Opposing Selections In Different Systems – What Do You Do?

Anyone who runs more than one system or method of selection will have faced the problem that different methods may give you the same selection. This isn’t a problem on its own but what if one system is for backing and the other is for laying. Perhaps your methods give you an odds range and in one range you back it and another you lay it. This makes sense but it is also possible it is just a selection and you are left with the difficult decision of whether to back, lay or ignore the bet.

What can you do in this situation? Don’t panic, there are a number of ways to go about making a decision of what to do.

• The simplest is to not take the bet. There is always another race around the corner. Just remember that if you have based your method on past data you will need to re-analyse it removing these selections to make sure that it still makes a profit.

• The next easiest is to see which of your selection methods creates the greatest return on investment (ROI). You choose the selection from the method that performs better as you want to get the greatest ROI for your money in this situation.

• This way is going to require a little bit of work. Go through your records and pull out all of the selections where both methods had selected the same horse. Now have a look at which method performed the best in this scenario and use this method for these selections in the future.

• Developing a little bit further from the last process we once again pull out all the selections from our records where the two methods selected the same horse. We want to break this down into odds ranges. These ranges need to be defined based on the data but you should have at least 30 winners in each range if possible. You now see which selection method performs better in which odds ranges. Which method you use is now dependant on odds.

• Go back through your records for each selection method and see if your methods are improved by using them in specific odds ranges. The majority of them will be improved. You may get lucky and find that each method now has an odds range that is different to the other and so when they find the same selections you already have defined odds ranges. If this isn’t the case you can choose not to bet these horses or delve a little bit further into your data. If you choose to delve a little bit further into your data then you want to look at just the horses that fall into the odds ranges for both methods. With these selections you want to go through the same process as the above. Find out which of the two methods you are using provides the greatest ROI in this situation.

The first way of making your decision is by far the quickest and simplest, as you go down the list the amount of time that you will need to put in increases. Although the easy ones are effective the more time you spend the greater your likely profit will be and so if you have the time available I would suggest using the last method described.

It is always difficult to choose which selection to use when two opposing methods bring up the same selection to back and lay. I hope that this article has provided a good guideline as to how to go about doing it.

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Tags: Backing, bet, bot, data, horse, horses, lay, Laying, method, money, one, profit, roi, selections, system, win