It is funny how things change over time.  When I first started betting, the spectacle of watching a horse I had backed over jumps was just superb, especially in a race with high class horses, where they travelled at speed and jumped with fluency and grace.

Once I had moved on to picking my own bets, rather than those of a tipster, I became to enjoy Flat races more. I think perhaps because there were no obstacles to negotiate and a faller at the last when winning easily was not part of the equation.

When I began writing systems first, I think I just wanted to succeed, to have a positive Profit and Loss column at the end of the month and the pleasure was more in the fact that I had written something worthwhile and it was equal no matter what type of race.

I think I have mentioned before, my main objective back in the day, was to find big priced winners as one of my biggest aims in life was to give up work as soon as I could and to someone relatively new back then, the thinking was, those big winners would surely enable me to do that.

I assume it did not take me long to reach the conclusion that I was not able to find enough of them to achieve my goal, but I think that mindset of wanting nice priced winners has always stayed with me.

Given my skills as a programmer, I am one of the lucky ones who can have ideas or hear them somewhere and then act on them in my own bespoke way. Although I have to say, it took me a good few years to realise that is what I should do.

Checking my code, I can see that I wrote my first Horse Racing program just over 10 years ago. I often kick myself for those wasted years between realising that research and study were the ways forward and then deciding to use data and my own coding skills as my biggest aid. No doubt though, I learnt things during that initial period that helped when the penny eventually dropped.

I wrote some very useful pieces of software when I first started, programs that I still use today if I have time to spend an afternoon or evening watching racing, which outside of Cheltenham is all too rare, unfortunately. And I also produced some systems that lasted a good few years, utilising Proform speed figures (imported to my database) and angles that I thought would give me an all important edge.

I continued to write systems on my own for several years and there came a time where I really thought I had cracked it. A time where I was betting €25 win only on multiple selections a day, a combination of evening and early morning Best Odds Guaranteed (BOG) and I was totally flying it. Then the bookies stepped in and just made it impossible to continue. So close and yet so far. I knew I had to make the transition to betting on the Exchanges.

At around that time, Proform started a What's App/Telegram group and there was a group of likeminded people, sharing ideas and Proform System Builder systems. Many of the people were in the same boat of not having bookmaker accounts.

Plenty of those shared systems were successful when the bets could be placed the night before racing or early morning and BOG was available, but they failed miserably when used on the exchanges. It was definitely a case of going back to the drawing board to find totally new approaches.

For whatever reason, during this period, I tended to use other peoples suggested systems and spent less time trying to write something new in my own software. I guess I thought they were more knowledgeable than me (and for sure, many were!), and also, I knew it would save me time, but unfortunately it did not save me money!

It took a couple of years and perhaps the realisation that I had not won money for too long, as I was getting nearer to my latest target retirement age (60), before I came to the conclusion that things had to change. Once again, my thinking was I should return to writing my own programs and use new approaches to try and break the cycle of losing on Betfair.

My start point was to look back at everything I had written in the past and during this process, I came to realise that over the years, my National Hunt and A/W systems have been much more successful that my Turf systems. I have no idea why that would be, but it was obvious to me that I would have to largely start over in that sphere.

In 2021, I did a lot of work on Percentage of Rivals Beaten (PRB) and in March of last year, another idea came into my head. Combining those two things became a new focus on Turf Flat racing systems and it quickly became clear that my efforts this time were better than those of the past and Winning Systems was born.

However, it is also now looking like those ideas may not transfer to the National Hunt sphere with the same effect. So, some digging in my OCP Trial Portfolio, which is largely made up of tried and tested NH systems, led me to think that perhaps the answer is under my nose.

I feel very confident that I will soon have a decent, consistent and all year round set of systems and do you know what makes all the difference? Betting at the top of the market! Funny how that has coincided with me being retired!

 

Kieran O’Hagan

www.winningsystems.co.uk

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