Betting Psychology

This article was originally from here and has been adapted for RewardBet customers.

Learn To Be Happy Whether You Win or Lose!

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What happens at the end of the day if you have been playing around having a bet? If you are deliriously happy when you've had a winning day, stop betting immediately. If you are sad and depressed if you have had a losing day, stop betting immediately.

Your approach to life and those around you should NEVER be dependant on whether or not you've had a good day on the punt and, if it is, you need to reassess where you're going with all this.

No matter what happens in the space of a gambling afternoon, it shouldn't dictate how you feel. It should be just a part of a normal day - win or lose - and life goes on.

“If you have a (very high) strike rate of 40% you are going to be wrong 60% of the time!”

It should not be the sole measure of whether your life that day has been successful or not. Remember this - if you have a strike rate of 40% you are going to be wrong 60% of the time so what are you going to do? Be miserable and sad 60% of the time? Pity Street is okay to visit occasionally but you don't want to live there.

You can't tell me you check your superannuation fund 6 or 7 times a day and the result of those checks changes your daily attitude.

Most people don't know what's happening with their super funds from one yearly statement to the next - and even then the things are written like you have a degree in financial management!

Really, your approach to gambling if you are going to do it for a substantial part of your income simply HAS to be the same as your superannuation approach.

If you have the right selection method and staking approach it needs to be so non-emotional and mechanical that it ranks along watching your superannuation fund as far as excitement goes.

On the side of staking, there's nothing better for your bank and your psychology than using a tool such as RewardBet.

You need to believe and know that regardless of what happens hour to hour and day to day, that at the end of the year there will be an increase in your bank and it is that knowledge that prevents you losing your head and panicking at any time during the year and blowing the lot in a fit of anguish and desperation.

What we're talking about here is having a passive income. It just happens without fuss and background noise. Almost without thought. When you can get yourself in that mental place you are well on the way.

Inexperienced gamblers (and experienced ones too) think it's the simplest thing in the world to follow a relatively simple set of rules and a betting method (.5% to 1% of the betting bank with minimum acceptable price) and you will win.

It's not that simple in real life gambling, and, unless approached as above, rarely works out that way. A lot of good intentions go down the drain by the end of the third race.

That's why gamblers fund the whole industry. Yes - the whole industry. Gamblers pay the wages of trainers, jockeys, strappers, stewards, race callers - the list goes on and on and EVERY dollar comes from gamblers.

There are some people (4% to 5%) who don't fall in to the gambling traps, and also quietly add themselves to that list of gambling beneficiaries when they move from gambling to investing!

Because I think to be a compulsive gambler and have to bet on every race on every day between the first in New Zealand at 10.10am to the last dog race in West Australia at 12.30am the next morning, is a shocking place to be - and a waste of this precious thing we call life.

And getting caught in the middle of the inevitable losing streaks (which MUST occur) and not having the control to get out the other side with some capital in place, is a soul destroying thing. And it's not worth it.

It's not easy. It takes self control and discipline. I know there are some people who can lose their week's wages on the way home on a Friday night or in a self indulgent Saturday and then have to be full of remorse - they just move in to the zone - a zone where time and money is irrelevant, where there are no limits until all the money is gone and they have no real idea about what they're doing.

If you want to move from frantic gambling to responsible investing, you have to wake up every morning NOT thinking about punting and simply seeing it as a small part of your day that's not going to affect your outlook on everything else.

It just happens. Almost without thought. Life just goes on regardless of how many bets you may have during the course of the day. Some days, that long term method you are using may have one selection - on others it may have twenty one. It doesn't matter which in the long term.

If you are staking well, using RewardBet's Reward Levels to guide your confidence and keeping to a similar outlay each race then you are well on the right track. 

 

“RewardBet was invented to help the 95% of punters that make all the same staking mistakes.

Ironically, the 5% of winning professional punters also love it as it emulates their approach.”

— Gregory Conroy, RewardBet Inventor

Serious Punters Think About The Big P!

Original Article by Racing and Sports

Despite often being seen as a 'mug's game' horse racing is one of few gambling pursuits where the punter can possibly have the odds in their favour.

