Inside Track
“Wins” means won or placed, even if there is a small nett loss once the place bet is settled.
Week 1: Bets 24, Wins 10, Profit -12.82
“Wins” means won or placed, even if there is a small nett loss once the place bet is settled.
Week 1: Bets 24, Wins 10, Profit -12.82
I am looking at a new horse racing tipster under the Betting Gods umbrella – Inside Track. This is something a little different: South African Racing! Niche right?! But with a posted £1, 500 profit in 3 months, it’s not a service we can ignore either!
A 100-point starting bank is advised.
Selections are delivered in three ways:
Email is delivered a few minutes after the first two, and as it is important to get on quickly to get the advised price, or close to it, email may not be the best way to follow the service.
Selections are published at 09:30 (London time) ± 1 hour; each selection contains data to identify the horse, the bet type (win or each way), the number of places and odds reduction where applicable, and Bookmakers. I suspect that you will need Odds Checker or similar to find the best price bets though.
Example:
Vaal 14:25; Trip to the States
0.75 pt Each Way @ 3.50 (Three Places @ ¼) Interbet, Betfred, World Sports Betting
While Betfair does have South African racing, this is for win-only markets and as this service delivers many each-way bets, Betfair is deemed unsuitable for this trial. I could not see South African racing on Betdaq but I might have looked at the wrong time. I have not investigated other exchanges. We all know the dangers of a bookmaker-only service so a cautious approach is advised, using as many different bookmakers as possible, and other anti-gubbing tactics.
I will record the bets using the advised price in the email and report using the CashMaster £10 per point standard.
August Update
SINGLES
A much better month with only 2 losing bets resulted in halving the deficit. I am hoping that this form continues.
Month 7: Bets 12, Wins 10, Profit 21.3, Betfair 22.2
Overall: Bets 90, Wins 52, Profit -21.8, Betfair -21.44
TRIXIES
Only 1 full loss, i.e. all 3 legs lost, but this was enough to wipe out the returns from the five partial wins, i.e. where only 2 of the 3 legs won. Remember that I record partial wins as wins even if they return a slight loss. Now that the winter football leagues are getting going this service has returned to two trixies per week.
Month 7: Bets 6, Wins 5, Profit -4.47
Overall: Bets 48, Wins 24, Profit -13.02
My thoughts turn to when to rule this trial off as we have been running for 7 months now. I was considering around the New Year but this will be close to the 12-month anniversary. So, assuming that the selections continue, I will run this for another 5 months and then draw this trial to a conclusion.
I’ve been following this service for a further year to see whether the system would continue to build profit. The last twelve months picked up a further 36.93 points profit; compared to 82.94 points profit for the first year. Over the full two-year period a profit of 119.87 points was acquired, averaging over 50 points per year which is respectable.
At the standard cash master £10 per point (£5 each way in this instant) this would give a decent profit of £1198.70 for an average of 30 minutes total activity per week. After two years of service costs (including VAT) of £237.60, that leaves a net profit of £961.10. This service remains approved.
Here are the important stats:
Starting Review Date: 11th August 2021
Current Review Date: 30th July 2023
Starting Bank: 200 pts
Minimum Bank: 159.14 pts (26th July 2022)
Maximum Bank: 324.71 pts (4th June 2023)
Number of Profitable Months: 11/24
Current Bank: 319.87 pts
Number of Bets: 1445
Number of winning Bets: 146
Strike Rate: 10.10 %
Profit/Loss: 119.87 pts
Return on Bank: 59.94 %
Time Taken to Place Bets and Check Results each week: 0-60 mins (depending on how many bets there are and how many to check from the previous week). This equates to about 30 mins on average. On some weeks there are no bets and on some weeks one could spend over an hour placing bets. The majors generally have more bets due to increased public interest.
Below is a graph showing the bank per week over the years in review
Notes:
Watch now to discover…
At the end of July 2023, marking Two Years And Five Months On, my bank stands at $584.46: a loss of $575.68 since the review started.
According to Michael Mac, the director of CTA, the conditions are now ripe for a new bull market. The on-chain metrics are in place, the market cycle picture is ready for the accumulation phase to end and the stock market is looking favourable. Black Rock, the world’s largest asset manager with US$8.59 trillion under management, apparently agrees. It has recently shown its confidence in the long-term prospects for Bitcoin by filing an application for a Bitcoin ETF (Exchange Traded Fund, see The Mini Glossary) with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
A Bitcoin spot ETF would be a huge deal. It would be a cost-efficient and regulated way for all pension funds, institutions and investors in the US to buy Bitcoin easily and safely through their trading accounts, or within their tax-protected structures like regulation pension/investment (ISA) funds.
