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** JACKPOT SYNDICATE BETTING PERCENTAGE STRATEGY EXPLAINED **
A good maths lesson.
My brain would go into meltdown if I tried to understand that.
It's a good thing you are at the helm.
Comments
I have explained briefly in previous posts about the strategy we are adopting as a syndicate.
It primarily works on covering at least 60% of the betting market in each race.
Well, it's OK me saying that, but what does that actually mean? I hope to explain here:
When bookmakers offer odds on horses they apply what is called a betting percentage, which is usually about 20%. So what does this mean?
Simply stated it means if they lay each horse proportionally to it's price for every £100 they take, they make £20 profit, and that is "utopia" for them.
The odds we go by in out spreadsheets are the best odds available by the leading bookmakers and usual have a "best book" percentage of about 110%, meaning you can get that percentage down to 10% if you shop around.
Ok, lets assume for now that the "best book" percentage is 100%. (It's not, but we'll assume that for this purpose)
So what does that mean? Well that is fairly straight forward, put simply, it means the following:
An even money chance has a 50% chance of winning, a 3/1 chance a 25% chance of winning and a 9/1 chance a 10% chance of winning etc.
Slightly more complex, but a 7/4 shot would have a 36.36% chance of winning.
The formula for calculating the "chance of winning according to the odds" is as follows:
If the odds are X to Y, the chance of it winning is Y / (X+Y)
So for a 2/1 shot X = 2 and Y = 1. therefore it has a 1/(2+1) = a 1 in 3 chance, or 33.33%.
Lets say we have an odds on favourite at 4/7, following the same formula, X = 4 and Y = 7, the chance of winning is:
7/(4+7) = 7/11 = 63.64%
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OK with the above? Well we know the "best book" average is about 110% not 100%, so we need to take 10% off of the percentages quoted previously.
This, for example would mean in reality an Even Money shot has a 45% chance of winning, not 50%, hence why bookmakers make a profit.
All clear?
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So my aim is to cover approximately 2/3rds of the betting market in each race, how this is done depends on the race card configuration. Let me give you a couple of examples:
Lets say in Leg1 we have three horses in our perm who's odds are, Evs, 4/1 and 9/1 respectively, how much of the betting market have we covered with these selections? Using the fore mention formulas it would be as follows:
50% + 20% +10 % = 80%
We then need to take off 10% (The betting percentage), so the figure is 72%, which is > 70% so I am happy.
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Lets say in Leg2, we have our "banker" which is a 1/2 shot.
With this horse alone we cover 66.6%, minus 10% = 60% of the betting market, so not ideal, but close enough.
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Let say Leg3 is an open handicap, and we have six selections at the following prices:
4/1, 6/1, 9/1, 10/1 12/1, 16/1
Our coverage would equal approx (20%+14%+10%+9%+8%+6%) = 67% minus 10% = 60%
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If the remover's do their jobs well, then theoretically our chances will be slightly better than those stated above.
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Anyhow, lets say that we get 66.66% coverage in each race, from a purely statistical perspective, this means the following.
Our chance of winning is 66.66% to the power of 6. Or 2/3rds to the power of 6 = 8.78%
So if we achieve the above, over time, we should win approx. 1 in 12 times.
It's a bit like rolling a dice, if it is a 1,2,3 or 4, you win that leg.
If it is a 5 or 6 you lose.
We are attempting to roll the dice six times without getting a 5 or a 6.
My belief is that "on average" our return will be greater than 12 times our stake.
I hope this helps people to understand the strategy.
Cheers,
G
If we can cover as much as 70% of the betting market in each leg, it is like trying to get KK to hold against AK six times.
Rarely you will win 3 or less times, mostly you'll win 4 out of 6 , sometimes 5 and occasionally six. (1 in 8.5 times approx.)
If you do win six on the bounce, you'd have a pretty big stack.
That is in effect, what we are trying to do. :=)
I just used 8/1 shots as an example, as it made the maths easy as they are 10% of the betting market.
What I am saying is that if the removers can successfully remove an average of 10% in each leg, whether it is a 16/1 shot in one and a 4/1 shot in another, that would really help our chances. The 8/1 per leg example was just to keep the maths easy for explanations sake.
Cheers,
G
Lets say that 2/3rds of the market is covered in each leg, then in addition to that, the following odds horses were successfully removed.
4/1, 12/1, 9/1, 8/1, 5/1, 16/1
Then using the previous formulas, our chance of success becomes
0.866 * 0.736 * 0.756 * 0.766 * 0.816 * 0.719 = 21.66%
The 21.66 percent is dependant on all the removers horses losing.
I just didn't want to baffle people with science, so previously used 8/1 shots as examples for each leg. Also in reality we would potentially be removing more than one horse in each leg. For example removing one 4/1 shot gets us the same betting percentage as removing two 9/1 shots, and visa versa. Both scenarios representing 20% * 0.9 = 18% of the betting market.
Also following on from, and in agreement with your comment, if we only did favourites and second favourites, the dividend would likely be low, which is why we do a wide perm, to give us a chance of a big dividend and/or potentially being the only winners.
Cheers,
G
Funnily enough when I have got the Jackpot up in the past, I got it for the full £1.00 anyway as I had a NR in the race that the favourite won, so it's still possible to "double up"
Lets say we were lucky enough to be the only winners and we had a non-runner when the favourite won, we'd have it for £2 but we'd still only receive the same amount as if we had it for £1.
It would be gutting to not get it because we reduced the perm size so we could do it for £1 lines. One of the main reasons we are targeting the Jackpot and not the SCOOP6 is because it is 50p lines and we can hopefully cover 60%+ of the betting market in each leg without the cost being prohibitive.
That's my thoughts anyway.
Maybe if we get some decent cashes we can consider it at a later time, but at the moment, my choice is bigger perm at 50p.
Cheers,
G