Beat the Credit Crunch

[TrimTheKing]

Here we go chaps, here is some totally free advice from me to you, on beating the credit crunch and, as mentioned in a previous post, avoiding contact with financial institutions for either lending of borrowing.

This is massive so you better steady yourselves, I call it............Gambling!

:lol:

Me and a mate have been dabbling with a well known online betting site for a few months, when they had a promotion offering you £25 free bets if you opened an account with them. We have played around with various different betting styles and then just before Christmas decided to have a little competition to see who could make the most money in 2 months.

We started with what I had in my account at the time, £31.17, and off we go. Now I am a very conservative gambler, happy to take very low risk/small reward bets. whereas my mate is a little more cavalier in his approach, tending to go big on fairly risky bets.

So far last year he has done very well making some big profits (took out over £4k!!!) but also takes a hammering every now and then, whereas I came up with the idea of not getting sucked into chasing losses and set myself a target of 5% profit per day on my initial investment, keeping the risks low and a steady return.

Now this is obviously peanuts when you look at the starting pot, but with the magic that is compound interest this comes in, on Feb 28th, at the princely sum of £536.72!! :lol:

I worked it out in a little spreadsheet and if I extend this out to my birthday at the start of July, and obviously providing I don't bomb it all out a blow the lot up the wall, this comes in at a wallet busting £305,037.22! :lol:

I will keep you in the loop with how it goes, both the good and the inevitable crash! FYI, my projection sheet shows that I should be at a pot of £76.24 as of today, but with the recent spate of multiple games in a day I find myself ahead of the game at £135.03 and am yet to lose a bet.

Early retirement here I come! :wink:

Cheers

Mark

PS SWMBO thinks I'm an silly person and just wasting my time I said, if that's the case then sign this piece of paper that states you want no part of my ill gotten gains, she politely declined to sign Apparently she's not taking the chance that I might be a spectacularly lucky silly person

If it succeeds then I will let you all in to my secret winning formula, then write a book about it. Hopefully I won't have to come back to you in 2 months asking for a spare room to rent....

 

[Escudo]

Mark,

If I were you I would quit now, while you have a profit.

Trust me I know about these things. (sorry to be so doom and gloom)

Tony.

 

[Jenx]

Hey Mark !

been there with a rather interesting scheme for the old horses..

I worked this one out myself .. and therein is probably the flaw !

Brief synopsis, if i can remember it off the top of my head....

Theres an average of 47 Horse races a day in the racing season.
48% of these races are won by the favourite.
( :idea: ) this is the point where the little bulb went on, in 'my head at least'. :wink: ... I can 'use these statistics, surely! '.

So.. theory was.. start with a 'pot' or your 'bankroll'.

Set an acceptable % that you are looking to gain daily ( % of your starting bankroll ).
I went for 5%.

Now, the 'key' was to keep backing favourites , every race.. ( you're playing the 'averages' game here... )
EG : You start with a bankroll of £100.
Set out to win 5% on day 1 ( £5 )
First race, - favourite goes to post at 2/1
to win your fiver ( notwithstanding your initial stake.. but £5 or 5% Clear profit ok.. ) .. you must bet £2.50.

If he wins... you've achieved your target.. and you MUST STOP.

if he loses, you now have to look to win your £5 target + your £2.50 that your are 'down' at this point, from race 1.

Fav in race 2 goes to post but his odds are awful .. lets say 11/10.
You now have to stake £6.82 to try and win your £7.50
if he wins... fine, and your done.... STOP.

But he doesn't.. he loses ..
You progress to race 3....
Now you are looking for your £5 ( 5% ) profit + £7.50 + £6.82. in race 3
Your now needing to win £19.32

lets again assume favie-hoss goes to post, at once again horrible odds.. ( as favourites tend to be !! :wink: ).. of something like , lets say evens
( 1/1 ) -- your stake is now £19.32.

Three races in, and you can see if its not happened yet.. its beginning to get serious.... your now betteing 4x what you set out to win at the beginning of the day, but its very exciting !.. ( beware.. you know there's a moral coming here eh ? ... :wink: )

And he loses again... ,
but salvation comes in race 5 for example.. and you get your winner.
THEN STOP.

So tomorrow comes... 47 more races, lots more chances to win... and you start the day with a bankroll of £105, .. and you are trying now to win 5% of That.

And so it continues....

for interest.. make yourself a wee spreadsheet and see how fast the numbers start to become very very serious indeed , days-wise.

Well... i did this with 'play money for a fortnight, and whilst it was sometimes scary.. after two weeks, I'd a very healthy 'play money balance. ITS WORKING !!

So I did it for real, with a starting balance of a rather ambitious 250 quid.
Ten days in... ten successful days.. I had a good pot !
So I withdrew it all, except £500... ( to start again as my bankroll )...
and paid off an aged debt.