In addition, there is growing speculation that an Ethereum ETF could be approved by the SEC as early as October 16th. Obviously, this would be a major milestone for the crypto industry, as it would make it easier for investors to gain exposure to Ethereum.
Furthermore, Paypal has just launched its own stablecoin, PYUSD. This is a big deal for two reasons. First, it shows that more financial institutions are taking crypto seriously. Second, it opens up the possibility for Paypal users to make payments with stablecoins.
Here are the latest stats and developments:
The Main Portfolio
Since my last update, the crypto market has remained in its accumulation phase, with a wee gain in my portfolio of $32.9. Two new coins have been added to the official portfolio and one advised for removal (cashing out).
Acquisition Cost: $1160.14 (Completed on February 11th, 2021)
Minimum Bank: $410.67 (Jan 1st, 2023)
Maximum Bank: $2197.55 (May 10th, 2021)
Number of Profitable Months: 14/29
Number of Crypto coins in the main portfolio: 14 (includes one stablecoin)
Current Bank: $584.46 (July 31st, 2023)
Profit/Loss Since Acquisition: -$575.68
Return on Bank since Acquisition: -49.62%
The graph below shows the daily value of the portfolio from March 1st, 2021 through July 31st, 2023:
We have been in an Accumulation Phase for about 390 days now (over a year!)
Airdrops
Five new airdrop-free tokens were reported. I qualified for one only; members of management qualified for all five as they have much bigger crypto investments.
There are also a total of 7 coins being staked that are associated with potential/acquired airdrops. Yearly rates for these coins are 2.6% to 48.3%. One coin, CRBRUS, was being staked but is now defunct. Total gains from my airdrop-associated staking are $10!
Staking
A total of five portfolio coins are currently being staked. The total profit to date from all my portfolio-staked coins is $27.7, equal to 4.7% of the current main portfolio value, $584.46. The annual interest rate on my portfolio-staked coins varies from 2.6% to 12.7%.
Short Term Trades (Buying and Selling the same crypto coin)
None reported.
In general, the best time to sign up for a crypto service is at or near the bottom of a bear market ( and during the accumulation phase) as this is the time when the coins are at their greatest value for long-term growth. So now is a good time. Here are the results of two additional portfolios that I have set up during the current accumulation phase. The first portfolio utilizes the three main CTA crypto coin holdings (Bitcoin, Ethereum and one other) and the second portfolio is the first plus two other CTA-recommended coins. They were set up using Dollar Cost Averaging (see The Mini Glossary) over a period of about 10 weeks. The graphs start at the date when the 10-week set-up periods were completed. The green lines are the highest reached values and the red lines are the lowest reached values. Both portfolios show significant gains even during the extant accumulation phase.
Three Coin Portfolio
Five Coin Portfolio
Note membership in CTA includes many introductory how-to guides. As well as primers on Crypto and Tax; Crypto Security; and Dollar Cost Averaging. In addition, there are spreadsheets to monitor portfolio performance, airdrops, and compounding.
You Can Sign Up Here For Full Membership
Important Addition: CTA has recently been offering a 5-Day Challenge for just seven quid (as Graham posted on an earlier occasion), where one can learn the basics of crypto trading in easily digestible chunks one day at a time. This includes setting up an account at an exchange, purchasing the core cryptos, understanding the crypto mindset, purchasing an altcoin, and how to stake coins. Currently, there is a waiting list for the next course. To join this waiting list, click here.
The next report will be delivered near the end of 2023.
Mini Glossary:
The Accumulation Phase typically happens before an uptrend. The Accumulation Phase is over when the market sentiment moves from a negative stance to a neutral one. During this phase, a lot of money is both entering and leaving the market at the same time.
Airdrops involve crypto projects sending free tokens en masse to their communities in a bid to encourage adoption.
Altcoin. If the entire cryptocurrency universe expanded from a single point, sort of like a big bang, that point of singularity would be Bitcoin, the first cryptocurrency. Ethereum introduced another region to the blockchain universe: one that allowed for innovations such as smart contracts and decentralized applications (dapps) to flourish. An altcoin is every cryptocurrency that’s not either Bitcoin or Ethereum.
A Bull run is defined as a period of time where the majority of investors are buying, demand outweighs supply, market confidence is at a high, and prices are rising,
Dollar-cost averaging is the practice of systematically investing equal amounts of money at regular intervals, regardless of the price of a security. Dollar-cost averaging can reduce the overall impact of price volatility and lower the average cost per share.
