Winning without Thinking: A Guide to Horse Race Betting Systems [Paperback]

A new generation of racing journalists and professional gamblers have been strongly influenced by Nick’s three previous books: Betting For A Living, Mordin On Time and The Winning Look.

This latest book has been a long time coming, but the wait should be worth it for it contains the results of extensive and unique research Nick has carried out.

Nick estimates he has spent over 30,000 hours researching racing results over the years. His aim has been to uncover the principles that govern the betting market and racing results themselves.

In conducting his research Nick has tested thousands of systems, both his own and those developed by academics, professional gamblers and others around the globe. In Winning without Thinking he shares the fruits of this work. It makes fascinating reading.

In this book you will learn;

· How to take advantage of recurring patterns in the results of horse-races
· Basic principles that govern racing results and the betting market
· Mistakes commonly made by the general betting public – and how to exploit them
· Full details of betting systems used by professional gamblers to make millions
· How to predict and profit from new trends
· How to use computers to increase your returns from betting

"If a man has one hundred dollars and turns it into one hundred and ten dollars, that’s work. If he has a million dollars and turns it into one million, one hundred thousand dollars - that’s inevitable."
Charles Englehard

The fantasy goes something like this: you scan the past performances of the horses in a race, take a quick glance at the odds, consult a few simple rules and make your wager on the horse they pick. There’s almost no need for thought. It’s virtually an automatic process. All you have to do is stand back and watch the money roll in.

If that’s your idea of a horse race betting system I’m not going to disappoint you. The fantasy is a reality for quite a few people. I know of one man in Hong Kong who claims he has made $20 million a year for the past decade using a betting system that he has programmed into a computer. Another player, this time an American, made an estimated $7 million in 2001 with a similar computer-based system. Thousands of other bettors around the world routinely use systems to make money out of horse race betting as well. But of course there’s a catch.

The catch is that usually you have to work awfully hard to get to the position where a system can make money for you. The Hong Kong player I mentioned above spent tens of thousands of hours developing his system. I’ve no doubt the successful US player did the same. Don’t get disheartened, though. Sometimes a successful betting system can be incredibly easy to think up and operate. Since this is the first chapter and I don’t want to scare you away, I’m going to start out by telling you about the simplest systems of all, the kind that are based on a mistake in the odds.

You might think it strange that a bookmaker or a Tote system should get the odds wrong. After all, their profitability depends on calculating the odds more efficiently than their customers and building in a profit margin for themselves. However, very occasionally the odds available in certain situations favour the gambler rather than the bookmaker or the Tote. Such an instance sparked one of the strangest stories in horse racing.

It began in the mid-1990s when punters in New York started noticing strange goings-on in their Tote pools. The pools and the prices displayed on the Tote monitor would look perfectly ordinary one moment, then in a single flash of the board some mysterious player would dump a monstrous bet of $50,000, sometimes more, on a single horse. The odds against the horse didn’t so much contract as implode. Invariably they plunged to the minimum pay-out of $2.10 to a $2 stake that is made in New York.

The consensus of opinion was that the person making these enormous bets just had to be crazy. Everyone figured he or she would run out of cash eventually. After all, nobody could possibly be making money by collecting the five per cent profit offered by 1-20 shots, could they? Strangely however, the giant bets didn’t stop. If anything, they actually became bigger.

After a few years, the speculation about the anonymous plunger had grown to the point where the press and TV people were writing and talking about it. Naturally enough, being reporters, they gave the person a nickname so that readers and viewers would know who they were talking about in future. They called the mystery gambler ‘The Mad Bomber’, in honour of George Metesky who had sold so many tabloid papers for them some years previously with his campaign of planting bombs on New York subway trains. Thereafter, whenever a huge Tote bet was made, there would be headlines such as ‘Mad Bomber strikes at Aqueduct!’

Some said the Mad Bomber was laundering drug money for the mob. Others suggested it was someone fixing the odds for illegal off-track bookmakers. Most thought the person was a barking mad millionaire who was in dire need of help from Gamblers Anonymous. Nobody would ever have guessed the truth if the Mad Bomber himself hadn’t gone public.

I don’t know what possessed the Mad Bomber to speak to a reporter from the Daily Racing Form (the US equivalent of the Racing Post). Perhaps it stemmed from a wish to correct the wild speculation that his actions had aroused. Maybe it was out of a common desire we all have to seek fame as well as fortune. In any event, for whatever reason, the cat is now out of the bag. The Mad Bomber has told all. It turns out that the Mad Bomber is, in fact, a professional gambler - and lives in Philadelphia. And the amazing thing is, he is operating a system.

The Mad Bomber’s system is based on the fact that most Tote systems guarantee to pay you a profit on your wager if you win. As I’ve mentioned, in New York, where the Mad Bomber operates, the guaranteed minimum pay-out is $2.10 for a $2.00 wager. Normally, the Tote’s minimum pay-out does not represent value. Occasionally, however, a race comes along where one horse seems so certain to win that it starts at 2-5 or less. If you look back through enough results, you’ll find that horses which start at such cramped odds virtually always reach the first three - and therefore pay a dividend to those who bet them to place (or ‘show’ as they call it in the US). In fact they finish in the money so often, you’d actually make a small profit betting them to place, even if they were all returned at the very minimum Tote price. In essence, that is the Mad Bomber’s system.