I enthusiastically volunteered to review this service, given the results from November 1st 2022 until my review began on 18th April this year, at which point it had made 462 points profit at BOG and 350 points at BSP after 157 bets. The first thing I look at here is the staking, and most of these bets are recommended at 3, 4 or 5 points. I always want to know what the results look like at 1 point single staking, but even 70 points profit after 157 bets piques my interest.
Here’s the sales pitch:
This is so easy to do that even a novice punter could place these bets in just a few minutes. Set the bets then go about your normal daily business. It’s that simple! I have an excellent record to prove it and very soon you’ll be betting on virtual auto-pilot too
I can make YOU a winner!
There are five key factors that bring me success…
1. Discipline
2. Dedication
3. Mindset
4. Selectivity
5. Experience
I am selective and very profitable over all racing codes, National Hunt, Flat and the All Weather!
What Can My Triple Crown Racing Service Offer You?
– 11 years learning the ropes to become a better punter
– 10 years as a betting professional
– 21 years overall betting experience
– Bets sent by 10.30am every morning
– Win and each way bets
– A 56% winning strike rate
– A huge 76% return on investment
– £2,285 a month to £25 per point bets
– Profitable to BOG, Betfair SP and SP
– Business like approach
– Investment Plan to follow Turn £25 per point bets into £33,147 plus
– Full advice and support when you need it
I will give you everything you need to start making exceptional long-term profits from your betting!
Including my Ultimate Staking Plan that has turned £5,000 into £33,000 in just 5 months!”
Now of course my trial is our standard 3 months, and all tipping services can, and do, have their downsides. With average odds of 3.5, these shouldn’t be long downsides, but the mathematics says it will happen. However, if you look at the graph, it seems I managed to find the exact point not to join! The green line shows the results BEFORE my trial, the red is the three month trial in full. This does seem to happen to me quite often, and I blog from a punter’s point of view, so I’m sure many readers will be very familiar with these circumstances.
The service is easy enough to follow, and can be used for Betfair as well as BOG bookies. There are usually a bet a day, occasionally two, and these are mostly straight win bets, though we did have three each way bets, none of which showed a return. For me, the service started getting frustrating when two-year-olds were targeted, which resulted in a bit of a losing run. These are not races which I would bet on myself, given the lack of form..
The numbers
Bets: 71
Winners: 21
Losers: 49
Void: 1
Points staked: 262
Average odds:3.56
Strike rate: 30%
Profit/loss to recommended stakes: -51 points
Profit/loss to BSP: -16 points
Longest winning run: 3
Longest losing run: 7
ROI: -20%
To me this looks like a service which can recover. It’s never been long away from a win. And even though I’m failing it, that’s based on the three months of the trial. I wouldn’t fail it if I’d been on board from the start, but that’s the vagary of being a punter.
This heavily promoted service from the Bet Lucrative stable launched at the end of February. The Challenge was that they will try to win 1000 betting points within a year using their Value bets, which are their best performing, by including them in accumulator bets on a daily basis. Because the average price of the selections is high, if they do succeed in finding a few winners on the same day, chances are that it could go a long way towards the 1000 points, or even do it in one fell swoop.
Where do I start with this? Let’s start with the Value bets. The advice is that Value bets are this agency’s best performing service, so we should create our bank by betting on the Value selections until it has accrued to the desired bank of 500 points. Then we will use the bank to bet additionally on accumulator bets with the same selections, thereby using bookie profits to target the big wins (with average odds of around 13, you can see how this would work if successful).
The guarantee is, if you haven’t made your 1000 points profit within a year, your subscription to Value selections will continue at no further charge until you have. (It’s not clear whether that means at the odds advised, or at the odds achieved, and this is one of a few unclear aspects of this service, including the following point)
Those who signed up for The Challenge are presumably new to the Value selections, but the accumulators are advised from day one. So what happens if, during the course of building the 500 point bank, the acca is landed? Does the guarantee expire at that point?
