That's not a bad thing to do MUFC, if your playing with an imaginary balance, as atleast when you do your boll0cks on a day, your not going to worry about it, as it's only imaginary money, therefore you won't panic into chasing losses. If you are then showing a profit on your imaginary balance after a while, you will have proved to yourself, that if you stick to a strict system, that you can show a profit. The problem is it's alot more difficult to control yourself when real money is involved, as when your on a winning run, you get greedy, and give all your winnings back, and when your on a losing run, you start panic betting to get it back, and the majority of the time you won't get it back, you'll just get further in trouble. So I'd say go a few months without having any bets, just use your imaginary balance, and see how you get on. I'm not sure about all this gamblers annonymous stuff, I just think you need to learn abit of self control, I was the exact same in my late teens early 20s
I'm sure he is a good guy, Dex. It's a heartbreaking story, he must feel terrible having to b0rrow money to take his kids out. He's lucky to have a friend like you. My advice to anyone would be only bet what you can afford to lose. I've never had a bet in my life....I sometimes think I'll put one on....but can't bring myself to do it. Like an OCD thing in reverse.
I would doubt there are many among us who have not pushed it too far at some point, it is part of understanding what gambling is and the dangers that it can lead to, and finding your limits. I would say that the reflection you are now making upon it is the most significant factor and will hopefully prevent you ever having a problem as most who have a problem are in complete denial about it. A problem in my opinion is when you need to win or when you could not openly show your betting account to loved ones. It is a fantastic sport and having a bet is great fun but when a problem with betting is formed the whole thing will cease to be fun. All the advice already listed is very sound in my book, and Dancing brave clearly speaks with great heart and understanding on the subject. My penny worth would simply be , this is a great sport so don't let gambling rob you of it because as Dancing brave states if you get a problem you will need stay away completely. It's like an alcoholic saying he will meet his friends in the pub but not drink. Good luck and never disrespect anything that can be addictive because if it bites you will hurt.
Be negative when it comes to selecting a horse, not positive. Don't look at animals through tinted spectacles. Be ruthless. Ask 'why can't this horse win today?', not 'why can this horse win today?'. The more negative you are, the less anything appeals to you. Sentimentality goes out of the window and your bets become rare and more calculated. 26 bets since January 1st, 8 winners, £476 up. Stakes ranging from £2 to £150. And I think 4 of those bets were silly in hindsight. Find what you're good at. All-weather handicaps? Sprint handicaps? Long-distance flat, stayer hurdling, pattern racing? Cricket, football, American football. It doesn't matter, just as long as you know the sport well & can identify value. After you've done the below, open up an excel file. Any single betting opportunity you think you've found, write down the name of the selection, the event, the date, the price and the stake you would place (be honest here). Do this for a year and see what's going on. Everybody can improve if they just look back. Perhaps you'll find that Lucky 15s have cost you a bundle, or you're awful at bumpers or AW handicaps. Find what you're bad at and eliminate that from your betting habits. And don't 'close your accounts in the next couple of days'. Close them now while you have that awful feeling in the pit of your stomach. That will go away after a few days. Close your accounts now. Any poker websites or anything, change your password - open up a word file, just press random buttons on the keyboard, copy, paste as your password, change the e-mail address and confirm. Also ban yourself from any bookmakers nearby to you for a year. Done. Source - me. 24-year-old, been gambling and interested in horse racing since November 2003.
