Insights

Pools betting strategy | Part 1

Syndicate captain and racing expert Matt Bisogno gives us the first of a fascinating introduction to pools betting strategy. To read his original article, you can click here.

 

What is pools betting?

Pools betting involves every players’ stake being combined into a pot. As the pool operator, Colossus take a share or ‘deduction’ of the pool and the rest is distributed between those who were in successful in the pool. Winning shares are known as dividends.

This means that the objective of your pools betting strategy is not only to predict correct outcomes but also for those outcomes to be less obvious than most players expect, in order to increase the value of your dividend.

Horse racing pools with multiple legs can offer an interest throughout an entire afternoon and, if a few fancied runners underperform, they can pay handsomely in relation to equivalent fixed odds wagers.

For an example of such a bet, let’s look at a place pool from Thursday’s card at the 2020 Cheltenham Festival, or what is known on Colossus as the Place 6.

The gross pool, the total amount bet into the pool, was £31,219. After the operator’s deduction, the net pool prize was £24,975. That pot would be divided between the number of remaining, and therefore winning, tickets after leg six, with the cost of entry £1 per line, or currency equivalent.

Players can bet with smaller stakes per line, as little as 10p, however doing so proportionally reduces the prize that you can win. For example if you choose to bet 10p per line, a tenth of the £1 maximum, that line can only win up to a tenth of the jackpot. Each full £1 line is known as a unit.

In the first race of the Cheltenham Place 6, the favourite, Faugheen, ran third, with 4/1 Samcro winning. From 31,219 starting units, 16,126 went forward to leg two.

Then in the second race, all four placed horses were towards the top of the market, including the unnamed favourite. However, it still resulted in a significant reduction of units and 6,643

progressed to leg three..

The third race, the Ryanair Chase, saw 2/1 second favourite Min beat 16/1 Saint Calvados with the 7/4 favourite in third. The vast majority of remaining units, 5,412 of them, had one of these selections and went forward to leg four.

However in leg four, the Stayers’ Hurdle, a huge proportion of those units were invested in the heavy favourite Paisley Park, who ran a clunker and was unplaced. This race was the kingmaker on the day and just 66.8 units (less than 2% of the running-on total) successfully predicted any of 50/1 Lisnagar Oscar, 20/1 Ronald Pump, or 33/1 Bacardys to place.

The warm favourite won leg five but still reduced the remaining units by over 50%, leaving 32.3 to contest the final leg, the Mares’ Novices’ Hurdle. Here, the very well-backed second choice of the market, Concertista, beat stable mate and 9/1 chance Dolcita, with a 100/1 shot back in third.

From an initial total of 31,219 tickets, and a net pool of £24,975, there were just 8.78 standing after the sixth and final race. Therefore, the dividend paid £24,975 / 8.78 = £2,845 per unit.

 

Does pools betting offer value?

Pools betting is another betting market, in addition to fixed odds and exchanges, framed around the same product, in this instance horse racing. Thus, they do not always offer the best value.

If you want to back a favourite, doing so through pools betting is probably not the best option. Generally you’ll get better value on an exchange than pools betting or a fixed odds bookmaker can offer.

However, if you want to back a longer-priced horse, it will normally pools betting or the exchange will represent better value than fixed odds bookies.

And if you want to play a sequence of win or place bets you may get better value through a pools operator such as Colossus who offer Win 6 and Place 6 pools.

If you only like fancied runners in the sequence, you will have no edge in a pool and are better off betting either a fixed odds multiple or parlaying your winnings in exchange markets.

However, if you have an eye for an interesting outsider then multi-race sequences are for you. Remember, the objective is not just to be right but to be right when the vast majority of others are at least partially wrong so factor into your pools betting strategy.

 

Basic Staking: how players get it wrong

The nature of multi-race betting means that optimal staking is almost as important as picking the right horses. I’ve written about this before but it’s important to reiterate here.

Smart pickers of horses often confound their own attempts to take down big pots by either under or over-staking. A six-leg sequence involves the player selecting one or more horses per leg, the total number of lines on the ticket being a multiple of the number of picks per leg.

Thus, a player picking one horse per race will have 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 = 1 line. He or she will also have a very small chance of correctly predicting the required outcome unless he or she is either very lucky or most of the fancied horses make the frame/win. The former is not what this mini-course is about, the latter is generally self-defeating in the long-term.

This, then, is not an optimal way to bet such sequences.

 

What are Caveman Permutations in pools betting strategy?