By the way, how is that bank growing at this 3 month mark? Well, it’s minus 52 points at the prices I achieved, so that’s just 552 points to go. I did point out in my earlier blog on this service that the Value bets have shown long term profitability (again, this depends on odds achieved of course, and whilst I don’t doubt the integrity of the odds quoted, having followed the service for three months, I often failed to achieve advised odds [sometimes I did better], it would be good practice for them to name bookies where they have achieved the odds. I would then have been better able to monitor the odds and check the extra places which are sometimes included in the results, even though they aren’t mentioned in the advice).
But there are other questions which need answering. Firstly, the cost of the service for the year (let’s base it on this, as you get the 64% discount over the quarterly membership) is £197 GBP. Underneath this price it says RRP £564. Where does that recommended price come from? I mean, who has recommended it? Where is the transparency?
We are also left somewhat in the dark over the accumulator bets, when there are two selections in the same race. The advice is to take the selection at the higher odds (it doesn’t give any advice as to what you should do if both runners are the same price, and this did happen very early in the trial). Now I think this is crazy. How painful would it be if you would have had a patent up but for choosing the wrong horse where there are two selections in the same race? At the prices, these winners don’t come along too often, so when they do, you don’t want to miss them. So what I’ve done to address this in my results is I’ve divided the stakes in half where there are two selections in the same race. The weakness in this, of course, is that where there are winners you will only win half the payout, so you could just double your stakes on these occasions. As it turned out in the trial, I did win five which would not have won if I had followed the advice. There was only one which would have won by taking the higher odds runner. As there are no published results for the accas at this stage, I don’t know either if they will be published, or if they are, if they will claim the results where, against advice, the lower odds runner was a winner.
One more gripe about the accumulators, then I’ll get to the results of the trial. As the accas are based on each way doubles, patents, lucky 15s and lucky 31s, the outlay can be as high as 62 points plus the 10 points, because effectively we’re backing the singles twice; once for our basic singles tips, and then for the acca bets, except in the doubles. Personally I will leave the singles off the accas, so my Lucky 15 will be a Yankee, my Lucky 31 a Canadian, etc. We back the singles anyway. But my results will be recorded as the suggested bets (other than when we have two selections in the same race, see above).
THE RESULTS 28/2/23-31/5/23
Since the average odds of the Value bets is high (around 13 for the odds achieved in my trial), there are bound to be long losing runs. Indeed, as I pointed out in my earlier blog, this service went from 3rd March 2017 to 25th January 2018 with 735 bets and no increase in the bank. Just think about that for a moment. BUT, they always stayed within the bank, and eventually came back with a bang.So it’s not really much of a surprise that I ended up minus 52 points on the value bets (1 point each way).
Selections: 253
Winners: 23
Placed: 53
Lost: 177
Void: 9
Average odds winners/placed: 10.6
Average odds all selections: 13.1
Longest winning run: 3
Longest losing run: 17
Strike rate: 30%
Profit/loss: -52
ROI: -21%
Getting into the accumulators for The Challenge, the bank (500 points) was busted on 26th May, but 3 days later came storming back with a 76 point profit patent. Because of the high staking, these raced to 100 points down within the first seven betting days. There were a few moments of respite, most notably a 151 points profit on a Lucky 15 on 19th April where there were two winners and a place. The overall loss of 490 points during the trial would have been worse if I had not ignored the advice to only back the higher odds runner if there were more than one selection in a race, including 77 points on a patent on March 28th.
Overall, the outcome of this trial is pretty much what you would expect, once you can see what’s involved, and the high odds of the selections. The inducement of making 1000 points in a year and, if not, free access to selections afterwards until the target is reached, does sound enticing. Until you watch your bank sliding away rather rapidly.
It wouldn’t be a massive surprise to me if this challenge was successful at some time. After all, as recently as 29th May, two of the selections in a patent won, both at 8.0. If the 3rd one had won (it wasn’t close) it would have yielded 3418 points and job done. However, you need to have deep pockets and a hefty dollop of faith to stick with it. And of course, it may never happen. And the most you would lose on the access is the £197 annual membership, but if you add the cost of the staking, even at only £1/point, you would already be £741 down by now.