An Exchange-Traded Fund (ETF) is a type of pooled investment security that resembles a mutual fund but can be purchased or sold on a stock exchange like a regular stock.
NFT stands for “non-fungible token.” At a basic level, an NFT is a digital asset that links ownership to unique physical or digital items, such as works of art, real estate, music, or videos. Non-fungible more or less means that it’s unique and can’t be replaced with something else. For example, a bitcoin is fungible — trade one for another bitcoin, and you’ll have exactly the same thing. A one-of-a-kind trading card, however, is non-fungible. If you traded it for a different card, you’d have something completely different.
Spot Bitcoin ETF is an Exchange Traded Fund that tracks the price of Bitcoin directly.
Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies that attempt to peg their market value to some external reference like the U.S. dollar.
Staking cryptocurrencies is a process that involves committing your crypto assets to support a blockchain network and confirm transactions. Staking can be a great way to use your crypto to generate passive income especially because some cryptocurrencies offer high-interest rates for staking.
July Update
The summer break goes so quickly and the European winter leagues are starting again. This will give the tipster many more matches to find value in, but I am not a fan of jumping in with both feet at the start of the season; teams with new players and managers need time to settle and form also takes time to establish.
SINGLES
The average odds for this month are 1.60 so the 50% Strike Rate wasn’t enough to return a profit.
Month 6: Bets 12, Wins 6, Profit -12.6, Betfair -11.56
Overall: Bets 78, Wins 42, Profit -43.1, Betfair -43.64
TRIXIES
In the two wins, we won 2 of the 3 legs; so close!
Month 6: Bets 4, Wins 2, Profit -10.06
Overall: Bets 42, Wins 19, Profit -8.55
Join pro football bettor Adam Cheng for the Inside Man Live Q&A at 7PM on Tuesday 1st August to discover…
How ‘The World’s Best Football Bettor’ made £817,617 and 28p from football betting in the last 9 years – and bumper profits for his Inside Man members!
Plus, get an exclusive free tip on the night usually only available to paying members…
Reserve your free space on the live Q&A now.
Here’s some of Adam Cheng’s – ‘The World’s Best Football Bettor’ – greatest betting hits…
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.
It’s been a very busy few days over at The Value Machine and Kieran (the man who invented The Value Machine) has been getting a mountain of questions. He sent me the answer to those questions this afternoon and I thought I’d pass them on to you,
Here goes:
Q.Will it work if I only have Betfair?
A. Yes. If you run The Value Machine during the day and take advised price or near to it in the live Betfair markets, you will make decent profits in the long term.
One user made a profit of 370 points in the space of 4 months just betting at SBK at an ROI of 7.8%.
Additionally, if you focus on higher priced selections where the markets are not as efficient, you can make substantial profits at Betfair SP.
For, example, if you had backed every selection advised at a price of 20.0+ over the last 2 years you would have made a profit of more than 850 points at an ROI of 12% after commission!
Q. I’ve only got a few bookmakers accounts. Will I be able to make it pay?
A. Absolutely. Kieran tells me of a customer of The Value Machine who made more than £16,000 profit in 6 months just following the selections at Bet365!
It can be done with a very restricted number of bookmaker accounts!
Q. How many bets does The Value Machine find a day on average?
A. It depends very much on how often you run it and the settings you use.
You can easily customise it to find you just 2 or 3 bets a day at very short prices with a high win strike rate. Or you can leave all the settings loose and run The Value Machine multiple times a day to find very large numbers of selections and get your turnover right up.
Basically, you can set it up to fit your betting style exactly.
And don’t forget, whatever you do, you can get the selections delivered automatically via Telegram alert!
Q. When is the optimum time to run The Value Machine to get the best results?
A. Whenever you are free! The Value Machine will find value bets from around 6 in the morning through to half an hour before the last race.
Q. Will it win every day?
A. No – sadly, nothing does! If you are looking for something that wins every day in the betting world – you are destined to be disappointed.
It won’t win every week either (but it will most weeks!) However, looked at over the long term, these type of value selections will always make a profit.
Now, I don’t want to scare anybody but…
Kieran is monitoring the user numbers carefully to ensure that the system can cope and that he himself can cope with the level of customer service required.
It’s getting close to the optimum number of users now and on current projections Kieran won’t be able to keep this offer open any later than this weekend.
He may even have to close it sooner than that.
If you have any interest at all in trying this out, I’m afraid you will need to be quick.
Issue 104 of On Course Profits magazine has been published to 21,900 registered subscribers.
This month’s issue includes…
That’s just the beginning all in all there are 60 pages of systems and research that will help you find more winners.
