The Cambridge Target System

The Cambridge Target System arrived on the market this week with the grand claim of being “the most profitable system ever published” and boasting average monthly profits of £17,000, with £193,000 generated in the last 11 months alone using stakes of just £33, £50 and £100, which is amazing if it’s all true!

When the 50 page system guide landed on my doorstep yesterday morning I was instantly impressed with both the quality of the publication and also with the detailed research the author has put into it. Okay, so 30 pages of those 50 are made up of past results, but the other 20 do an excellent job of explaining the strategy and after reading it two or three times I was left with the feeling that the author could be on to something.

If you’ve ever purchased a system and skimmed past all bar one page because it’s a lot of baloney, thinking “oh well, as long as the system works I’ll be happy”, you’ll be in for a pleasant surprise with The Cambridge Target System. If I’d put this one together I’d be feeling rather pleased with myself right now, because the author has gone into great detail about the system and everything in the manual is relevant, interesting and should definitely be read.

It starts by describing the basic selection process. I’m saying “basic”, but in truth you should read this a few times and even paper-trade your first day, because if it’s a busy day’s racing you really need to stay on top of your game, so you should make an effort to fully understand it all before you put your money down. Within an hour or two it was second nature for me, but I’m used to operating quickly on live markets and if this is new to you it might take a couple of days to find your feet. I wouldn’t let that put you off – I’m just stressing the point that you need to be on the ball for this, so make sure you read it a few times to be sure you understand it properly.

The next section talks about setting yourself targets and maximizing your profits. The basic selection method alone generated 1200 points profit in the 11 month period, but the author has gone to great lengths to research the past results and come up with a strategy that cuts down on the amount of work involved and then improves the profits by a further 700 points. This isn’t some weird or wacky staking system – it’s more of a commonsense approach to betting that could easily be applied to anything else you do. I liked the logic behind this too.

The next few sections provide you with an odds comparison table, which when you understand the system properly is probably all you’ll need open to operate it, a “course information” section that will help you when you’re working to the targets he recommends, a race card template that will be a big help to you if you’re new to operating on live markets, and finally a “race sheet” that enables you to track your day’s betting in the same way the author does.

As you’ve probably gathered by now, this isn’t a system that would allow you to pick your horses the night before and leave them to run. You do need to be at your PC and watching what’s going on in the market before the off, but here’s where it gets interesting….

The author has gone to great pains to explain that you DON’T need to be at your PC all day, or even every day, if you don’t have the time (and let’s face it, most of us don’t). The selection process works just as well in the evening as it does in the afternoon, it works every day of the week, and even if you only had an hour or two to dip in one day you could still use it and profit. Obviously the more time you have to dedicate to it, the more money you’ll make, but with so much racing on these days, even those of us with hectic lives should be able to use it okay.

With that in mind, I need to explain that I don’t have time to follow it for 8 hours a day at the moment, so for the purposes of the system test I’m going to dedicate as much time as possible, but some days I’ll be able to do more than others. I won’t be able to do Sundays at all and I’m going on holiday for a week on the 7th of June, so it’s going to be a shorter test than normal.

The author doesn’t mention a recommended bank in the manual, but I’ve set aside £1000 and I’m planning to split it into £25 units and see where it takes us. Whether 40 points is large enough I honestly don’t know, but from what I’ve seen I think that’s reasonable enough.

So, will The Cambridge Target System really turn out to be “the most profitable system ever published”? I guess it’s time to suck it and see….

You can view the results and our conclusion of The Cambridge Target System below…

Results

Conclusion

That’s us come to the end of my trial of The Cambridge Target System and I have to say that the last couple of weeks have been interesting, at times tedious, but overall very profitable. Most of all I think I’ve learned enough about the system to provide you with a realistic idea of what to expect from it, how to fine-tune it for more accurate performance and also (hopefully) show you how to improve the profits you generate when you make the decision to use it.

First off, let me say that I DO very much like the idea behind the Cambridge system. I’ve operated in a similar fashion on the betting exchanges for some years now and I know from experience that the general idea is a solid selection method that will almost certainly produce decent profits. However, after speaking with the author of the system at some length over the last week or two there’s a “niggling” aspect to it that I feel I should address first.