Racing is more than tips and trackwork updates - if you are serious about how you play then you'd already be using RewardBet and we hope this article provides some more food for thought for the smart punter.

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A majority of punters get into the game with the goal of making a profit.

This goal is achieved not by finding winners but by finding good bets.

There is a difference, which is what we will look at that briefly in this article.

Due to the fact that the true odds of the outcomes are unknown, it is theoretically possible to have the odds in your favour as a punter at the races, which makes it fairly distinct from most other gambling pursuits.

Just about all other forms of gambling start with one certainty. That the odds are locked in favour of the 'house'.

The law of averages will apply to racing in the long term, even money shots will win closer and closer to their true probability (50%) with more and more occurrences, but in the short term, results are essentially random.

“The randomness of racing in the short term essentially means that we mustn’t look at the form like it is a mathematical equation as there is no one answer.”

The randomness of racing in the short term essentially means that we mustn't look at the form like it is a mathematical equation as there is no one answer.

We need to look at racing more probabilistically and can't fall into the trap of thinking that among the information available to us sits the answer, a horse 'destined' to win the race.

This line of thinking can be reinforced by retrospect where it all looks so easy.

We have all scrambled for the form guide after the 15/1 winner salutes and thought 'Of course! It was obvious.'

If the horse we bet on wins we feel like we got the race right and if it loses we feel as though we got the race wrong.

This isn't to say that there is nothing to be learned from results – we can and should update and refine our methods as more information comes to hand - but we have to accept that one of the very few certainties in racing is that losing bets will be frequent and that they are not necessarily bad bets due to that fact.

“A losing bet is not necessarily a bad bet.”

The proof of this will be in the pudding - or lack thereof - at the end of the year when your bottom line will show fairly clearly whether you are making good or bad bets.

So over the long term, we can find out whether we are making good bets - taking better than 'true odds' - but for the short term, we just have to remain disciplined and stick to our methods in the face of individual results.

A good analogy for this is a game of golf, where making good bets is liking hitting greens in regulation.

We will spend a lot of the punting year making par or breaking even, but if we keep making enough good bets, and hitting enough greens, then over the journey we will give ourselves plenty of chances to make birdie and our scorecard at the end of the year will reflect this.

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Of course, it's all well and good to say we are going to go out and hit more greens in regulation.

To actually do so we are going to need to work on our swing and the clubs we use on the course. 

Luckily for you, you already are carrying the world's best driver - ie: using RewardBet for your staking.

The Importance Of Barriers

This article was originally from Statsman, Practical Punting.

We want to share it with our customers to help them have a better betting experience.

How important are barriers when accessing the form? This article will examine what to look for with regards to the fastest way home for a horse!

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The shortest way home is always on or near the inside rail. Well, that's technically true, as we all know, but we also know that many times it doesn't find you the winner of a race. Especially when track conditions are on the very wet side!

It's then we see the horses being deliberately taken extremely wide by their jockeys in a bid to find 'firmer' going away from the rail. Even on tracks considered only dead or slow, we will see horses winning after racing wide throughout. Why? Because the track surface has been uneven, with the footing getting better the wider on the track a horse is raced.

So now we get back to barrier draws, and their importance in racing, and more importantly their importance as far as form study and analysis is concerned.

You can't get away from the fact that for a great percentage of races it's better to be drawn closer to the rails. The race percentages themselves show that most races are won by horses coming from the 10th gate inwards. Yet such a statistic is only helpful up to a point because each race is a different 'ball game' with different horses of different ability and pace.

“A slow beginner drawn on the rails in a big field is really at a disadvantage.”

— Statsman

A slow beginner drawn on the rails in a big field is really at a disadvantage. Fast beginners outside him will have every chance to cut across and chop him off, placing him in an invidious position from which to win. It's been my experience that in Australia not enough attention is given by rank-and-file punters to the issue of 'pace' from the barrier.

