Hello and welcome to the first module in this “Master Your Betting” course.

To make sure the content of this course makes sense to you, regardless of your level of experience betting horses, I’m going to cover the basics first.

The aim of this module is to get a solid foundation prepped and in place for you to succeed in your betting.

STEP 1: MINDSET

The first step is to adopt the ideal mindset. Everything begins in the mind. The mind tells us if we are succeeding or failing, through thought and feeling, both of which are based on our current perceptions and past experiences.

For most of us, some re-programming will be necessary, because we need to teach the mind a new definition of what betting success actually means.

It doesn’t mean winning most of your bets every day. Nor does it mean taking home a profit every week, or even every month.

For our purposes, betting success can be defined as ‘our ability to generate a substantial profit from our betting activities, over the long term’.

Based on this definition, the best way to measure success is by calculating our annual return on investment, or ROI.

This is different from standard ROI used in betting, which is generally calculated as: Profit / Total Staked; whereas our annual ROI is calculated as:  Annual Profit / Initial Investment.

In other words, the way we calculate return on investment is the same as interest rates for most mainstream forms of investment, including your savings account.

So, when it comes to balancing the books at the end of each year, we’re looking for a positive return on investment, ideally somewhere in the 200% - 400% range. This translates to 200 - 400 points profit per year, based on betting 1 point level stakes.

Your actual ROI may be somewhat lower than this, at least initially, but any positive return is still a successful result.

After all, at least 98% of people who bet, lose money in the long run.

This means if you're in profit at the end of  year, you’re firmly in the 98th percentile, and can congratulate yourself on a job well done.

There’s always the opportunity to improve your performance the following year; and generally, the more experience you gain, the greater your returns are going to be.

When your ROI reaches the ideal range of 200% - 400%, it will be time to sit back and smile contentedly, in the knowledge that you’ve achieved more than probably 99.9% of your fellow betting enthusiasts.

The important take home point is to train your mind to define success as long term return on investment, instead of short term winnings.

While we’re at it, it’s also important to re-define failure.

Failure is not a losing day, week, or month. In the grand scheme of things, short term losing runs aren’t a problem, as long as we’re willing and able to ride them out.

That being said, if at the end of the year we’ve produced an overall loss, our current strategy for finding bets certainly needs to be re-developed and tested, before we resume our betting activities.

Mindset training is a process, not an event, and it requires regular work and reinforcement to keep us on the straight and narrow path. Particularly when our old instincts tell us to jump ship, chase losses, or gamble during a period of losing bets.

Diligence is required to make this work, but it can certainly be done.

STEP 2: INVEST A DEDICATED BANKROLL

The next port of call is to choose exactly how much to invest.

Before emptying your savings, here are a couple of important points to take into account-

First, once your bankroll is invested, it should not be used for anything else. Not for casual betting or gambling, not for a social event or holiday, and certainly not for the essentials such as your mortgage or weekly food shop.

By the way, your investment is not the same as your profit, which can indeed be with withdrawn and used as you wish (but that comes later).

When it comes to your starting bankroll, you must be able to comfortably afford the amount you choose to invest, and no matter what you may see or hear, you mustn’t be fooled into thinking you can “get-rich-quick” by investing all your money into a so called “sure thing”.

As a wise man once said, don’t place all your eggs in one basket.

A second point that needs emphasising, is that betting is a “high risk” form of investment.

Risk and Reward go hand in hand, so the higher your potential ROI, the higher the chance of losing your investment.

With sports betting, 200% - 400% annual returns are certainly possible, but this is definitely higher than the vast majority of other investment opportunities, and the risk is higher too.

It’s therefore important to only invest what you can comfortably afford to lose.

STEP 3: STAKE SENSIBLY

Let me give you an example to demonstrate the importance of sensible staking…

Back when I first started using my own betting strategies, I’d created and tested a new racing system, that was showing a 50 point profit over a 6 month period, and had a 25% winning strike rate.

So I decided to test it out for real.

I opted to stake £10 per bet, and still being somewhat inexperienced at this point, thought a 50 point bankroll would be sufficient to cover potential runs of losing bets.

Unfortunately for me, this system ran into a major losing run not long after I started, and just five weeks in, I’d lost my full £500 bankroll.

Being a student at the time, it was really more than I could afford to lose, and this is a pitfall many of us run into into at some point- we stake too much of our bankroll per bet, to cover potential losing runs.

To find out how successful bettors avoid this pitfall, I did some research on strike rate and the likely length of losing runs.

Here are the results- My 25% strike rate translates to a maximum losing run of around 24 bets- but that’s only half the story.

In betting, it’s fairly common to see more than one losing run over a fairly short sequence of bets, and to succeed, we must be prepared for this eventuality; so use a stake that will allow you to survive at least four maximum losing runs. For this example, this would have been around 100 points, instead of just 50.

After realising my error, I had the option to suck it up, and invest another £500.

This would have provided me with the 100 point bankroll that I really should have used from the outset.

But I didn’t. I was too afraid of losing more money.

Instead, I continued tracking the bets on paper only, and to add insult to injury, after a 60 odd point loss, the performance began to improve, and two months later, the system was showing an overall 30 point profit- so not only had I needlessly lost £500, I’d also missed out on £300 profit.

The other lesson I learned from this experience was to stick it out when the going gets tough!

This becomes a lot easier after adopting the ideal mindset, of course, but getting back to the point; your staking plan can make all the difference between substantial profit, and losing your full bankroll, so it’s essential to get it right from the get-go.

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Additional Note: We will be able to predict our likely strike rate during the bet finding process, from past data, the available odds, and so on. Then, we will work out and implement the correct staking plan during the bet placement process, in module 7.

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STEP 4: ESTABLISH A ROUTINE

This involves setting aside a time that you can regularly dedicate to finding your bets.

How regularly you do this, and at what specific time, comes down to personal preference.

Ideally, it will fit well into your current routine, and work around your other commitments.

The amount of time it takes to find your bets for the day can vary, but a good place to start would be to give yourself an hour per session, and adjust later as necessary.

It isn’t a requirement to bet every day; in fact, I’ve found at least one day’s “rest” from betting each week to be beneficial.

On the other hand, the less you’re able to find and place bets, the lower your profit and return figures are likely to be at the end of the year.

I therefore recommend implementing a minimum commitment of 2-3 days per week, and you can increase this to 5-6 days to maximise your results.

By planning a regular routine in advance, practising this routine to the best of our ability, and being rewarded for our efforts, we can form a new habit.

That habit is to regularly find and place bets, which generate a substantial return on our investment, over the long term.

Once that habit has been perfected through practise, it becomes an automatic process, and essentially effortless.

And that about sums it up for this module.

These four steps are the solid foundation on which we can base our betting activities, and once you have them in place, you'll be ready to move onto our next module (as soon as it has been posted), where we start to delve into the bet finding process.

See you then!