A very common pools betting strategy is to select two horses per race in a permutation (or perm for short). Twice as much coverage per race gives a better chance of finding the right answer. However, it also invites the user to invest far more cash in a somewhat arbitrary manner. We can write the calculation for the number of bets by using ‘to the power of six’ (representing the six legs in the wager). Thus:

 

2 horses per leg = 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 2⁶ = 64

3 horses per leg = 3⁶ = 729

4 horses per leg = 4⁶ = 4096

 

As you can see, this quickly becomes expensive. Moreover, it is deeply sub-optimal.

We won’t necessarily feel we need the same amount of coverage in an eight horse race with an odds on favourite as we will with a twenty-runner sprint handicap, so staking them the same doesn’t make a lot of sense. Again, such players are aiming to get lucky rather than playing smart.

 

Bankers

One way to whittle the number of perms in one’s bet is by deploying ‘bankers’, a single selection in a leg. Adding a ‘single’, as they’re known in America, to a six-leg sequence can make a lot of difference to the number of bets. Such an entry makes a ‘to the power of six’ bet a ‘to the power of five’ one, as follows:

 

2 horses per leg with one banker = 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 1 = 2⁵ = 32 bets

3 horses per leg with one banker = 3⁵ = 243 bets

4 horses per leg with one banker = 4⁵ = 1024 bets

 

Using two bankers ratchets up the risk of a losing play but also dramatically further reduces the numbers of units staked:

 

2 horses per leg with two bankers = 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 1 x 1 = 2⁴ = 16 bets

3 horses per leg with two bankers = 3⁴ = 81 bets

4 horses per leg with two bankers = 4⁴ = 256 bets

 

So, for instance, a ticket with two bankers and four selections in the other four legs would amount to 256 bets, whereas four horses per leg through a six-leg sequence would be 4096 bets. At 10p a line, that’s the difference between £25.60 and £409.60.

Any single ticket perm, where all selections are staked to the same value (e.g. 10p’s in the example above), is known in the trade as a ‘caveman’ ticket. This is because it still doesn’t properly reflect, in staking terms, how we feel about our selected horses and can be considered unsophisticated or a blunt instrument.

 

Advanced Staking in pools betting strategy: How to get it right

So if those approaches are varying degrees of how not to stake multi-race bets, how should we do it?

The answer is a pools betting strategy known as ‘ABCX’, an approach which requires players to assign a wagering value to each horse in each race, like so:

 

A Horses: Top level contenders, likely winners, or horses which you think are significantly over-priced while retaining a decent win/place chance. In this latter group, a 50/1 shot you think should be 20/1 need not apply; but a 20/1 shot you make 5/1 is fair game (notwithstanding that such a disparity normally means you’ve made a mistake).

B Horses: Solid options, most likely to take advantage of any slip ups by the A brigade. Generally implying less ability and/or betting value than A’s.

C Horses: Outside chances, horses who probably won’t win but retain some sort of merit. Often it is a better play to allow these horses to beat you, or to bet them as win singles for small change to cover stakes.

X Horses: Horses that either lack the ability, or the race setup, to win (or place if playing a place wager), and which are thus excluded from consideration.

 

This approach works a lot better for multi-race win bets than for place pools. In the latter bet types, it is usually sensible to focus solely on A’s and B’s, with C picks going in to the same discard pile as X’s.

The exception to that rule of thumb would be events such as the Cheltenham Festival where pool and field sizes are huge. Indeed, the only sensibly staked way to catch one of the placers in the Stayers’ Hurdle would be on a C ticket.

Once this hierarchy has been established, a means of framing the selections into a bet, or bets, is required. I have used multiple tickets to optimize my staking for more than a decade and if you are not doing likewise, quite simply you are losing money.

The good news is that, while the mechanics I’m about to share are somewhat convoluted, I had a tool built to do all the grunt work ,which I will share in Part 2 of this article.

 

Staking multiple tickets using ABCX

Although I will share the tool, it is instructive to be aware of the maths of ABCX. The way I generally use my A, B and C picks are as follows:

 

– All A’s: 4x unit stake

– All A’s except for one B pick: 2x unit stake

– Mostly A’s with two B picks: 1x unit stake

– All A’s except for one C pick: 1x unit stake

 

Let’s take a recent pools betting example from a Win 6, which requires you to predict six winners, at Clonmel. This was a rare occasion when I went 3x on an ‘All A’ ticket as I didn’t feel it represented strong value. In truth, given it was the last day of racing in UK or Ireland for many weeks, I just wanted the action. Ahem.

