Dr Pangloss,

Personally I think the selection process is the most important. I would rank Psychology 2nd and Staking 3rd. My reasoning is that no amount of Psychology or Staking can turn a losing system into a winning one (although either one can turn a winning system into a losing one) so the selection process has to be right to start with. If you do have a winning system then Psychology does become quite important - I know I have missed out on quite a few good wins in the past due to being too cautious.

Maybe you should start another thread with your thoughts on the matter - I will be happy to contribute to it (and I am sure others will too). I just don't want to divert this thread from the main subject matter.

__________________
"Computers can do that????" - Homer Simpson

TOPIC: Why do the majority of betting systems fail?

Response: Because of an unfailing and persistent disregard for -

(a) staking methodology
(b) Psychology

It might be the case that the majority of betting system users fail at (a) or (b), or both.

I respect the view expressed in your post be careful and can not say you are wrong. As for being off topic - I think not.

1. Psychology.

This has to be ranked number one in my book.
If you don't possess the self discipline, patience and faith in your own system, you'll never win. Providing your system is proven and sound, you will win - but not if the right mentality isn't there.

Staking is ranked last.
Your system has to win at level stakes betting. Correct staking will only maximise profits, but if your system doesn't show a level stakes profit, it will maximise losses.

becareful .what would you say about the power of ten then,.if you want to make money at the races year in and year out you cannot achieve this with flat stake betting.the margins on win betting are too tight.bettors must look for more innovative ways of betting.in todays enviroment the only way to make consistent long term profits is through effective staking strategies.winning at racing is acombination of picking enough winning selections and an appropiate means of betting the selections.

Ok, heres my more detailed thoughts/ramblings on the subject of Selections v Staking v Psychology. Obviously doing any one of them badly can ruin you so they are all important, however if I had to rank them I would do so as follows:

1. Selection System/Methodology
I rank this first as it is the foundation of becoming a successful punter. As has been said numerous times before no amount of creative staking can save a system that does not show a profit on the basic selections. Similarly it doesn't matter how good your psychology is you still will not win if you can come up with selections that show a profit. Also I believe it is the hardest one of the three to develop so it probably deserves to be the area you should concentrate on initially (no point wasting time working on the other two if you can't crack this one - find another hobby/job instead).

2. Psychology
Once you have a selection system/method that works then the next most important thing is getting the psychology right (I am still working on this). To a certain extent the psychology required is similar to that needed for share trading. I think you need to be able to ignore the actual money involved and just focus on your plan/system - it shouldn't matter whether you are $1000 up or $1000 down for the day you need to treat each bet on its merits. As Equine Investor said you need patience, self discipline and faith in the system otherwise you can cost yourself a lot of money through either over aggressiveness (not enough patience/self discipline to wait for the right bet) or being too cautious (not having enough faith to place a bet your system has indicated is a valid bet).

3. Staking
In my book staking comes a long last to the other two. As I have mentioned many times before I don't believe any staking plan can improve your POT in the long run so the main purpose here should be to insure your bets are sized appropriately to maximise the return. This means making sure your bets are not too big otherwise you will destroy your bank if you hit a run of outs. If the bet size is too small you will miss out on potential profits from your winners. I personally use a 1% of bank rule (so if my bank is $10000 then the maximum bet is $100 - if my bank falls to $9000 then bet is $90, if it increases to $11000 then bet is $110). The 1% comes from the fact I am generally betting on 10-1 chances to win - obviously you need to work out a % appropriate for your type of betting. Also if you are betting with TAB with larger bets you also need to consider how much you can bet into the pool without affecting the odds too much.

In my opinion the reason most betting systems fail is due to factor 1 - the wrong selections. A system itself cannot fail due to Psychology (although an individual punter may lose money with a winning system due to bad psychology). Many systems try to use elaborate (or simple) loss chasing staking plans to make a profit and inevitably fail in the long run, however the real cause of the failure is not the staking system but rather the fact the selections do not make a profit at level stakes (the staking plan just hides the problem until the inevitable crash).

