If you want to advance beyond the level of the casual punter and give yourself a better chance to make money wagering on horse races, then you’ll need to up your game and take the whole thing to a more serious level.
In this post, we’ll briefly take a look at a few tips that will help you raise your game and hopefully your cash pool as well.
Don’t Expect (Or Try) To Get Rich
Placing bets with a get rich quick mentality is likely the fastest road to the punting poor farm. Yes, you could get lucky and pull off a big win occasionally, but any betting strategy that’s reliant on massive returns is likely just going to eat up your betting account very rapidly.
One of the keys to successful punting is percentages. You want strategies where you win more often than you lose, but at the same time, bets that pay out enough to be viable without high levels of risk.
If you stay on the conservative side and be happy increasing your account by about 10% each betting session, your money will steadily increase without sending your stress levels through the roof.
Be Selective When You Place Your Bets
Most professional punters – those that actually make a living from betting on the races – will tell you that they don’t place lots of bets each week. In fact, they might even go for weeks without placing any bets because their predetermined conditions haven’t been met.
The idea is to learn all you can about the game, the horses, trainers, everything that can help you make the best choices. Then it’s a matter of coming up with strategies where a variety of conditions all have to line up before you’ll risk putting your money down.
Sure, this method sounds way less exciting than placing heaps of bets every weekend, but if you genuinely want to make a steady profit from this, then excitement needs to be taken out of the equation.
This isn’t about emotion. It’s about getting it right…consistently.
You can’t place bets like the once a year punter will do when trying to pick the winner from the Melbourne Cup horses. It needs to be methodical, thought out, tried and tested.
Don’t Always Expect To Win
You’ll have winning streaks and you’ll experience losing streaks, no matter how great your strategies may be. It’s just a part of the business.
The trick is not to let a string of losses get the better of you and start betting out of emotion to try and make the money back.
Stick with your strategies, and if they just don’t seem to be working consistently enough, then tweak and do some more testing; either with no money down or just $1 wagers.
You won’t win all the time but you can be learning and improving all the time. Just keep your emotions on the back burner as much as you can. Emotional betting is never a good strategy.
Don’t Focus On Favourites Or Long Shots
Neither of these strategies has proven to be successful for people who have tried them. Favourites don’t always win (only about 30-35% of the time) and long shots very rarely win.
If you’re putting your money down on a win or a place, you are better off choosing horses that are close to being the favourite, but based on other criteria, such as recent form, how they perform over that race distance, track conditions, who the jockey is and more.
It’s about having all your predetermined criteria match up. If the horse that meets these criteria ends up being the favourite, then go for it, but never base everything on the fact that a horse is a favourite and nothing else.
Treat It Like a Business
If you do, then the more chance it has of becoming a business and you’ll be a successful professional punter.
Have some risk management in place and don’t spend more on bets at one race meeting than what you’ve allocated. If you lose your betting budget for that day, stop and save yourself for the next time.
Learn when to walk away from a losing streak and come back fresh.