this is a really useful thread, thanks all. i almost never bet, but i was going to start although had some reserve about it. a couple of seasons ago i got myself a notebook and studied the whole card and wrote down the names of horses i fancied in each race to see if i was good enough at picking a horse to bet on. after a bit i was getting at least a place/win horse in nearly every race and decided i was doing really well so started thinking i could bet. then i realised i was cheating, conveniently ignoring the races where i would have lost all my stake and looking at the races next to it where i had a place/win horse and thinking that made up for it. also i never looked at the odds so as not to be swayed. so i did an experiment similar to what others on here have suggested, and worked out how much i would have won/lost if i had £2 each way on each horse i picked. the first day i was up by £5.43. the second day i was up by £30 odd, but then the third day the total went downwards despite the places and wins. reality struck then i guess, that working it out absolutely honestly it wasn't the win/win situation i thought it would be. the other thing i found out was the compulsion if you like, to pick a horse in a race even when i wasn't completely sure. that told me that if i was to start betting, that's probably what i would be doing. i still write horses down, which is a habit in itself, but it makes the race more enjoyable if i've picked one, and i confess i like the ego rub if i've got a winner. i think there's some truth in what dancingbraveforever says about even not having money on can still be betting. it's no risk but has the same behaviour as if you were betting. it does have a purpose though writing horses down. i plan to go to a jump race meeting at some point [it's all flat round here], with a tenner to lose, but at least i'll know what i'm doing and i've lost the naivety that i'll make a packet. so to the original poster, i'd say break the cycle, closing online betting is a good start, write down horses if you need to and work out if you would have won, but be honest about it and forget convenient thinking. although it's very time consuming trying to work out what you would have won, you could do it for just three days and see your own pitfalls immediately with no financial risk (mine is handicap hurdles). in the meantime, finish your degree and instead bet with yourself what your marks are going to be. because the rest of the worky world becomes a bit endless and dull, but the better you do in the degree makes the rest of your life a whole lot easier if you do well at that one thing right now. all the comments above have been really useful and from experience, and i for one have certainly taken heed. maybe i'd bet if i'm at the races, but otherise the best races i've seen are the top ones where i didn't write a horse down.
This is a useful point - so many people increase their stake if a horse gets backed and/or is shorter than they expected. I do this with spreads - form my own markets then compare my prices against the actual market prices, where there are differences investigate further, the same principal can be used with fixed odds betting for horses, study a card and if you think a horse should be 9/4 but is available to back at 5/1 then work out why and if there's no obvious reason then it's a solid bet. Clearly you need time for this and sadly the only time I ever put this amount of effort into my punting is Cheltenham, Aintre and Punchestown, and unsurprisingly I have a decent profit for these meetings year on year. Standing in a pub all night with only the Evening Standard for help and an evening meeting on the TV is a sure fire way of doing your conkers.....
Epona "I've never had a bet in my life....I sometimes think I'll put one on....but can't bring myself to do it. " I'll lay you 10-1 you will have a bet this year!
As before this is an excellent thread, and hopefully a help to you MUFC. I personally am very lucky that I can enjoy the racing with either no betting at all or watch with very small bets on (and that is all I do). There are some very good suggestions on the thread, which I think you should take heed of and in particular the part about distancing yourself from all aspects of racing (including this forum!), if you think you have an REAL problem with gambling. That's the only way you won't be tempted to bet.
I dunno about others but my biggest screw ups with gambling have pretty much always happened when I've been drinking. Losing 50 quid or whatever when you're sober makes you call it a day - after 6 pints you think "ah I'll easily win it back"....... Interesting how different things work for different people though. I set up a betting account last year and have actually been really disciplined as I know exactly what I've been spending as opposed to the old days when I couldn't always remember how much i'd whacked over the counter as i'd lose track - just the usual saturday entertainment though really.
and a small 50p e/w on binocular hey epona - after his performance he is definately in with a shout for the 1st 3!
