I have tried to help others improve their gambling discipline in the past but not very successfully. Maybe discipline cannot be taught. Maybe you have it or you don’t. It reminds me very much of the need/desire to smoke. Every sensible person knows it is wrong. The very sensible never start smoking. The sensible smokers try and stop. Some succeed and never smoke again, others will just have a little puff when they have good times (parties) or bad times (funerals). Others will not even try to give up because it is too difficult, too boring, or not needed – mugs !
My suggestions to improve discipline and hopefully turn around poor P/L are;
First week - The advice I normally give punters wishing to reform is to stop betting immediately. Take a week off – NO BETS. Use you newly liberated free time to improve other things in your life. Love, Health, Family. Take a break then come back refreshed and eager to change your previously non-profitable gambling.
Second Week – set your target. 3% average profit per day is a useful place to start. Or you can change this into a “per bet/trade” target based on how many bets/trades on average you expect to have. Approx. 4 bets per day, with a 0.7% average profit target on each works well for me.
Set up a spreadsheet that tracks each bet/trade, that shows recommend stake/risk level based on fixed criteria (e.g. 20% of accumulated bank per trade or 5% per punt) and tracks the bet’s profit.
Have a column that tracks your accumulated betting P/L against your target. So after 30 bets I know that a 1000 GBP betting bank should have risen to 1233 GBP. You can also have a text column that tells you if you are “ABOVE” or “BELOW” target. Plus if you really want to be flash, set up a graph of bet numbers, tracked against actual and target P/L. Nothing is as nice to see as your P/L graph heading the right way – UPWARDS.
Spend the second week looking for ways to achieve your target but without betting. My advice is look for something that you enjoy, has convenient event times, that maybe you have TV access to, that you have special knowledge of, or access to special knowledge off (OLBG tipsters perhaps – follow the good ones, lay the bad ones?). Now find 5 strategies, that include an element of trading, that you feel has a good chance of meeting the target.
Spend the rest of the second week running the 5 strategies on separate spreadsheets using pretend money. This gets you used to using the sheets and, as you are not using real money, it improves discipline.
Third Week – Two weeks without betting? How did it go? Those smokers who try and give up the dreaded weed have nicotine patches to help. They haven’t invented “mug punter” patches yet ! Seriously though, if you can’t go two weeks without a bet then give up trying to improve your discipline and/or your P/L. You are doomed to a life of trying to make it work but always failing. \If you did make it through two weeks without a bet then well done. Treat yourself to a night out or weekend away with the money you saved.
At the start of the third week you need to review the spreadsheet and 5 strategies. Hopefully the 5 you picked have shown a small profit, and/or bags of potential. Maybe you have changed the detail of how to play them. Change them, dump them, pick new ones. Do what you have to and track the improvements through-out this third week.
Fourth week - Review the 5 strategies again at the start of the 4th week and ditch any that aren’t performing well enough. By now you should be familiar with spreadsheet use, your discipline is shit hot, and you have 2 or 3 strategies that show potential – now is the time to play for real money but with small stakes (10% of what you will end of using).
Restart the spreadsheets with a small but real betting bank. Try them for real. Observe their strength’s and weaknesses, look for improvements.
Fifth week – monitor your progress each week. Improve. If your strategies suck then dump them and start again with new ones. But DO NOT use full stakes until you have confidence in your strategies and more importantly in your discipline. If things are going well then treat yourself to a non-gambling treat. A meal with the family, a night out with the boys, a new (or second) flat screen monitor. Do something to reward yourself. Five weeks of disciplined gambling using 2 or 3 reasonable strategies is worthy of reward.
Sixth week – If at the end of this week you are still disciplined and still above target then increase the stakes to the full level.
Other practical advice;- Strategies should be trialed for longer than 3 weeks, to become proven Golden Egg Laying Geese, but at least with discipline and regular reviews it will take you a long while to lose what you had previously been losing every month.
- Keep learning, keep improving. Some of the threads on the Betfair forum are very useful, especially for newly disciplined but inexperienced traders.
- Pre-race (low risk) trading can be profitable. This is where you combine backs and lays, with price swings, to gain a small profit before the race starts. But you will need to have extra special discipline levels to make it work. Due to its low profit margin, one mistake in this trading could easily wipe out all profits that have taken a month to build up.
- Once you have 2 or 3 strategies that work you can add to them. All new strategies should be tested as above, by a few weeks of paper trading, and a few weeks of small stakes.
- Very few people will share strategies that work otherwise their “edge”, advantage over the market, will reduce. If anyone tells you that they can make the game pay without trading, treat them with suspicion. It is very very tough to consistently beat the market without at least an element of trading. If they offer to sell you tips then ask yourself – “why are they selling the Goose That Lays Golden Eggs”?
- When selecting punting/trading strategies ask yourself why the strategies should work. Do they take advantage of market over-reactions? E.g. Consider a race with two joint favourites – the course/distance/trainer/jockey are all positives. One JF always runs from the front, leading, the other is always held up and makes the occasional mistake but normally recovers and finishes well – which would you rather back pre-race? I would rather back the lead horse and lay off all or some of the risk in-running, taking advantage of a market over-reaction on the lead horse. Going for a level green screen (equal win on all outcomes) or using trading to improve the effective odds on my view of the race outcome being correct.
- “one button’ betting software can be useful especially with their improved Betfair page refresh rates and the ability to download prices into excel. The downside is that mistakes can be costly. One click bets can also mean one click mistakes, some of which could cause a big dent in your P/L.
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Never bet what you can’t afford to lose. Gambling addiction is an illness, seek help. http://www.gamcare.org.uk/site.builder/helpline.htmlThat’s all I am prepared to say on this subject for free. Good luck.
