Prize Lays

If were a Spaghetti Western it would have to be ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’.  Bags I’m Clint and the Mutt wants to be Lee Van Cleef.  Argue amongst yourselves for who’s going to be Eli Wallach.  So will we get ‘A fistful of dollars’ or even just ‘A few dollars more’?

Let’s start with ‘The Good’.  is obviously a laying system, (the clue’s in the title folks.!!!) and let’s face it there’s a lot of them about these days, so what makes this different and more importantly, what makes it good?  19 months worth of results are provided with the system claiming £9,467 for 2007 (June to Dec) and £18,616 for 2008 (Jan to end Nov) to £100 level stakes, giving a strike rate averaging 86.83% for 2008 and 17 winning months out of 19 overall.  Backtesting for confirmation was not feasible.

The author has put a lot of thought and logic into this system which ticks a lot of boxes around here (the Mutt is nodding sagely at this point), because there’re too many systems around which are worked out on the back of a fag packet in my view.  It covers both UK & Irish racing, which is great as this gives us the opportunity for more selections and given the oft times chaos and massive fields of Irish racing, good opportunities for losing lays.  The rules of the system are clear with little room for misinterpretation, so you’ll soon get the hang of it without having to constantly refer to your crib sheet.  Of course something this well thought out means that it’s not going to be simple and requires a bit of work on the part of you the punter.  It’ll take you between 45 minutes to an hour each day to find the selections.  No worries though, because you can do this the night before if you’re tight for time over the cornflakes.

Now we get to ‘The Ugly’, (‘The Bad’ comes later).  You have to use the Racing Post!!!  Not a problem a month ago, but a real pain now they’ve changed it all.  The RP site is laboriously slow even on the fastest PC as you navigate through each race and they are currently on occasion placing banners over bits of information that you need to view.  There are ways around this though if you are familiar with RP, but it does slow the process up.  We recommend changing your browser to Firefox which speeds up access and scrolling considerably.

Finally, to ‘The Bad’.  You need to glean certain information using differing criteria from the RP and it’s easy to make a mistake here if you’re not fully concentrating.  The Racing Post has gone through several changes over the last month which forced the author to make certain changes to the way that the qualifiers were calculated.  This had involved having to run a quick calculation using a calculator or even just your brain if you’re a real show-off, but it was another area where mistakes could be made.  More recent changes to the RP have allowed the author to revert back to the original method of calculation, which doesn’t require a calculator and makes the process much simpler and faster to work out.  We are assured that, as this was the original method of calculation, the published results reflect the true method of selection.  I shall be monitoring this for a while.  You are initially given access to a phone line for 3, yes 3 months, where you can check your selections against the authors, or to save yourself the trouble of working it out for yourself if time is an issue or ‘bone’ (sorry Mutt) idle.  I would recommend that you take advantage of this in the early days as a checking mechanism while you get used to the methodology.  I like authors that offer this in the first few weeks.  Double checking your selections is also a good discipline to employ because of the possibility of mistakes.

During the background trial the system gave anything up to 6 selections each day, although you may get more on Bank Holidays and Saturdays.  To run the OBE month long trial we’ll be using £10 level stakes and assuming a BF Commission of 5% from a bank of £1,000.  That may seem a little over the top, but the LLR has been 5 and as the BF odds ceiling is 8.00, (overall average losing bets price was actually 5.45) theoretically you could lose £350 of your bank in the unlikely event of  you being  unlucky enough to hit 5 losers at max liability, so let’s play it safe.

I like the system and the Mutt gave it 4 out of 5 bonios.  It would have scored a 5/5 if it weren’t for the risk of not selecting the correct criteria or getting your sums wrong if your brain isn’t quite in gear on the day, but to be fair that would be down to you, not the author or the validity of the system.  So light up a cheroot, squint into the sun and strike up that Sergio Leone music and let’s get this party started.