Warts and All (16th January 2005)

Well, another losing week!

Currently I am on a business trip in Japan and I had hoped that would get away from racing for a while. Oh no the availability of broadband access, coupled with jet lag and a 9 hour difference between Japan/UK and a spice of “bored mug punter” all conspired in me having irrational bets on Saturday with inevitable losses. The Japanese have a word "baka gaijin" which means idiot foreigner. I wonder what their word is for "Mug Punter". When will I learn?

With me it’s not the mechanical side of betting which is the problem. This trip has proven to me that not having the time, space and mental capacity to think about race research seems to be my downfall. I mentioned a few weeks ago that I thought that lack of trend analysis was the reason for successes on Saturday and not midweek. This point is true however; I also get the feeling that Saturday is my best day because on Fridays after work I have plenty of time to concentrate on one thing and one thing only. Punting on Saturday’s.

I'm formulating an idea that until I build up my confidence, I should concentrate on principle race meetings in the same way that Pricewise (Tom Segal) limits his selections to the most valuable races of the week. Plenty of time, plus lots of historical stats seems to be a winning combination in my case, and in the words of the great Mark Cotton ("Value Betting" Aesculus Press)

"betting is never a game in which to make sweeping generalisations but it would not be too far to wide of the mark to suggest that most punters lose because they persist in backing bad horses in bad races"

Point taken Mark and I have added a link ("selection methodology") as a reminder to ignore races that require too much guess work.

Anyway, the web site feature list is almost completed. I have now added a link which allows me to search my previous posts. This will be handy if I need to recall a horse/race analysis or some previous information such as a course description. The only remaining feature is to add a notebook for horses which that I wish to follow. I’m kind of doing this already via www.gg.com alerts however; it will be nice for this information to be part of the web site. Just need to think about content and layout.

On a different note, here are some photo’s of Tokyo