image

A Guide To Laying

Don't dance to the fiddler's tune - be proactive

It's awfully easy, especially after a successful period betting, to celebrate your good fortune/genius (delete as appropriate) when you really should be burying your head in the form book and preparing a path for tomorrow's riches. Almost all of us have succumbed to the warm glow of success only to be slapped in the face the following day by the wet fish of poor preparation. There is a reason why successful punters stay successful and that's because they realise that hard work is what made them

If you don't put in the hard work, you will find that the clever punters have gained an edge on you and you are struggling from flagfall. It's only too easy to fall back into the habits of the recreational gambler in such circumstances and you will find yourself potentially chasing losses or playing on events that, with fifteen minutes study the previous evening would have earned the tag “leave well alone”. Just because you were a roaring success on Monday, don’t fall into the trap that you have the game sussed ~ you’ll come down to earth with a hefty bump. Honest punters will admit that for every day which they have prepared poorly can produce a loss which five days of application will take to put right.

If you are a horse player, to use an Americanism, then print out the relevant racecards the day before and at the very least give them a cursory glance and make preliminary notes on what opportunities may be available ~ if you have been betting with success earlier, then at this stage your mind will be surprisingly sharp and your ability to make quick judgements reliable. The same thought process applied at 2pm the following day without previous study can produce surprisingly uneven thinking.

I tend to print out a summary of the card I want to concentrate on (I will look at a maximum of two meetings per day in this way ~ any more and it becomes too distracting) and scribble my ratings by the side of the jockey names. Doing this race by race enables me to get a fair overview of all the races and I can get a fair handle on which races I like from a punting angle, even before I price them up. Afterwards, I will read form summaries for the principle contenders and digest other relevant information, and then it’s off to bed before rising in the morning and beginning the process of pricing up each race. Obviously I don’t expect my approach to be the only one which will bring success but it does demonstrate that the best way to tackle the conundrum of betting on the horses is to approach it in a constructive manner. This will improve the clarity of your thought processes and will enable you to identify a number of potential opportunities very quickly. It is these opportunities that you should then spend the majority of time maximising for your financial gain.

As always, while this approach is geared towards betting on horse racing, the principle applies across the betting board.

© Daily Donkey Ltd, 2024