Creating a betting tissue

By James Condron

I have always considered ‘value’ as an important part of my betting, associating the term more with longer-priced runners rather than short-priced favourites, using instinct to separate good and bad value bets, rather than any quantitative analysis of what constitutes a ‘value’ bet.

The approach of professional punters by and large tends to involve analysing a race before betting on horses that are trading at a higher or more generous price than their chance in the respective race should entitle them to be rather than focusing simply on selecting winners irrespective of the price. Alan Potts in his book, The Inside Track, The Professional Approach, makes the point regarding short-price favourites that “an even money favourite is prone to all the ills of the thoroughbred and is just as likely to fail to show his form for physical reasons, as is a 33/1 outsider”, before going on to argue that it requires a phenomenal strike rate to make significant profits backing short priced horses and if backing 100 horses at even money, you would have to back at least 51 winners to make a profit.

A number of writers have proposed various systems pinpointing areas that the punter may locate ‘value’, amongst those that caught my eye were James Pyman’s ‘Impact Value’ theory and the ‘Tail End System’ proposed by Ross Newton, both of which suggest that profits can be made from looking past fancied horses in the market (in Pyman’s case due to the overestimated significance of certain factors in the market), but the one approach that I was always intrigued by was the creation your own betting ‘tissue’. Dave Nevison, in his book, “No Easy Money” attributes the making of a ‘tissue’ as the foundation of his success as a professional gambler. Nevision gives an insight to his approach, stating that after studying the form of a race, he creates a ‘tissue’, which provides his assessment of the true chances of each horse of winning the race.

In creating a ‘tissue’, the betting percentages of all horses’ chances must add up to 100 per cent (a bookmaker’s tissue will add up to more than 100 per cent in order to generate a theoretical profit margin for the bookmaker). The formula for working out the betting percentage is 100 ÷ x where ‘x’ is the decimal odds. For example, the betting percentage of a 6/4 shot (decimal odds 2.5) is worked out as follows: 100 ÷ 2.5 = 40 per cent. This horse now takes up 40 per cent of the market meaning that the remainder of the field have a 60 per cent chance of winning the race between them in your eyes.

In relation to the selection of bets, Nevison works on the basis that if he can back a horse with bookmakers at a price more than 15 per cent than what he considers the price should be then he will back that horse, sometimes perhaps two or three horses in the same race.

Buoyed by the helpful advice contained in Nevison’s book, which included a handy betting percentages table for ease of use, for a short period for the summer I created my own ‘tissues’, hoping to pinpoint value and take advantage of discrepancies in bookmakers’ prices.

Despite my best intentions, I must admit that I struggled with the practicalities of creating of my own ‘tissue’ for races, primarily due to the time consuming nature of the process and my own average arithmetical skills. Initially, I found that I could spend up to one hour working on a ‘tissue’ getting bogged down with ensuring that all the prices of the horses added up to 100 per cent (in more cases than not, I ended up rounding up figures like 99.6 or 99.8 to 100) rather than focusing sufficiently on the ‘bread and butter’ tasks of studying the form. While with more practise in compiling my own prices, I reduced the average time down to 45 minutes per race, I still found that the whole process greatly restricted the number of races I could focus on per day.

While I can see the benefits of having your own betting tissue for a race and over time it may indeed give astute punters an edge, the practice is very time consuming especially when taking into account the demands of analysing the daily racing meetings and administrative tasks such as writing up notes on horses, keeping up to date accounts and taking best prices available on selections.

To cover all these tasks and proceed with the ‘tissue’ approach, it may be necessary for punters to form partnerships with other punters, delegating certain responsibilities, for example, one person could be responsible for reading form, bet selection and race analysis while the other could create betting tissues (and compare to bookmakers’ prices), place bets and general administration.

As unfortunately, I also hold down a full time job and a rather time consuming (and expensive hobby) involving caring for six horses, I simply don’t have the time to create ‘tissues’ for races in which I may be interested in having a bet. This highlights a problem that all ‘part time’ punters face no matter how thorough their approach, sometimes there simply are not enough hours in the day to address all areas of your betting. Notwithstanding the challenging nature of the ‘tissue’ process, it was interesting to put oneself in the place of an odds compiler albeit for a limited period. Considering the amount of racing which takes place in Ireland and Britain weekly, it must be demanding for bookmakers’ odds compliers to price up all races and keep on top of all form. The punter meanwhile can be selective with regard to when they place a bet and whether your bets are guided by the ‘tissue’ system or simply instinct as to what constitutes ‘value’, the discerning punter can still exploit opportunities in the market.

By James Condron