As you can see from the image below, I had two A’s in leg one, three A’s in leg two, nine horses spread across A, B and C in leg three (as well as the unnamed favourite), three in A and three in C (plus unnamed fav) in leg four, a banker A in leg five, and five A’s with two B’s in leg six.

 

 

In terms of actual picks, I moved the 279F group in leg four from B to C to reduce stakes and I took a contrarian view in the last race where 7/11 were the first two in the betting. Although I didn’t especially like them, I didn’t want them to beat me either. The 136810 group of A’s represented the next five in the market. That was a bold play which happened to pay off this time.

In leg five, #3 was the 4/6 favourite in a short field of chasers, the smart horse Bachasson.

The image above shows my picks in the ticket builder tool. What it doesn’t show is the part-permutation tickets the tool created for me, or the associated stake values. So let’s introduce those now.

 

 

At the top of this image, there is a series of check boxes where a user may decide which combinations of selections he/she wants to play. In this case, and indeed most cases, I have selected all of those possible options.

Beneath each ticket is a further trio of check boxes where users may amplify stakes. As you can see, ticket one has a 3x amplification (would normally be 4x for me), tickets two and three are 2x unit stake, and tickets four to six are 1x normal stakes.

The ticket breakdown is:

 

Ticket 1: AAAAAA – 3x stake
Ticket 2: AABAAA – 2x stake
Ticket 3: AAAAAB – 2x stake
Ticket 4: AACAAA – 1x stake
Ticket 5: AAACAA – 1x stake
Ticket 6: AABAAB – 1x stake

 

The total amount wagered across these tickets was £214.80. Ignoring the absolute cost and its relation to your own level of staking, consider that cost against a full perm ‘caveman ticket’ of 2 x 3 x 10 x 7 x 1 x 7 = 2940 bets, at 10p = £294.00

But it is not the £80 (approximately 25%) saving in absolute cost that is the smartest component here. Rather, it is the fact that my stronger fancies, and the more likely sequences of winners, are amplified to more than 10p.

We’ll cover the use of unnamed favourites in pools betting strategy later. For now, suffice it to say that this is a means of keeping more tickets alive and playing up the merit of the favourite. I use this tactic a lot in multi-race tickets and will discuss it in more detail later.

It takes less than three minutes for me to place six tickets as per the above. Sometimes, I have as many as 20-25 tickets and it takes 12-15 minutes. That, clearly, is more time than it takes to place a single caveman ticket; but my extra effort is frequently repaid in the return.

The winning sequence at Clonmel looked like this:

 

Leg 1: #3, 6/4 favourite, an A selection

Leg 2: #13, 7/1 (drifted from 7/2), an A selection

Leg 3: #6, 9/4 favourite, an A and a B (FAV) selection

Leg 4: #7, 9/1, a C selection

Leg 5: #3, 4/6 favourite, an A banker

Leg 6: #1, 15/2, an A selection

 

There were three short-ish winning favourites in the six-race sequence and the winner of leg 2 was a strange price, given it had been strong in the market all morning at around 3/1, 7/2 before driting heavily. It then bolted up by 17 lengths.

The dividend, to a £2 stake, paid £10,710.85. My 5% unit was worth £620.21 including Consolation Prizes for four and five out of six. Consolation Prizes are a Colossus feature available in most pools (not including place pools) that offer you a prize for near misses.

 

 

As you can see in the prize breakdown above, there were only 0.05 winning units which, of course, was my ticket shown above. This means that there will be a £10,000 or so rollover to the next Irish race meeting, whenever that may be. The six tickets paid out as follows:

 

Ticket 1: £80.43 consolations

Ticket 2: £57.42 consolations

Ticket 3: £3.80 consolations

Ticket 4: £3.81 consolations

Ticket 5: £620.21 winning ticket, plus consolations

Ticket 6: £1.90 consolations

Total payout: £767.57

Total profit: £552.77

Approximate odds: 5/2

 

There is an important note in the totals above. The approximate payout on this bet was 5/2. Not 100/1 or 1000/1 or another big number.

With the safety net of Consolation Prizes, I am happy to stake more, relatively, in search of a bigger return.

This is another subject which I’ll discuss in part two of my pools betting strategy guide, in addition to when to play, using unnamed favourites, taking insurance, the value of the early markets, Syndicates, Cash Out and, of course, the ticket builder.

 

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