If you don’t mind a very high stakes lottery, this could be of interest. I’m required to award the service a pass/neutral/fail rating for the blog. That’s quite a tough call, because different levels of risk suit different bettors. I’m not the type of punter that this would appeal to being fairly risk averse, so I think the fairest outcome would be a neutral rating, but I would certainly like to see the service tidied up with the points I’ve raised in this blog.
1,000 points profit in a year is asking a lot, and when I got sight of the methodology it was no surprise that this involves accumulators. It was either that, or high points staking.
The premise is that you take a successful tipping service with a strong track record, and you use some of the profits from these to place on accumulators. The suggestion is that you should wait for the profits to arrive before embarking on the acca placements, so when the challenge is to accumulate 1000 points in the year AFTER the stated bank of 500 points is achieved, it isn’t clear whether the challenge began when people signed up for the service at the end of February, or if it begins when the profits of 500 points are in place. For our testing run, I’ve assumed we already have the profits, the suggestion is a 500 points bank and stakes at 1%. So my trial is based on 1 point stakes for both the individual bets and the accas. As the accas are based on each way doubles, patents, lucky 15s and lucky 31s, the outlay can be as high as 62 points plus the 10 points, because effectively we’re backing the singles twice; once for our basic singles tips, and then for the acca bets, except in the doubles. Personally I will leave the singles off the accas, so my Lucky 15 will be a Yankee, my Lucky 31 a Canadian, etc. We back the singles anyway. But my results will be recorded as the suggested bets (other than when we have two selections in the same race, see below).
This system is based on the Value bets from the Lucrative service. These are high odds bets that, according to the tipster, represent value (ie, the actual chances of a runner winning its race are better than that reflected by the odds offered). Obviously, the maths of this idea are correct; over a period of time, if you always manage to bet on something where the odds offered are bigger than the true chances of winning, you will come out in front. Value in the case of horse racing is obviously based on opinion (as opposed to the tossing of a coin, if you’re offered 51% on it landing on heads, you will win in the end, value is here based on fact). So, how do we know that a tipster’s opinion represents true value? Well, the results are the best indicator (but unlike fact, opinion means what happened in the past may not continue to happen in the future).
So, because the odds are high, there are obviously long losing runs (one of 18 last year without a placed horse), and the bank advised is based on this. So if you’re going to assign a 500 point bank to this service, you need to be prepared for a large chunk of that disappearing before you see an upturn. This is the reason the service advises you back the singles and only back the accas when you are well in front from the singles.
When these promotional emails go out, everything looks hunky dory and easy profit making; but in action the psychology is a lot harder, and most of us have a natural defence mechanism which is averse to watching our hard-earned going down the pan. There’s a free trial with this but it’s only 7 days, and that’s not going to test your psychology. So you have to ask yourself, if you have a 500 point bank, and that bank goes to 300 points down, would you continue with it? You know how it works: you pull out and the very next day there’s a 300 point acca winner!
I’ve been in this game for a long time, and worked with a lot of people, tipsters and bettors, and my view is that most people are not comfortable with this type of long losing run betting. But if you do have the long term mindset, it can be very lucrative.
Promoters will typically crow about best case scenarios, but for me, I always want to look at the worst case scenario of past results. In the case of Value tips, they went from 3rd March 2017 to 25th January 2018 with 735 bets and no increase in the bank. Just think about that for a moment. BUT, they always stayed within the bank, and eventually came back with a bang. However, at £37 a month subs you would have paid £370 in that time without moving forward. How many of would have persevered? And with The Challenge, which promises free access if it fails to make the aim of 1000 points in a year, there could be a feeling of gullibility about the subs already paid by then.