If you want to win then you have to be disciplined and not go chasing a bet, wait for a bet to come to you. I'll tell you a few recent stories of my own if you have time to read through them. My particular favourites are when outside forces influence a price, forces which have nothing to do with the actual game but can affect it's outcome. It's pretty easy to spot these if you are really into a particular sport and they are particularly common in the likes of Ante-Post betting. Some examples of outside forces for my own particular niche, Scottish Football include: Rangers going into administration - it's been pretty well known for months that they were going into administration yet I could back Celtic at 9/5 when they were 1 point behind Rangers in the league in November (that price was left out by mistake by Unibet after Rangers lost and Celtic won that weekend). I had a few hundred on that price and I had my bank account on Celtic to win the league at 1/7 when administration was announced on Sky Sports News last week (they were 4 points ahead at that stage and administration was looking likely). I hedged out of the bet at 1/50 the next day on Betfair. Last year I backed Gary Hooper to be top goal scorer in the Scottish League. I had around 400 each way at 25/1 when he was 10 goals behind Kenny Miller in the league. He was injured for the first 2 months of the season so had fallen pretty far behind. When backing the 25/1 I thought the win was unlikely but was more interested in the 7/1 place. The 7/1 place was so interesting because basically Kenny Miller was 8 goals ahead of the second top striker in the league at that point, so Celtic's top striker only needed to catch up on 3 goals to get into second place. I made the place about 1/2 myself. The only reason it was 25/1 was because the WIN ONLY was very unlikely, the place on this market was broken. Not only this, but there was an angle for the win - Rangers were going broke and Kenny Miller was out of contract in the summer - so there was a huge chance they would sell him in the winter transfer break. Of course they did this and Hooper went from 16/1 to 5/4 to be top Scottish goal scorer over night (I backed the 16 win only too when Sky Sports News announced it). Unfortunately for me Hooper finished 1 goal off the lead in the SPL, but I made a few grand from the place as intended and got one hell of a ride for my money when Hooper scored a goal to bring him one behind top, 25 mins into the last game in the season (I had about 6k profit if he scored again and 12k profit if he scored 2 more ). Of course there are examples of bets that haven't worked out so well. I backed Birmingham to go down at 33/1 this season because I believed there was a huge chance of administration, I backed Hearts to go down at 40/1 because of the same reason in the SPL (betting was suspended for a while on that one when the wages weren't paid). Overall though I have nicked several thousand in the last few years, just trying to spot the things that happen outside sport that will affect the prices. I of course have short term bets some of which work and some of which don't - even the ones which you know are getting massive value. An example of this is I backed Ajax to qualify from Group D of the Champions League this year. My reason for backing it was there was two games to go in the group and Ajax were three points and 7 goals ahead of Lyon to get into second place in the group. Lyon were playing Ajax in France in the next match, if Ajax won the match they qualified, if Ajax drew the match by any result other than 0-0 they were through (as the other leg was 0-0 and it goes on head to head), if Ajax drew 0-0 then Lyon would have to win in the final match and hope Ajax lost, whilst also reducing the 7 goal difference to less than 0. Ajax were 6/5 to qualify with Bet365 at this point - but you could back Lyon at 6/5 to win their next game against Ajax with Asian bookmakers. This does not make sense, someone hasn't done the permutations - if Lyon don't win they are more or less out of the Champions League so if they are 6/5 to win the game then Ajax are 5/6 to qualify from the group on the night. Not only that but even if Lyon did win then Ajax would still be about 6/1 to qualify if they could better Lyon's result in the final game. Overall I made the 6/5 being offered by Bet365 as an actual true price of about 4/6. I absolutely piled on it until Bet365 cut the thing to even money and even that was wrong. So in the next game Lyon played Ajax, I knew and Ajax knew that a draw more or less got them qualified - I backed the 0-0 in the game (I was think it was 9/1) because I knew Ajax would be playing for it. The game ended 0-0, I won a few quid and my 6/5 bet on Ajax qualifying was now 1/25 top price with most bookies. For any of you who know what happened next... Ajax lost 3-0 to Real Madrid in the final game and Lyon won 6-1. I lost several thousand pounds on a bet which was outstanding value and which touched 1.01 to lay In Running (and I didn't hedge). But that's the way the cookie crumbles with gambling - you can do all the right things and lose and you can do all the wrong things and win. The most important thing to know is if you keep doing the right things you will win in time, the only thing needed is discipline and managing your staking levels.
A cracking read! I too bet more annually on football than horse racing, but i wont bore you with my £2 accumeys after your big stakes stories! However - As im from Darlington, i knew the financial difficulties they were in and when they were 8th in Blue Sq Premier, and trading at 125/1 to be relegated. I had a few quid on and now there hovering ominously close to relegation, and basically playing a youth team every week as they cant bring any1 in
I am serious believe it or not! You can bet on every single horse in the race if you really wanted to!
Really?! Well that seems the way to go then....a sure way of getting a winner! Ladbrokes here I come!
I was standing in the Grandstand next to this hideously drunk woman who was leaping around saying she had backed the winner of every race after she has cheered home the winner in the finale. She had backed every single horse that ran that day. I kid you not. A quick way to the poor house but at least she enjoyed the journey.