Off we go again.. with the starting 500... went great for 17 days...
then went pear shaped. As you see from the example above, the stakess begin to get big very quick... the reality is, you have about 12 races to hit your winner on a daily basis, and each day started afresh.. a whole new ball game each day, so to speak...
and day 18.... 11 or 12 races in...no winner yet... Yup, I'd lost the lot.
And it was 'the lot'. It was thousands.

A very rapid end to my dreams of an AC Cobra for me, lotus elise for the missus, brand new Yamaha R1 in the garage... country estate with the red setters and the ponies etc etc....
And good old Willie Hills let me do it, all online... let me keep 'upping my daily threshold' .. whilst always displaying the 'responsible gambling' notice in there somewhere.

Painful lesson ! ...and nobody's fault by mine, 100% :roll:
Was I additcted to gambling ? strangely No.. not at all... I was beguiled and intrigued by statistics ... very much so ! soon as i lost it all.. I didn't go looking to back horses the next day, or the next week or the next month... so I wasn't an addicted gambler ( i don't think.... )

But its a good story and a good lesson...

You can have great fun 'playing' with the horses....
I still have a wee bet now and again, the odd couple of quid here and there... but nothing like placing £400 quid bets on Category D 'nothing' races like I was doing for a while there...

In the end its Stan James, Joe Coral, Willie Hill, Bet-Fred or Larry Ladbrokes that win...

Take it easy and enjoy ! 8) 8) 8) 8) 8)

 

[eggflan]

Hi Mark , now i dont gamble and i never have so im not interested in the theories behind it , the way i look at your plan is this , you have started with money you had spare so there is still food in the cupboard , if it works and you walk away with a tidy sum in your pocket then good for you If it fails and you loose the lot then so be it as long as you think about your starting figure and not what you have in the winning pot , i see it as if you start with £20 and build it up to £5000 and then you loose it all well i would say you have lost £20 and not £5000 , its when people start taking money from wages that they cant afford to lose that there is a problem ..

So i say good luck to you and keep us up to date with how its going :wink: :wink:

 

[devonwoody]

Yeah and if you did find a winning formula, the bookies would ban you.

So you still cant win.

 

[TrimTheKing]

Guys, I think some of you have taken me little too literally here! I am not getting sucked into a world of gambling beyond my means, just having a laugh.

As eggflan says, this is the exact approach I have taken, in fact since we originally started this I have withdrawn about £300 more than my initial stake money, so as you say all I am playing with is money that I have never had, so I am not out of pocket.

I am under no illusions that gambling is a means to early retirement, and well aware that it could come crashing down any second, but I am interested to see whether, if by a methodical and not too greedy approach I can make it work for me.

I can see that there are some strong feelings towards gambling, and I do know someone who got themself into a bit of financial difficulty with it so am well aware of the dangers.

Hi Jenx - I have heard about that 'method' before, bit too rich for my blood to be honest! I hate losing money so the thought of doubling up on bets until you hit the winner scares the life out of me! :shock: I am quite happy with my current level of making between £2-5 at a time and most of the time I am winning the bet before a ball has even been kicked due to the odds dropping closer to game time.

As I say, I am currently nearly £300 in the black which has been withdrawn and put to good use, so the money in the betting account is something intangible really as I have never owned it.

I will leave it there as I have no intent to offend or upset people.

Cheers

Mark

 

[Grinding One]

Over here you do not bet the horses you watch the owners and drivers...they take turns in winning.
I play the first three holes they run out of,and only to show ...so if they(the favorites) come in 1-2-or3 I win....you make a little money this way but not a lot of money at one time.Now if you play the long shots and hit,well you now have a bankroll.

 

[Jenx]

Excellent Mark ... there you go, you've nearly paid for your your next fill up of heating oil !

Sounds excellent. and very 'controlled', which is probably a very good thing

I only lost what I'd won - and whilst it stuck in the throat a bot, cause it was a mighty big hunk of cash... at the end of the day, I guess I wasn't out of pocket.. it was only 'winnings'.
And what can you do, bar be 'philosophical' !

I developed a massive aversion to John McCririck though.. well, TBH, I think I had that beforehand !

 

[TrimTheKing]

Excellent Mark ... there you go, you've nearly paid for your your next fill up of heating oil !

Now you mention it, I could do with talking to you about this again in a bit more detail!

Everything is working fine, but I am getting through oil like billy-o, around 100L per week, how does this sound? Feels heavy to me, but then again the house is BIG and running two boilers, I'm just concerned that maybe the system isn't running as efficiently as it could be, but my knowledge on what to look for is limited.....

Cheers

Mark

 

[Jenx]

No worries.... I'm off down to the 'big smoke' of Uxbridge in a few minutes for the rest of the week, but will have a bit of a 'study' on it when I'm back up home again, as long as thats ok ?