If you’re not yet subscribed click here to download issue 104 for free:
If you’ve been following along with the goings on over at Make Your Betting Pay this week, you’ll be well aware that my colleague, Kieran Ward, is releasing some subscriber spaces on his game changing Value Machine software.
So what is The Value Machine?
The Value Machine is web based software that enables anybody, regardless of experience, to identify value priced horse racing selections at the click of a button.
The Value Machine has had a group of loyal subscribers since it was first made available all the way back in 2016. Since that time, The Value machine has been tweaked, refined, improved and upgraded on several occasions.
Here is the overall performance from backing every single selection identified since he added telegram alerts in July 2021 (which made it a lot easier to track a benchmark performance):
Bets: 62,587
Wins: 10,001
Profit/Loss: +6220 points
Profit on Turnover: 9.94%
If you had backed these selections to just £10 win stakes since July 2021, you would have made an astounding profit of £62,200!
That’s an average of more than £2591.67 profit every month. To £10 Stakes.
There are very few if any methods out there that can come close to those figures.
Best of all, Kieran has put together an incredible deal to ensure that it will be affordable for everybody to give the software a two week test drive.
Plus it comes with a 30 day no quibble money back guarantee!
Systematic Betting (Final)
I have been reviewing Systematic Betting, a horse racing tipping service from the Betting Gods stable.
Usual setup, after you subscribe you receive an email with the day’s selections. You simply place these as advised on the platform of your choice.
I started the trial on the 14th of February and at that time Ellie provided just 1 selection per day. I knew that it was going to take a few months to grab enough relevant data on which to base a conclusion. Just my luck though, looking at the Month-by-Month Breakdown from the Betting Gods website, I joined just as the skids went on and poor Ellie suffered one heck of a drawdown.
The results that I recorded follow this drawdown period.
There has been a big leap up in profit due to an 80/1 winner (140 to BSP): 24-Jun 15:40 Ascot, Khaadem each-way (4 places @ 1/5).
I don’t have a problem with a bet like this as Ellie obviously works hard to provide her selections and deserves a decent payout from time to time. The other thing to note from the charts above is that Ellie had managed to put the brakes on and the service appeared to hit a floor at around -70 points from mid-May until towards the end of June.
To advised (Bookmaker) prices the service ended 23 points down; this is £-230 to the CashMaster standard £10 per point. However, Betfair ended up 7.11 points or £71 even after 2% commission has been deducted. I don’t include the BOG offer in my consideration on a service as it is a perk and not all Bookmakers offer it, however, I do track it and BOG was -0.07 points down.
To be honest, at 70 points down I was considering failing this service. However, the last 6 weeks have given me hope that Ellie can turn this around. I also have to be aware that I did start at exactly the wrong time; had I joined 9 months ago I’m sure I would have a completely different view of this service. With That in mind I am going to rate this service as Neutral but with some confidence that good results are on the way.
You can get Systematic Betting here.
With 306 bets but, more importantly, 2 months and 233 bets since the volume of selections increased I feel that I can bring this trial to a close. Summary to follow.
A great month that has turned things around for this service. This is all due to an 80/1 winner (140 on Betfair). Some folks would say the tipster got lucky, but they put in a lot of hard work and deserve results like this from time to time.
Month 5: Bets 43, Wins 18, Profit 42.35, Betfair 69.35
Overall: Bets 306, Wins 105, Profit -22.92, Betfair 7.11
Another month ends a month which has been mainly focused on the summer leagues.
Singles are not showing any signs of improvement, but hopefully, once the major European leagues get into full flow this will change.
3 winning Trixies have brought this side of the service into a small profit. OK, one of those winning Trixies was for a loss of 0.64 points, but I treat anything less than a full loss as a win.
With only 66 singles and 38 Trixies, I need to run this trial for much longer to collect enough data on which I can form a conclusion. We may be looking at another 4 to 5 months here.
SINGLES
Month 5: Bets 15, Wins 8, Profit -9.3, Betfair -9.32
Overall: Bets 66, Wins 36, Profit -30.5, Betfair -32.08
TRIXIES
Month 5: Bets 5, Wins 3, Profit 10.94
Overall: Bets 38, Wins 17, Profit 1.51
With Wimbledon just around the corner, it is the ideal time to get into tennis trading.
Whether you have tried trading tennis before or not, Tennis Profits is suitable for all levels. It has everything you need to get started as a beginner, with full support from tennis trading expert Paul Shires.
If you are already at a more advanced level, you will find the Player Stats and Live Stats tool indispensable to your trade selection.