By this, I mean that few punters give much attention to weighing up the possible scenario of how a race will be run-which horse will lead, which horses will sit just behind the pace, which horses will get trapped wide, which ones will drift back and then have to make ground late? These are some of the issues which have to be addressed if you are to get a clear picture in your mind of how a race is likely to be run.

You may well end up being wrong but you'll probably be right more times than you are in error, as long as you apply the right principles of form and objective, rational analysis.

“Horses compelled to race wide around turns MUST cover more ground than runners inside them.”

— Statsman

One point you must remember when assessing barrier draws is this: Horses compelled to race wide around turns MUST cover more ground than runners inside them. The extra ground covered can often mean the difference between winning and losing, because at a lot of Australian tracks a lot of ground can be lost by tracking deep.

You can do a simple test yourself if you need convincing. Make a drawing of a racecourse with the backstretch and the home straight taken away, and only the turns remaining. The turns butted together form a circle. We will say this circle is 800m in circumference. Start one horse around this circle running against the rail and another horse in the middle of the track, or about 15m from the rail.

If both horses run at exactly the same speed the outside horse will be about 43 lengths behind at the finish. It is surprising, then, to discover how little distance a horse can run out from the rail to show an enormous effect on the result of a race. Take the case of the rails runner in this example. Send him around the circle and hold him close to the rail and at 12 seconds to 200m he will run 800m in 48s. Run him at exactly the same speed but 4m from the rail and his time for 800m will be 49.5s. And remember-a horse running 4m out from the rail is not doing anything unusual but is duplicating a circumstance that happens all too frequently in real races.

In a race, a horse runs in a lane about 3 feet (or a metre) wide; that is he takes up about a metre of the width of the track. To pass him, another horse must go at least a metre further out from the rail, and often a jockey is compelled to bring his mount up to 5, 6 or 7 horses wide on a turn. It's nothing then to find a horse racing some 5-7m out from the inside rail.

There are differing opinions about exactly how much ground horses lose when racing wide. Let's look first at the conclusions of Paul Segar, author of the popular book Horse Racing Theory And Practise. He says: "Horses capable of taking up good positions from anywhere have early speed, like a car; the jockey just puts his foot on the accelerator.

“The better class galloper can turn the speed on at any time during the race . . . From any barrier position, by jumping out well a horse can succeed more easily. A horse missing the jump by even a small amount, even half a length, is usually under pressure right away and is often beaten a long way from the finish."

“Travelling one metre extra works out to be equivalent to 0.36 lengths which means a horse covering 4.5m extra would be about 1.5 lengths worse off, with 9m extra being covered, equivalent to about three lengths.

If you work in weights, these work out to about 2.3kgs and 4.5kgs respectively.”

— Paul Segar

In regards to how much ground a horse can lose by racing wide from a poor barrier draw, Segar says: "The amount of extra ground covered by a horse depends on a number of factors: how long the race is, how many turns it has to run around and how long the horse is caught wide. Travelling one metre extra works out to be equivalent to 0.36 lengths which means a horse covering 4.5m extra would be about 1.5 lengths worse off, with 9m extra being covered, equivalent to about three lengths. If you work in weights, these work out to about 2.3kgs and 4.5kgs respectively.

"With this level of extra handicap on horses being caught wide, it's no wonder that many horses are beaten when they race wide. Horses racing very wide are at a real disadvantage as they can be losing a couple of lengths every time they negotiate a turn."

Professional punting 'king' Don Scott goes into great detail about wide runners, and barriers, in his best-selling book, Winning More. Indeed, one of his main 'maxims' in a raceform study is the following: Some outside barrier positions are a disadvantage ... this disadvantage can be expressed in kilograms'. Now we are getting to the nitty-gritty of the subject.

Says Scott: "Although an outside barrier position tends to be a disadvantage, it is often not as great as some punters believe ... Some experts produce statistics showing that most winners start from inside barriers. These stats give a false picture since the inside barrier positions are always occupied in every race while the outside positions are occupied only when fields are large.

“A good horse, well weighted and well ridden, can overcome the disadvantage of a wide barrier.”

