The Curse Of The Handicapper

August sees the start of a system test for Curse Of The Handicapper, the latest stats-based laying system from Paul Fowlie (of Stat Attack and Lay The Place fame) and Sportsworld Publishing.

Sportsworld claim profits of over £40,000 since January the 1st, to £100 stakes.  This is net of 5% Betfair commission, and recorded at Starting Price.  SP is good in a way because it’s the only consistent way to record results, but is also contentious because it is generally understood that it can be a challenge to lay as low as SP on Betfair.  Still, at this end of the odds scale, it should be possible to lay at near-SP, particularly, I would have thought, if you wait until close to the off to place your bets.

Of equal importance to the overall profits, is how the system gets there.  I’m not particularly interested in a system that produces 11 losing months, then one miraculous month with huge profits.  Gratifyingly, the profit graph for Curse Of The Handicapper is nice and smooth, with a 75% strike rate and average “losing price” (i.e., when we lose our bet) of 9/4.  Importantly, this is to level stakes.

The system document itself is all of four pages… in a big font!  The rules are easy to understand – in fact, I would say this is the simplest system that Paul Fowlie has produced, by quite a stretch.  It’s all straight to the point – blunt, almost – but who wants fluff?

The manual claims that it should be easy enough to implement with Grey Horse Bot, and that’s how I’m going to run the test, as I’m all for automating.  So it’ll be a case of manually identifying the potential qualifiers on the Racing Post web site each morning, and programming Grey Horse Bot with those selections.

A 100 point bank is recommended, so that’s £1000 to £10 stakes – I will record results on that basis, to SP for consistency and also SP +10% to see what effect that has.  At the end of the test I’ll also be looking at how the prices I was able to obtain with GHB compared to SP.

I’m looking forward to giving this new simple system a shot.  Simplicity is good, as I’m at work during the day.  It should take about 15 minutes each morning to set it going.

The results of the trial are set out below followed by our conclusions…

Results

Conclusions

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 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 Curse, 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.

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