As Paul explains, the Live Stats tool features “a Match Situation Stats pop-up that displays stats relevant to the current match situation.”
“Tie break coming up? It shows the players tie break record in the last year.”
“The first set’s just finished? The pop-up will show how likely the set winner is to take the match in straight sets.”
“It shows how often the set loser gets the first break in set 2 and many more.”
Joining Tennis Profits now gets you two months for the price of one!
Get full access to:
There is plenty of profit to be made from trading tennis and Tennis Profits is the ultimate service to help you on your way.
I’ve just heard that Kieran Ward over at Make Your Betting Pay is releasing a completely free manual of profitable angles for following Jump Jockeys on the Summer Jumps from June to September.
Over the last 4 years backing all of the selection thrown up by these angles would have seen you profit to the tune of £18,471 to £20 stakes at Betfair SP.
That’s quite the edge!
Grab your free copy here before he changes his mind!
They’ve averaged 3 or 4 bets per day June to September in that time and the selections take just a couple of minutes to find each morning.
Kieran has released similar manuals before and sold them for £57. Even if the angles perform a quarter as well going forward, that would be an absolute snip.
When I began reviewing CWK an advised bank of 1000 pts was recommended. So I invested $1000 into the venture. This amount proved sufficient to purchase all the initial coins that were within the advised price range with some spare $ cash. However as the crypto market entered a bear phase, some unbought coins fell within the purchase range and the original $1000 was insufficient to purchase all of them. Furthermore, additional coins continue to be recommended outside the main coin portfolio – in fact, 23 so far! I have invested $10 each on these additional coins.
Since the last update, two of the additional coins were partly sold for profit as advised by the service.
In order to cover the whole portfolio and future coins, I’ve assumed a starting bank of 2000 pts (=$2000), and the results are back-fitted to this.
Acquisition Cost and Starting Bank for the Review: $2000 (September 25th, 2021)
Minimum Bank: $927.35 (January 2nd, 2023)
Maximum Bank: $2701.81 (November 28th, 2021)
Number of Profitable Months: 7/20
Number of Losing Months: 13/20
Number of different crypto coins in the portfolio: 38
Coins currently lost due to the collapse of the FTX exchange: 5
Current Bank: $1052.22 (June 1st, 2023)
Profit/Loss: -$947.78
Return on Bank: -47.4%
Return on Invested Money to date: -60.0%
Unused cash: $420
The graph below shows the daily value of my portfolio from September 25th, 2021 through June 1st, 2023.
It’s quite clear from the graph, that the CWK portfolio has performed poorly during this review. It is primarily a long-term service (at least at present) that is most likely to raise its value during the next bull run, that is why I am continuing to monitor it.
In general, the best time to sign up for a crypto service is at or near the bottom of a bear market as this is the time when the coins are at their greatest value for long-term growth. We are still in an Accumulation Phase (following the last Bear Phase) at present.
Currently, you can snag quarterly membership at £199.97 or yearly membership at £599.97.
The next update will be in 3-4 months.
A busted bank in the search for a jackpot
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.
Betting Mastermind is a football betting service provided by Stuart who I have actually known in the betting space for over a decade.
You get an email each morning with the tips for the day and you simply place a 1 point level stake on each selection and get on with your day.
He now provides tips in four specific football markets:
Back the Draw
Back the Home Win
Back the Away Win
Back Over 0.5 First Half Goals
Plus they are testing the Under 2.5 market.
The service costs £39.99 per month.
There is also an additional option of completely automating this service with a betting bot, namely BF Bot Manager. There is no extra charge for this from Stuart although of course you’ll need your own subscription to BF Bot Manager (and a VPS if you want it all running in the cloud). Since I do already run BF Bot Manager for other strategies I chose to use this option as it made this trial effortless. The bot automatically downloads the selections each day and bets on them so all I have to do is check to see how they are doing once in a while.
As usual, I bet at the CashMaster standard of £10 level stakes, betting on Betfair. I ran this since 21st December 2022 and here are my final results:
It’s worth noting that Stuart abandoned the Lay the Draw strategy in March and introduced the Under 2.5 Strategy under test a little later.
So the final results are as follows:
All five strategies: -£344.28
Without Lay the Draw and Under 2.5: £162.08
Without Lay the Draw: £67.71
Even if I had been running this trial without the Lay the Draw or the Under 2.5 strategy it would have made a profit of £162.08 after five and a half months which wouldn’t have covered the subscription, and especially not if using the betting bot and the VPS.
As such I did use all strategies and lost £344 and either way this one has to go down as a fail.