when it had forescat odds of 19, so that was similar to Classic, although I don't think you can compare 19 out to 32 and 7 out to 19 in the same way perhaps? Mo Ghille Mar also had the top speed rating in the race, Dontdoodsson didn't - you just have to decide for yourself and go by your feeling on the race. Analysis As you can see below, the top few metrics - currently updated and shown each day on the Show Analysis tab - show that backing all value scores of less or equal 5 has a 20% ROI. The others in the top 3 are a handicap score of 17+ and the draw css score, both with good ROI% too. The table here has been sorted by ROI%. |
We calculate our own handicap score for each horse in a handicap race - currently not Irish races - and this score is out of 20.
The Draw CSS is another of our calculations regarding the draw in flat and all weather races and this shows that the top ranked horse going by our draw calcs, also has a decent return on investment.
You can read a full explanation and watch a video on the link below.
I hope that all gives you some food for thought and if you want to get involved with these new ranking cards yourself and are not a current subscriber, give us a go on the link below now.
