Double Dutch is an Excel spreadsheet costing £34.97 and marketed by Steve Davidson. I suspect that the spreadsheet utilises macros, so I think that Excel is mandatory, but this does sell quite cheaply on shopping sites such as EBay or you could use the online version.

For a market, either a horse race or a football match or whatever sport you want to use this for, you enter the odds of the various possible results. If the Dutch of these results is viable, the spreadsheet calculates your stakes using one of two stake pools. On a busy Saturday, this can take a while to enter all the required data. I only used prices on Betfair, and placed bets there with a 2% reduction for commission.

I looked at Horse Racing; I chose UK only and selected the non All Weather meeting that had the first race of the day, and the meeting that had the final race of the day. I looked for 4 or so bets. The five weeks that I used to evaluate the spreadsheet, horse racing finished £16.37 up. Perhaps better race selection: analyse all today’s races, include Ireland, include Australia perhaps. I also used the odds at 10.00 am (ish) which had the benefit of stable prices, however the odds at this time seldom reflect the true market. However, taking prices closer to race start has the problem of fast moving prices, especially on horses at the top of the market.

I also looked at Football, looking at English Championship, Spain, Italy and France where the games were likely to have few goals. Whilst I made £16.12 I do feel that there are better ways to find matches to bet on. Here too I used early morning prices, where prices closer to kick-off may have better represented the true market.

I feel it is important to mention that you are using a collated view of the market as defined by other users, you are using the odds so that reflects the view on how likely a 0-0 is or a 3-3 or that horse “A” will win.

In short, there are several ways that my selection process could have been improved.

The spreadsheet works, but I got frustrated when, because of the way the two ditching pools are balanced, I correctly selected the winner and still had a losing bet.

To keep the stakes manageable, I reset after 7 rounds on any one leg, I also reset if the overall profit was 10% of bank or more.

I can see that with decent bet selection, this could be a handy little tool. On that basis I am happy to approve.

You can get Double Dutch here