Useful Resources:

Oddschecker - allows you to check price movements, and find the best available odds.

Betfair Exchange - provides a visual graph of price movements.

Shortlist Spreadsheet - use this to build your shortlist of potential bets.

Timeform's Horse Racing Results - use this to compare your odds to Betfair SP.

Hello and welcome to module 4 of master your betting.

Today we’re going to explore the concept of value, firstly what it really means for those of you who don’t already know, and then some useful hacks that we can use to quickly and easily find value bets.

So first things first…

What does the term Value mean in relation to betting?

A value bet is one where the chance of an outcome happening (for example, a horse winning it’s race) is better than the odds suggest.

At one time, the average punter had a very limited choice when it came to placing their bets, but with the birth of the internet came the opportunity to expand this choice greatly.

Fast forward to today, and there seems to be an ever increasing number of bookmakers and betting exchanges who we’re able to place bets with.

With this increased choice, comes the ability to shop around for the best odds, and with odds comparison tools such as Oddschecker.com, this has been made easy.

Those who don’t make use of these tools (usually the ‘old school’ punters who tend to stick to a specific firm) are really missing one of the best tricks in the book.

I like to compare it to buying food in the supermarket. If you saw two identical items with different price labels, common sense tell us to pick the one with the lowest price i.e the one that offers the greatest value for money.

With betting, by failing to take the best available odds, you’re essentially picking the food item with the higher price.

Conversely, taking the best available odds consistently, can potentially turn a losing punter into a winning punter.

For example, let’s say you’re using a system that has a strike rate of 30%, and you’re betting at average odds of 2/1.

If you can already spot a problem here, you would be right.

Staking £50 per bet, this is what would happen:

 - A winning bet results in £100 profit. This happens 30% of the time.

 - A losing bets results in a £50 loss. This happens 70% of the time.

So in this example, for every one hundred bets placed, we would win a total of £3,000, and lose a total of £3,500, resulting in a £500 loss.

On the other hand, if we shopped around for the best available odds, and managed to increase our average odds to 5/2, each winning bet would now bring us £125 profit.

And in this example, for every one hundred bets place, we would win £3,750 and lose £3,500, resulting in £250 profit.

So it’s pretty clear to see that- an initial step to increasing value, is to always look for the best odds before placing your bets.

That being said, in the majority of cases, even the best odds available do not represent true value.

If they did, you’d be able to turn a tidy profit by simply picking horses at random, and making sure you take the best odds.

But the bookmaker wants to make the profit, and therefore generally offers odds that are poor value.

The good news is, they don’t get their odds right 100% of the time.

They are, after all, attempting to accurately estimate how fast a horse will run across a field, and evidently, this is very difficult to do.

In fact, they get it wrong on a daily basis, and this presents an opportunity for those of us who notice their errors.

One of the most accurate methods I have found for identifying these errors is odds compilation.

The problem is, compiling odds is a long and arduous process, which is why I’m not going to cover it in the module.

For those interested in learning how to compile odds, please refer to our 'Value Hunter Training Course’. You should see the link in the menu above. In this course, we take a deeper dive into odds compilation, and by the end you’ll know exactly how to go about it.

But in this module, we’re going to focus on another way to find value:

Value Hacking- a term I recently coined, which basically means shortcuts for finding value.

The purpose of these “hacks” is to enable us to spot potential value in a matter of minutes. And there are three main resources I use to do this:

 - Odds Watch (a tool offered through horseracebase)

 - Oddschecker

 - Betfair exchange

To show you how I use these resources, let’s take a look at an example race…

PLEASE REFER TO VIDEO ABOVE FOR THE WALKTHROUGH

(4 minutes 42 seconds)

So, can I just back as many steaming horses as possible, and turn a profit?

Well, the probable answer is yes, at least over the long term. There’s also the potential to trade, and lock in a small profit.

However, just like with angles and systems, we can increase our profit considerably by going one step further, and taking a closer look at the race in question.

This involves heading over to the racecards, and comparing the horse we’re interested in, with the other runners in the race.

There’s a host of great tools and reports we can use for comparison purposes, and that’s what we’ll focus on in our next module.

In the meantime, here’s a good way to practise and hone your value hacking technique:

1. Use the three resources we covered to identify some potential “value” horses.

2. Record a list of your horses on a spreadsheet, including the best available odds on Oddschecker.

3. Use Timeform's results to check back on the results, and compare your odds to the Betfair Start Price (BSP).

If your odds are higher than the BSP more often than not, this means the majority of your bets represent value.

Now it’s time to get some practise in, then move on to module 5 for the next step.

See you then!