It’s mainly about the way the company report their results. If you follow the system to the letter there are some subjective aspects to it, but to combat these I reported everything based on the final shows that were available on every single qualifier and this meant that my results should almost certainly be as close as you’ll get to perfect. There’s no room for subjectiveness at all when you do it like this, but Roger, the author, doesn’t do it this way and that bothered me.

I spent 40 minutes on the phone to him the other day and he’s a nice bloke, but he told me that he isn’t always able to watch the races himself and therefore when there are delays at the start or whatever he still picks his selections roughly one minute before the official off-time. Now, over the last two weeks we’ve had a lot of delays and a lot of meetings where every race was running late, so if there’s a 5 or 10 minute delay a lot can change before the races actually start.

This meant that on many occasions the selections he was backing were entirely different to what myself, and everyone else who knew when the races were starting, were backing. I’ve made it clear that when it comes to reporting the official results a simple check at the end of the day to compare the live shows with the forecasts from the newspaper he recommends would mean that the results were 100% correct, and indisputable, so I hope he listens

Now that I’ve got that little grumble out of the way, let’s get onto the system test itself…..

The first thing you’ll notice if you read back through my results is that I hit the ground running on day one with a profit of no less than £378 to £25 stakes. I never did manage to repeat this feat over the next 13 days, but I think there are good reasons for why that happened.

For starters, I ignored the targets that Roger sets on the first day and basically sat there betting all day long. That isn’t something I’d recommend as I think it’s better to follow his lead and stop betting when you’ve made your wages for the day. Secondly, for a full week of this system test the racing conditions were terrible, there was a lot of abandoned meetings, an unusually high number of non-runners and days when the going changed halfway through the day.

I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the days where I lost money using this were the days where there was a lot of non-runners and the conditions were extreme, so my first piece of advice for you would be to avoid betting at meetings where the going is described as soft/heavy/firm and when you see that a lot of runners have been pulled. If trainers are pulling out their runners it’s because the conditions aren’t what they were expecting, so this is a straight common sense approach that will almost definitely help to save you and make you more money.

My second piece of advice is with regard to the way the bets are graded. At this point some of might be saying to yourselves “you only tested this for two weeks, what do you know?”, but I’ve got enough experience with system analysis to appreciate when rules are cool and when rules aren’t so cool and I don’t really dig the grading system much. For those of you who don’t know there are two ways to grade the runners – grade 1 bets are as solid as you can get and should be backed, grade 2 bets aren’t so strong and in my opinion these could probably be dismissed.

I’m sure that in the big scheme of things the grade 2 bets won’t be nearly as profitable as the grade 1 bets and it will make life a lot easier on you if you chose to ignore them. That’s just my opinion, so take it with a pinch of salt if you like, but it seems pretty sensible to me.

Thirdly, in The Cambridge Target System manual the author recommends that you use a daily newspaper as the guide for picking your selections. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I disagree quite strongly with this, because the paper only provides you with a limited amount of information and I think you would do far better (as I’ve proved actually) if you were to use the Sporting Life website as your guide instead. If you do that you’ll have ALL of the info you need to hand.

So, all things considered, would I recommend The Cambridge Target System?

Well, in case you haven’t noticed, I’ve probably spent a good 70 or 80 hours on this in the last two weeks testing the system, tracking the results, answering questions about it and generally just trying to help people to use it in the best way possible and I wouldn’t have done that if I wasn’t particularly impressed with both the manual and the idea behind the system.

The fact that I made a tidy profit of more than £870 using £25 stakes, in just 14 betting days, obviously helped to cover the cost of my time on this, but I can’t help thinking that if I’d followed my own advice above that the actual profit would have been closer to the £1500 mark and there’s probably a valuable lesson to be learned there. I’ll continue to use this system personally and as time goes on it’s likely that I’ll continue to tweak the rules too, so stay tuned for more info.

If you haven’t got your hands on a copy yet, you can do so via the link below:

Learn More About The Cambridge Target System…