You probably didn’t come here to listen to a homily, and I know many of you are, like me, long enough in the tooth to know these things already. I will mention a couple of other things about this service which I see as somewhat problematic. When there is more than one runner in a race, we’re advised that where the acca is concerned, we should take the highest priced runner. To me, this is a bit random (I don’t know what that means other than the conventional sense, but my kids use it, so I thought I’d throw it in). For example, on day one of my trial, there were two in the same race, but they were exactly the same price. So just choose one? But more than this, how painful is it going to be that you pick the higher priced horse, and the lower priced horse wins? I can’t have that, so what I’m doing is splitting my stake, so in this case I placed two half point ew patents. That may or may not work out to be more profitable, but it’s the possibility of missing a winning bet which I struggle with.
The same is true for the minimum odds. We’re advised not to back a horse lower than minimum stated odds, because it therefore doesn’t represent value. I will disregard that advice. A winning horse is a winning horse: whether the sp is 7/1 or 8/1, I’ll still be happy. But if I left it off an otherwise winning acca, I would miss out on a big pay out. You do wonder, where a lower priced horse of two in the same race wins, or where one wins but is below minimum odds, how the results will be recorded. For example, on 9th March, Taskheer, a horse running at Lingfield, won his race. The price suggested by the service was 12, the minimum odds given for value was 9. I managed to get 7, the SP was 11 and the BSP 12.5. I took the 7, believing it was a steamer. Wrong decision, but at least I got a return. At the time of placing my bets, I would have left it off if I had followed the guidance. On March 21 there was a Lucky 15 where three of the four selections were placed. I achieved none of the minimum odds for these (I acknowledge I didn’t get in quickly enough and may have done better if I had been able to get on earlier) but I still made 10 points profit. On 25 March, there was a patent with two horses in the same race. The shorter odds horse won the race (Elvis Mail, Kelso 3.35). It should not have been in the acca if the recommendations had been followed. So it should be recorded as an 11 point losing patent, but I’d be surprised if it wasn’t mentioned as a winning patent. On 28 March, there would have been a winning double – except that there were two runners in the same race, and the winner was the lower odds of the two, and so if you followed the advice, it would have cost you 150 points. I wonder if this will be claimed on the official results!
This is a paid for service, and so transparent results should be assumed. Certainly it’s a service where subscribers’ results could vary significantly from official results. The trial continues.
This is one of the latest staking systems developed by Winningmore, AKA Steve Davidson and his coder Michael. We go back a long way (decades now!) and I always look at their projects with interest, and they have many. Importantly for me, this project, as with the majority they publish and sell, is usable on the exchanges. I no longer accept bookie-only gigs unless there is are realistic loopholes.
THE CLAIM
If you had 12 losing bets in a row, on 2-1 odds selections, would your bank be OK?
Some will say NO, others will say of course.
Using a 500 bank over 50 bets, winning only 15 and having 35 losses including 12 in a row, X Factor still made 56.5 points profit.
This is a Windows based staking software, with great staking and easy to use interface.
Originally designed for bets around 2-1 (3.00) originally for Football. However, this works well with Horses, Dogs, Sports and Casino and varied odds.
Using the Bank To a Solid and Full Effort.
With X Factor Staking, it looks at getting the best return with the least possible risk. Some methods will have you betting 1% of the bank, great, but you have a lot of money not working.
And why so little staking from the bank?
Because we try to preserve it from the inevitable losing streak, that we all know is coming – just not when. X Factor staking is designed to get the very best return from the bank and preserve it at the same time, from the losing streaks.
Let’s look at a little of the maths for the staking (we will not expose all the secrets here).
The X Factor Staking plan was devised with two purposes in mind:
1) To defeat the long losing run which is the stumbling block of many systems (Winter).
2) To enable higher stakes than were previously used to be placed to play up winners and winning runs (Summer) in the knowledge that the long losing run would not cause the system to fail.
In a way the theories of the plan can be likened to the old saying ‘Make hay while the sun shines but save for a rainy day’. There are many, many staking plans which are used with systems to boost profits or to turn level stakes losses into winnings.
Most are dangerous – things go well for a time and then the inevitable long losing run occurs to take any previously accrued profits and the operating bank and the system is dead, showing big losses.
