You’re either comfortable with variance.

Or you’re willing to learn how to manage your expectations by understanding it

Or you’re going to quit.

In September we’ve had an unusual amount of feedback about the recent performance of the trackers at bookiebashing. These ranged from “extremely poor” and “is there any point in continuing?” and “it’s time to quit” to “I’ve made £30k in the first 4 months”. A kaleidoscope of experiences. 

None of the above is representative of the average experience, these are outliers, but they go to show that:

1. One person can be losing whilst another is winning and
2. Some will associate short term losing runs with a change in the quality of data. 

Is the quality of data and analysis better through winning periods than losing periods? No, it’s not. It’s exactly the same. The matter of fact is, in value betting it is impossible to bypass a losing period. Some are longer than others. Your expected variance profile depends on volume, odds and equity. Bet infrequently at high odds and low equity and losing runs will be long. Bet frequently at lower odds and higher equity and losing runs will be shorter, but they will still exist. 

The typical profile of a bookiebashing member measures losing runs in months, not weeks. They may have 3-4 winning months and 8-9 losing months a year. They just win more when they win than when they lose.

I have posted a few graphs below that report on our internal monitoring of performance. September 2023 horses did seem to run under expected performance at some bookmakers both using Default and BBAlgo metrics. Under a default setting the break even period has gone back to July. We can understand that can feel like forever, but it is not a long period of time in value betting.  This also coincides with a period in which the bookmakers themselves reported lower earning which usually means a disproportionate amount of favourites winning, most of the value we find is not with the favourites.

If you started betting on golf on January 2023 and were following our weekly golf options then you would have still been down after the 3M Open on July 30th (after nearly 60% of the year). We know for a fact we lost a few golf bettors up to this point. That was frustrating as the inevitable upswing then occurred. Now we have a +15% ROI in 2023 on golf, still under the long term +31% ROI but within reasonable expectation.

The bottom graph shows the performance of +EV Double Delight Hatrick Heaven bets on football. The recent downswing has been going on since April 15th. It will turn around.

Given the nature of the bookiebashing there will be different ROI profiles depending on what you bet on. The graphs below are representative of a sample of data we’ve recorded from the trackers. On horses the long term ROI on BBAlgo is 6%, using default is 5%. As of Sep 28th 2023 long term ROI on golf is 31% and DDHH it is 19%. Short term all trackers have experienced losing runs. That will always happen, there is no escaping it. Longer term they are all in healthy profit.

These are the times that will make or break an advantage player. If you’re playing the game you either quit or you ride out these periods to your eventual benefit.