__________________
"Computers can do that????" - Homer Simpson

DarkyDog,

I have never seen the details of "The Power of 10" but I totally disagree that you cannot make a profit at level stakes in the long run. It may take a lot of work to keep your system/method fine tuned but I believe it is certainly possible to average 10% POT or higher year after year. Mathematically speaking staking plans will give you the same POT in the long run as level stakes betting (the only exception is if you increase bet size on bets that have a higher expected return - ie. the larger the "over" the larger the bet) so I just don't see the point.

__________________
"Computers can do that????" - Homer Simpson

In principle, I tend to side with Becareful.

The most important element is the Selection System/Methodology. If the Methodology does not make a level stakes profit, no matter what one does with a staking plan there is still the potential - ie risk - of being wiped out due to a losing seqence of bets. If the Methodology makes a level stakes profit, provided care is taken in terms of level of bets you WILL make a profit. In addition, as PPM have highlighted on a number of occassions, staking plans do not improve the POT.

If you can not make a level stakes profit over a long sequence of bets, it is my opinion that you will never make profit using a staking system, all you will do is delay the inevitable realisation that the method is wrong.

In order to improve my own methods, I review them without fail every week, ie they self learn. As a result, some of my methods have returns in excess of 44 % POT over tens of thousands of dollars of wagers.

The second element and just as important at improving the profitability is the Psychology. The key to this is still related to methodologies and in saying this I mean the thought process/psychology of chosing whether or not to lay the particular bet. An example that comes to mind was Avon Jewel in Brisbane two or three weeks ago. My methods picked the horse as a bet however given that the horse had run at the track 5 times for no wins and no places, I left the bet alone. The horse won but over the long term those final choices whether to bet or not have saved me far more money that they have cost me. In fact, over the past 9 months, only two of the possible bets left alone have won for a saving far exceeding the dividends.

The Psychology issues seem to often be approached in terms of "will to bet" whereas I approach them more from the point of "reason why my selection should be bet". In saying that, for me a good bet is a method/system selection that seems to have a good chance of winning either because it has run a good race in a fast time already at the distance (my preferred final review) or for some other potential positive reason. A bad bet is one that afterwards you can look back as say "I was not confident that it had a good chance because xxxxxxx" and in Psychological terms, we should always learn from those decisions.

The staking for me is a non issue as I always total the days results in terms of profit or loss however treat each method as a totally seperate entity on level stakes.

regards

The Phoenix

If you are a real systems buff there is a service call ************** GTS by Marcel Plant & accociates.

For $1000 you get back data of 20,000 races .
With this you can start testing any criteria & most systems criteria that one may want to check , to see if it`s got legs or not .
It has a provision to greate & save your own system criteria ,if you subscibe to their daily form data service , you can have your system scan the entire days various meetings to find your systems selections within seconds.
It will show ,profit & loss , strike rate , etc.within seconds, it can do more in one hour than someone could do in a month.

For another $3000 a year they supply a daily form service plus update past results to add to you data .
If one makes money out of any system idea ,then I guess its not expensive , no matter what system you come across they all have winning $ loosing months.
You have to be mentally prepaired for that .

__________________
Cheers.

Very interesting (and different) contributions all round. It seems that:

SELECTION methodology will determine expectancy (ave win div./strike rate etc)

STAKING (position sizing) will determine net profit

PSYCHOLOGY will determine the degree of integrity with which SELECTION and STAKING are applied.

Bhagwan

The TRB product is the most impressive system testing tool I have had the good fortune to trial. However, excellence has its price, and the software itself was somewhat difficult to manage for a computer dunce such as myself.

In searching for alternatives I came across http://www.ird.com.au a little while back and was particulary impressed. Wondered if you or anyone else had any experience with this product.

Thanking you in anticipation.

[ This Message was edited by: Dr Pangloss on 2002-10-16 10:11 ]

Dr Pangloss, I am presently using the two day trial of the CIRA system tester you mentioned above. Perplexing thing is that I can't replicate results found with the same rules, or so close as to be not funny, ex the Price Predictor program.
Other comments are that it is a bit slow and laborious only giving the option of scanning 3 month blocks at a time and the lack of a spread sheet facility (unless I'm missing something) for later, more in-depth analysis is a minus. Interesting though, thanks for the link.