— Don Scott, Winning More

"Treat with caution all these theories and statistics about barrier positions. The barrier position is just one factor you have to consider and you should not give it undue importance. A good horse, well weighted and well ridden, can overcome the disadvantage of a wide barrier.

"While some punters refuse to back horses drawn wider than 8, 12 or 15, depending on the fanaticism of their opinion, I have backed scores of winners drawn out in no man's land. One of the most memorable was Citadel at 100/1 in the 1974 Epsom."

On the subject of how much ground horses lose when racing wide, Don Scott has this to say: "One expert on wide running has calculated that ... the actual ground a horse loses by running two wide on the home turn at Randwick is 1.42 metres (56 inches), or just over half a length. According to him, you have to compensate a horse two wide 1kg, three wide 1.5kgs, four wide 2.5kgs, 5 wide 3kgs, and so on."

Scott himself says his own compensations for horses running wide “are less than the actual ground lost." In his book, he lists such compensations for wide running under two headings-‘For Wide Running On Early Turns' and 'For Wide Running on the Home Turn.' For example, let's say you had a horse drawn in a wide barrier and at the first turn he was caught five wide on a track rated fast. In Scott's estimation, that would call for a compensation factor of 1kg.

Let's say, also, that the same horse was six wide when negotiating the final turn; Scott would allow a compensation factor of 3kgs. Therefore, when assessing this particular horse's final race rating for a future race, Scott would give it a bonus of 4kgs for that wide running effort.

There is no doubt, then, that barrier draws do have a big role in determining whether a horse can win or not-but probably not such a dominant one that you can afford to make sweeping assertions. Therefore, you cannot dismiss any horse from calculations merely because it might have drawn barrier 18 in a field of 18.

A famous American turf expert, Lou Holloway, once wrote: "You can't blithely accept statistics or the law of averages in racing, because each race is a separate entity, with different variants. So a horse drawn out wide in one race might lose, but in the next race, in a completely different set of circumstances, another horse coming from the same barrier in the same size field, will win."


Scott dissects each major city and provincial track, in all States, and allows various penalties for horses racing from wide barriers. If you use these, in conjunction with your own knowledge about a horse, you should be able to accurately 'track' how much a barrier will affect any individual horse.

For example, you may be looking at an early-speed horse drawn in barrier 15 in a 1200m sprint at Randwick. You know that this horse explodes away from the barrier, and you reason that it should possess enough pace to lead in the first 100 to 150m. So then you look at Scott's charts and you find he has allowed a 1kg penalty for a horse drawn 15 over 1200m at Randwick.

You now have to decide if you should penalise the horse that 1kg, or perhaps reduce it to a half kilo, or even do away with it completely. You may feel the wide barrier is no disadvantage, given the horse's ability to 'ping' away smartly and display early toe. Or you may decide that even with the early speed, the wide barrier might mean the horse will have to be asked to go just a little too hard too early, and therefore will have much less stamina in reserve when the chips are down in the testing final 300m.

My own observations are that horses drawn between 1 and 7 should be suitably drawn, unless you can make out a case for a slow beginner in a sprint being chopped off from, say, barriers 1 to 3. Against this, you have to assess whether it is an advantage for the horse to be axed out of the early rush, given that it's a late closer anyway.

Horses drawn between 8 and 11 are getting into the 'midways' range, where you have to begin giving some consideration to penalties, depending on the distance of the race, and the shape of the track, taking into account the distance between the barrier gates and the first turn, and also taking account of each horse's racing style.

Once you get from barrier 12 outwards is where you strike more and more imponderables. I think it's essential that those serious punters possess Don Scott's Barrier Charts, and that they use them as reference guides at least. You don't have to accept the penalties he lists at face value; instead use them as a tool for your form study and change them as you see fit.

“Always remember then that barrier draws are important - but don’t get carried away with an all-embracing rule about them.”

— Statsman

Always remember then that barrier draws are important - but don't get carried away with an all-embracing rule about them.

Treat each case on its merits. Wide draws can be fatal-but not all the time. And, as for wide running on the turns, remember that horses DO cover more ground when doing so, so think about compensatory form allowances for it.

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