Probably the most dangerous staking plan is the ‘doubling up’ system. Work it out for yourself – start with one point and double it up a further nine times. You will find that the tenth stake required will be 512 points and the total loss after the tenth consecutive loser would be 1023 points.
Simple progressive plans such as 1,2,3,4 etc. or 1-2-2-3-3 etc. are less dangerous, but a winner after losers may not be enough to cover previous losses, and a long losing run could still cause problems.
An important consideration in deciding which staking plan to use with your system is pattern of results combined with the average starting price odds (SP) the system produces.
For instance, do you get regular winners, but at short prices (maybe a ‘favourites’-based system) or do you get a smaller ratio of winners but at bigger prices or is it somewhere in between. For example, maybe you are looking for winners at say, around 10-1.
You will get some, but they will be few and far between and I can assure you long losing runs will be regular and VERY LONG.
Application of the ‘X Factor Staking Plan’
To illustrate how the ‘X Factor Staking’ rules apply, I will use the ‘Retrieve Staking Plan’ (explained in the manual within the software) but can I stress that the principles of the X Factor Staking rules can be applied to most staking plans.
I have used a fictitious set of 50 consecutive results. There are 15 winners and 35 losers, the average price used throughout is 2–1 (So this would probably be a ‘favourites’-based system)and there is a consecutive losing run of 12 between bets 34 and 45.
The sequence of 50 bets would show a level stake loss so I have not used a particularly favourable set of results.
Considering that the price of 2-1 (3.00) is fairly short, a consecutive losing run of twelve should not happen too often – if it does, the selection method is wrong and should be abandoned.
Remember also that any betting system should use an ‘operating bank’ – in my examples the bank is 500 points. Using the basic ‘Retrieve Staking Plan’ the whole bank is LOST after bet No. 45.
Whereas by using the ‘X Factor Staking’ rules, the system carries on successfully through to bet No. 50, the whole of the operating bank is intact and a profit of 56.5 points has been made- and this from a fairly poor set of results.
That is a 556 unit difference between a Retrieval staking plan and the X Factor.
I stress that in both cases the operating bank is exactly the same – 500 points. I am not asking you to use a higher bank to operate my plan.
In fairness to the creator (Johnny) and clients that purchase, I will not go into the actual staking details (you will see the complete manual in the software).
MY TRIAL
I ran a live test on this, with my own horse racing selections. I was picking mostly favourites, and tried to keep above even money odds, with a few exceptions. I backed 319 horses to win only on Betfair over a period of five months, so on average just over two bets every day.
BETS: 319 WINNERS: 138 LOSERS: 181
That’s a strike rate of 43%, not too shabby if I say so myself. With level staking, I would have made 26 points profit.
PROFIT: 157 POINTS
LONGEST LOSING RUN: 9 LONGEST WINNING RUN: 6
LARGEST STAKE: 29.5 POINTS
ROI: 8.1%
So, using this software, I made 131 points more than I would have made using level staking.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, the extra profit made using this staking plan is significant. I am risk averse by nature and, for me, the negative which would be jumping out of the page in my review, would be that largest stake of 29.5 points. That losing run of 9 set me back 63 points altogether, and in fact, that came immediately after the highest point of the trial, where I was 202 points in profit. But the staking never got to the ‘throwing in the towel’ stage, which is a common response from me when things aren’t going well, because the algorithm of the software doesn’t just make cumulative loss recovery to take you out of the game.
I would recommend this software, with the proviso that you need to take a long term cumulative view. It was a very gradual climb to those 157 points of profit, but a sure one.
There must be something to the Little Acorns laying system, because it’s been going for more than a decade (actually nearer two decades from invention), and you won’t find a negative review in any respected betting review site anywhere. Because the system lays favourites in horse races, when it loses – which it does regularly – the losses are easy enough to shrug off, knowing that a win won’t be too far away.
I bought this system a long time ago (probably more than a decade), and I stopped using it, so I need to explain why. Before I do so, though, I will explain what Little Acorns Gold is and how it differs from the original version.
