Prize Lays

One Of The Most Consistent Laying Systems We’ve Seen…

If Prize Lays 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’.  Prize Lays 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 Prize Lays 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 RP 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 HR.ie trial I used £10 level stakes and assumed a 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 I played it safe.

Below are the results achieved during the initial trial through to the time of writing the summary below:

So how did Prize Lays perform during my testing period?   As the final results show, it ended 28.54 points in profit bringing our £1,000 bank up to £1,285.40.  Although, having been playing around with this for a while, I’d have to say that 10 -12 points profit a month would be more typical.

You’ll also see that there was an unavoidable gap of 6 days at one stage in the trial, but this was because I was on holiday.  Now, the missing 6 days could make a difference one way or another I’d admit, but it’s an interesting progression none the less.  At the time of writing the current run is 23 winning lays.  Not bad!!!

Like a lot of laying systems longish odds can result in long winning runs and this happened in the first half of the month.   However, laying systems with longer odds also punish us harshly when our selections decide to show a clean set of hooves to the rest of the field  and that’s what happened in the middle 2 weeks with a couple of payouts to backers at 5.00 BF odds.   However I feel that with Prize Lays the winning days manage to compensate for any of these events and the bank recovers reasonably quickly.   Occasionally the odds will creep up to the 8.00 limit especially with drifters.  To date I’ve only had winning bets at that level, but it is inevitable that one day one of these will trot over the line and hit the bank hard.   In general the author claims the average odds of a losing bet to be 5.45 and I’d tend to agree with that.

You get selections most days, to a max of approx 6, although 3 or 4 each day is more usual, so if you’re one of those punters who likes loads of selections this probably isn’t for you.  There were a couple of bets on the margin where the bot didn’t bet as the price had drifted beyond the upper limit a fraction.

Making your selections each day is straightforward and although you can do this the night before, information has to come from the Racing Post which can make overnight changes, so it’s worth checking again in the morning if you have time.   I made the selections at around 9.00 a.m. each morning.   Mistakes can be made by clicking the wrong buttons on the RP if you’re not paying attention so care needs to be taken with that, but I’d say that it was no more difficult in that respect than Dodgy Favourites or Four The Win.   The author provides a phone service updated in the morning, free to begin with and I’d suggest this as a checking mechanism, for the first few weeks anyway.

In summary, 28 points in 44 days may not seem that great to some and yes there are more supposedly profitable laying systems out there, but I think that the authors results appear achievable and I’d rather that than unachievable pie in the sky or white knuckle roller coaster peaks and troughs.   Our bank of £1,000 was hardly dented during the drawdowns and only went into negative territory in the first week.   Personally I like it as it suits my betting style and is easily operable to level stakes, the yardstick of any good system.   In fact I have run it against a few staking plans and frankly there’s little point with this level of consistency.

For the trial I set The Grey Horse Bot to 20 seconds.   In retrospect I wouldn’t recommend this setting as I did miss a few drifters which would have been winning bets, so I’d suggest getting on earlier, somewhere between 4 – 10 minutes seems to work fine and catches most late drifters.   You could just lay your bets in the morning and leave them, however getting on early morning could result in laying a steamer and getting hammered if it won, although it’s probably swings and roundabouts in the long term.

As for the author, he’s very helpful, answers any daft questions politely and is not afraid to admit to any slipups and for those that know me you’ll know that I don’t say that about many authors!

I like Prize Lays 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.  As a laying system in a portfolio or even as a standalone earner, I’d give Prize Lays the thumbs up and the Mutt would too if only he had a thumb!

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