Another one bites the dust - well mostly

Hey All,

Don't you just hate it when you come up with a new system, do a little testing on paper (well in a spreadsheet) and the results look great - the excitement builds as you prepare to give it a go and then...

It flops :(

System was a very simple one - laying the 3rd favourite on Betfair. I've seen plenty of figures that tell me that of the top 5 favourites the 3rd one makes the biggest loss so I figured there is money to be made laying them - especially if you add a little loss recovery to the mix. Of course doing this is time consuming and a bit boring but seeing as bots don't get bored I figured that was the way to go. I downloaded a bot on a 5 day free trial and set it to work.

As a test I ran it on the UK greyhounds and after day, well night, one it had made a profit and everything was looking good - well until I realised I'd stuffed up the settings and rather than try and recover 100% of the loss over 5 bets, which I thought meant 20% of the loss at a time, it reocovered 100% of the loss 5 times!!! So I woke up to find the bot had made over $100 profit when I was hoping for a steady $30.

Either way, once more I thought I was on a winner - just had to rejig the bot and all would be fine. I took the afternoon off work, there wasn't much going on anyway as the systems were down, and ran the bot again but this time on the Aussie racing - worked a treat, the bank cracked $400 and I was away. This was all too easy, I was dreaming of retiring and all was good.

And then it happened, I ran the bot on the UK greyhounds again and woke up to find my max loss reached and half the bank gone :( - I was definitely too greedy there but my confidence was up. Anyways a run of losers had done major damage to my bank. I still had money left and figured it could turn around, my paper testing had been on Saturday gallops and that's what we were up to - the money would be rolling in again real soon - but no, a run of losers again and the bank was suddenly halved once more. Reset, start again with half the bank and once again - GONE. So so frustrating. You would hit a double figure run of results and then wipe it out with 3 out of 5 stuff ups.

So, the system has bitten the dust - well like I said mostly, I have the bot for another 24 hours or so, I'm hoping to crank it up one last time for small stakes and see if it can pay for itself. If not, then the system will be dead and buried.

Punting can be so painful at times

Poker on the otherhand, well actually - it can be ultra frustrating as well but still worth a crack. So this time tomorrow I'll be playing in the World Blogger Championships on Pokerstars. There are a week of lead ups to a main event on the 31st (1st of Feb our time) - unfortunately they are all on this time of day so I'll miss Wednesday, Thursday and Friday while I'm at work but hopefully I can make the most of the others and crack a prize or two. Got to love Australia Day and the taking an extra day off to make it a 4 day weekend :)

If you got a blog - why not have a crack.

Ok, better get going - got some things to do

Have a great day