With Little Acorns, you trawl through the races every day to look for potential lays, according to the formula in the manual, and if the odds are in the stated zone in the pre off-time market after it opens 10 minutes before the scheduled race time, you place the bet. With LA Gold, the difference is that the work is done for you and you receive an alert via a Telegram group on your mobile phone and/or email shortly before the market opens. Additionally, the system employs DES (Delayed Entry System) which you don’t get with the manual version. I’m not exactly sure what this is, and the manual doesn’t divulge too much about it, but it’s something to do with the stats which show when some odds on runners have won on any particular day, the later ones in the same odds range will be less likely to win. No, I don’t know either, but if it works, I don’t need to know!
So why did I stop using Little Acorns original? Two reasons. Firstly, although the daily time it took to find qualifying bets wasn’t significant, I coupled that with the speed of the reward and lost interest. LA Gold addresses that now that I don’t have to spend any time searching the markets; all I have to do is react to a few alerts a week and place the bets.
The other reason is that if you want to move to profitability in the shortest time, you need to use recovery staking, which is something I’ve always been averse to. In the original manual, the advised recovery sequence was the fibonnacci style sequence of 1-2-3-5-8-13-21-34 so if we had 8 losers in a row, that would be a total of 87 single stakes lost, a potential maximum of 87 points (this was changed later to include a double 1 at the start, so became 9 losers in a row). Of course, as we’re laying these runners at evens or shorter, it’s unlikely to be anywhere near 87 points loss, but I’m looking at how long it takes to make 87 points and my interest wanes. However, we all know that backing odds on selections is not the easy way to make an income from betting – in any sport. The actual results from Little Acorns demonstrate that the vast majority of months are winning months, and if you stick to the advice on bank and staking, there is not much to fear.
With LA Gold, the advised staking sequence is an 11-step fib sequence of 1-1-2-3-5-8-13-21-34-34-55. In 8 years of using the DES system, there was a single instance of a losing sequence, and even this event could be covered by the advised 140 points bank depending on the prices. The Little Acorns Gold alert service has slightly different filters to Little Acorns original and also includes Irish racing.
Both the original manual and the LA Gold manual go into great detail about staking and the various risk factors of each, so there is something to suit all types of bettors. It’s not imperative to use recovery staking, and there are other ways of ratcheting the profits, such as compounding, which can be used with or without recovery staking. Users can use level stake laying if they wish, it’s slower going but makes around 25-30pts per year that, when compounded over the years, can really build into nice monthly profits hence why they called it Little Acorns. Start small and build up.
So – if I hadn’t given up on this soon after purchase a decade ago, it would now be providing me with a very useful tax free second income, even if I had started with a tiny bank.
I have been following LA Gold since September, my longest fib step was to 21 (7 losing bets). There have been 155 lays, I did find that quite a lot of them were outside the qualifying odds range, but I acknowledge that I got to a lot of these late and missed the opportunity. This has yielded 16.5 points profit, which from a 120 point bank at 2% per point yielded £39 profit (note, the advised bank for this fib sequence is 140 points, had I employed that the profit would have been £46). However, I went through the exercise to see what would have happened if I had layed the runners outside the odds sequence (there were five from 1.15 to 1.49 and 37 from 2.02 to 2.91) and this would have yielded 24 points with no further risk, so £57 with my 120 point bank, or £67 to the advised 140 points bank.
It’s important to find the bank size and staking plan that you’re most comfortable with. LA Gold can be used for every bettor’s personality type. It’s a system which has longevity because it can’t be self defeating by successful users. There will always be plenty of liquidity available in the markets for favourites. So, yes, this does what it says on the tin, and I am happy to approve it.
There is currently a bonus offer of one month free of Little Acorns USA selections that has achieved these results since inception. These are also alerted to members in same way as LA GOLD selections:
Total Since launch: June +6.07pts July +1.34pts August +2.16pts September +2.31pts October -0.30pts (Loss) November +0.8pts December +3.75pts January +2.80pts February +5.50pts March (to 24th ) +5.70pts
