The Curse Of The Handicapper: Final Review

The Curse Of The Handicapper test drew to a close on 31st August after a month of tracking and testing.

Making the selections each day was very easy, if a little laborious at times as there can sometimes be 50 or 60 potentials to pick out and make a note of! I tracked the outcome of the potentials that qualified, recording results to SP (as in the official results) and also to SP plus ten percent, to allow for the fact that Betfair odds are usually higher than the starting price.

Here are the final figures:

Days operated: 29
Profit to SP: £561.59
Profit to SP +10%: £306.43

This is to £10 stakes, with 5% commission taken into consideration. I feel it is reasonable to dismiss the SP figure, as generally you’re not going to achieve that. That leaves a respectable 30 point profit to SP plus 10% – the question being, how achievable is this?

The Curse Of The Handicapper manual states that it’s possible to use Grey Horse Bot to place your bets – this is true, and I did so as often as I could. What the manual doesn’t state is whether or not it is profitable to do so, and I saw enough to conclude that it wasn’t. I’ll qualify that… I used GHB to place the bets automatically, one minute before the official off. Unfortunately I lost my spreadsheet during a catastrophic PC system crash, however I do know that the profits were slightly negative by that point, and I remember that they’d bounced around, sometimes slightly positive and other times slightly negative. Overall, I felt that breaking even would be the best case scenario. The reason for this was that the Betfair prices on the winning horses were usually significantly higher than the starting price, and indeed significantly higher than SP + 10%. All this proves, however, is that how I ran this through GHB is not the best way to run this system.

Many feel that obtaining prices that are as little as 10% (and less) above SP is achievable if you are betting manually, and I can see how this can be possible if you are following the markets and can bet based on judging which way the odds are generally moving. (This is where most bots fail, as they just bet a set amount of time before the off.)

Additionally, there are further options to explore when using a bot – for example, asking for a price that is better than that currently on offer, or allowing your Betfair order to persist while the market goes in-running, in order to get a better price and not accept whatever is available just before the off. Also, you could place bets earlier in the day as a test to see how that compares – these are all on my list to check when I have some time spare. Another consideration (but not necessarily a recommendation) is a gentle loss recovery system, or rather, an overlay recovery system that recovers only the excess you have lost compared to SP; this particular idea is something I am planning to explore, starting with small stakes and building up from there.

Overall, I came out feeling ambivalent towards The Curse Of The Handicapper, so I’m going to give it a neutral review. It’s another system that advertises hefty profits, but you come to realise it’s not quite as simple as that, because those profits are based on obtaining prices that are close to SP. Straight automation with a bot (as I did) doesn’t cut it, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be automated if implemented in a more sophisticated fashion – something I’m going to continue to look into.

I feel this system does have decent potential, if you’re prepared to work out how to run it the most effectively, which probably means running it manually; I don’t have the inclination or the time to run something like this manually, but if you are prepared to put in some effort to judge generally which direction the odds are going in, I feel this could indeed be a viable system to add to the portfolio.

In a nutshell… simple automation is unlikely to be profitable, but the potential is there if you are prepared to work on obtaining odds that are as low as possible.

Posted by Matt on September 8, 2008. Filed under System Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry