Editor’s Note: This is the third installment in a series of five fantastic articles written by guest blogger Mike Bishop of The Secret Betting Club. To enable you to enjoy more similar posts written by Mike Bishop a link to the Secret Betting Club is provided at the end of this article

ENJOY! - Mike Marsland

Service Name: Big Mike Betting Hughies
Website: http://www.bigmikebetting.com/

Summary of article

• An appraisal of the new approach to following Big Mike’s Turbo Hughie method.

Product Overview

Before we get onto the details on how to automate this service for using with Gruss it
is well worth an update on the new approach to place betting from Big Mike.

His place bets are termed ‘Hughies’ as Big Mike likes to give a colourful title to each
bet, which have long been described as the basis of which his members can make a
good profit following his daily advice.

There has been an ongoing saga with the Hughies over the past few months though as
we have strived to find the fairest method to proof them, so that every member can
obtain the returns on offer.

Previously the Hughies were calculated with the place odds being based on the place
segment of a standard Each Way bet (i.e. 1/4 or 1/5 the win odds).

Using his own timing of market move on the Betfair place market, Mike has been able
to obtain these odds, but they weren’t so easy for his members to obtain. This is why
we began tracking results to Betfair SP, before it became obvious that the Betfair SP
prices were vastly inferior to pre-race market prices. Generally if you bet on a
selection 5-10 minutes before the race started, you would invariably beat Betfair SP.

Something has needed to be done and thankfully Big Mike is up for the challenge as he
is very keen to begin proving the effectiveness of his Hughies.

Introducing Turbo Hughies

Members of Big Mike’s service will be also aware of the new Turbo Hughie method as it
has been much discussed over recent weeks. It is now Big Mike’s advised method on
how to follow his Hughie place market bets.

With the Turbo Hughie, you now place your usual Hughie bet on a horse to place at a
set price range as supplied by Big Mike, however you double the stake. You then put a
lay request for the same horse not to place at the same stake plus £1 at 1/3rd of the
odds.

Sounds confusing? Don’t worry its fairly simple in reality once explained clearly.

For example, Mike advises a £8 bet on Red Rum to place at 1.5

You then double your stake so
You place a £16 bet on Red Rum to place at 1.50
You would then place a £17 lay on Red Rum not to place at 1.17

Stake +£1 and 1/3 the odds.

Of course it is unlikely that pre-race your lay at 1.17 will be matched, which is why this
bet uses betfair’s persistence feature. This means that you state if the 1.17 price is not
matched pre-race, it is to stay in the in-play market to see if it is matched there.

Very often it appears that a place lay will trade at 1/3 the odds during a race, EVEN if
it doesn’t go onto place.

With the above bet on Red Rum, if the horse placed we would win £16 X 1.5 = £8
profit. We would lose £17 X 1.17 on the lay side = -£2.89 loss. Overall we then have a
£5.11 profit (before commission).

If however Red Rum didn’t place, we would lose the £16 we bet on him to do so. We
would win the £17 lay on him not to place. Overall we then have a £1 profit (before
commission).

In summary
Red Rum Placed +£5.11
Red Rum Unplaced +£1

Of course this all depends upon Red Rum being matched as low as 1.17 in-play, but it
does seemingly happen quite regularly. It will of course be matched at 1.17 every time
Red Rum goes on to place. The question mark is will it be matched if it goes onto not
place?

This is a new strategy from any service we have followed in the past, so monitoring it
will make for some very interesting analysis. With the Turbo Hughie method we are
risking more on our staking (doubling the stakes) but trading back our bet in-play. This
should make for a lower ROI but conceivably a higher profit.

Our Live Monitoring

Proofing is all important when it comes to tipsters, as is the knowledge that as many
people as possible are able to match the performance of any service. We like to test
every method before giving a recommendation to it, and Big Mike is rising to this
challenge this month.

From the 1st September, Big Mike will be placing each Turbo Hughie via a transparent
Betfair account, that both ourselves at SBC and Big Mike himself will have full access
to. We will then be able to observe ongoing performance of the Turbo Hughies as well
as the prices actually matched.

It doesn’t end there as Big Mike emailed us with the following offer to showcase his
confidence in this method:

As you will see I am passionately prepared to nail my colours to the Turbo Hughie
Mast, so much so that I am prepared to offer SBC members the following Better Than
No Risk Exclusive Deal regarding the Turbo Hughies performance:

‘Join Big Mike Betting on the 1st Sept for two months via my new Hughie Only Service.

First month (Half Price) £24.50 followed by the normal rate of £49, (so a total
investment of £ 73.50) and I will warrant that provided the subscriber follows the
Turbo Hughies to my advised stakes the PROFIT after Betfair commission of 5% will at
the very least cover the cost of the two months subscription from the Turbo Hughie
profits (£73.50p) or if I fail to achieve this target I will personally refund to the new
member the £73.50p subscription stake) PLUS and EXTRA 10%+ profit (in effect an £81
refund should the Turbos not achieve the £73.50 profit in this 2 month trial period
which will end on October 31st 2009.)

We will keep the score/record via the new Turbo Hughie Betfair account which the
Secret Betting Club will have access to, so there will be indisputable evidence of either
our success or failure.’

SBC members can take advantage of this offer by signing up for a normal membership
(via the Join Today link) and selecting the Hughie monthly subscription for £49.99.
Then at the bottom of that page enter the code’ 3FB936419D’, where it says ‘Enter
Coupon Code’ and this will change your subscription price to £24.50.

Conclusions

This is a great offer from Big Mike, which we are gladly taking him up on as we are very
keen to observe the performance of the Turbo Hughies.

The one note we must make is that to date we have no long-term historical
performance on the Turbo Hughies and therefore no knowledge of the likely profit and
loss figures.

As members will be aware, we only like to fully recommend something once we have a
full dossier of proofed figures to hand, so if following this Turbo Hughie method there
is an element of the unknown to factor in.

What we do know is that Big Mike has been running his tipster service for many years
and has always struck us a very genuine individual who puts his member’s interests
(and profits) to the fore.

He clearly is a talented man when it comes to analyzing betting methods and strategies
for profit, and his Hughies did make a fair profit to the methods prior to Betfair SP.

We will leave it to each of you to decide on your own course of action in terms of
whether you wish to follow the Turbo Hughies via this offer. We would however not
advocate that if new to the service, you follow it with large stakes of money. It is
probably best if you are new to Big Mike, to test the water with lesser stakes, until we
build up a full historical performance listing.

In the next installment of this series we are going to look at how to; Automate Your Big Mike Turbo Hughies Using Gruss With Full Instructions.

As promised if you would like to discover who are the good the bad and the ugly of the tipster world here is the link to the Secret Betting Clubs website: Secret Betting Club.

Mike Marsland FCA is the internets leading authority on strategic betting techniques. Visit his blog and signup free to get blog updates by email, along with profit-boosting tips, tried and tested betting strategies along with free advice, live blog bets, additional resources and a lot more! Go now to www.bigmikebetting.com/blog

Editor’s Note: This is the second installment in a series of five fantastic articles written by guest blogger Mike Bishop of The Secret Betting Club. To enable you to enjoy more similar posts written by Mike Bishop a link to the Secret Betting Club is provided at the end of this article

ENJOY! - Mike Marsland

Service Name: Gruss Betting Assistant
Website: http://www.gruss1-software.co.uk/

My review of Gruss in the first article in this series: Betting On Autopilot: Gruss Betting Assistant, leads me nicely onto a look at the different ways it will allow you to place your bets at Betfair.

Currently a large majority of bets are placed at Betfair SP, although more and more
evidence is suggesting that the Betfair SP prices are inferior to what is on offer prior to
the race. This is being backed up by a number of sources, not least the Big Mike Betting
service (which we talk about later on in this issue), Double The Odds and the Dazzler
service from Tip Exchange.

Betfair SP may be handy and is a good barometer to judge a service, but is it always
the most effective method for maximum profits?

Here is what just a few services that are affected by this have had to say on the
matter:

Double The Odds

As a general rule, the really big priced selections (over 30.0) are best left until just
before the off. The others are generally best taken early. A good example of this was
the bet, Herbert Crescent, which was available in the morning at 15.0 or more yet
opened with the bookmakers at 10 and hit 11-2 before easing back to 7/1 SP.

This is obviously a general rule and there is nothing as frustrating as waiting until the
off and finding a really big price has plunged into 10/1 – thankfully it doesn’t happen
often.

With regard to the way we personally bet the selections we take each selection on its
merits and decide what to do based on that. In its most simple form if a top jockey
such as Dettori or AP is on, we like to get in as early as possible because of the
following they have – same with some of the top trainers or with yards that are known
to put horses out to be punted. It’s usually not that clear cut however and the advice
below is probably as near a generalisation as we could get.

Big Mike Betting (From an email on the 14th July)

Hughies – Major change today. Basically we are being completely shafted by using
Betfair SP in a way like Ladbrokes are using the SP Bookmakers to drive down the price
just before the race.

In effect – and there has been a good discussion in `the Learning Zone` on the Forum
where there are some interesting theories. My belief is that a few minutes before the
off a price is taken on the shorties, and then laid off at betfair SP. Invariably the
price taken is matched in full but 4/5 ticks below the price taken!

Now is this the work of genuine layers or indeed somebody close to Betfair? Whoever it
is will be making a guaranteed stack every race where there are shortuns. It’s a nice
little business if you can get it, as the race hasnt started before they are matched.
Try it yourself just for a few quid. Bet £33 on a horse say at 1.31 just before the
race. Lay at Betfair SP £10 and see the results. Just for comparison mind and proof for
yourself that this stunt is indeed going on.

Big Mike then sent a follow-up the next day (15th)…

Again some remarkable figures seen in the Betfair price 5 minutes before the off (on
short uns) v Betfair SP. The most remarkable came in the first race where the fav was
1.12 pre race (to big money) and the Betfair SP was…………1.06. Laughable.

So clearly with a number of services that we back at Betfair SP we need to adopt a
different procedure, and the best way to do this is with a bot. Gruss will do all of this
for you and at only £6 a month will no doubt be excellent value for money in terms of
the better prices you will achieve (hopefully) through this approach.

We are going to look at how to automate the placing of bets using Gruss for the
Dazzler, Double the Odds & Big Mike Betting’s Hughies. The latter service is perhaps
the most complex to follow and we have put together a standalone article in reference
to this later on.

Firstly let’s look at Dazzler and automating his bets.

Dazzler Strategy

There has been some discussion on the forum quite rightly about the different prices
being quoted on Dazzlers place bets and those of Betfair SP. Once again, it appears we
are seeing the pre-race prices on offer appearing substantially better than Betfair SP.
This appears to be exacerbated in the place market particularly with the lack of
liquidity sometimes having an impact.

Tip Exchange was in existence prior to the emergence of Betfair SP and thus has long
had its own methods to calculate likely Betfair prices. They currently use the following
method as detailed by Ian from Tip Exchange…

“We have been given access to Betfair’s Market Data scripts which we query every five
minutes to get the latest prices for upcoming races. The times we query data are at
the following minutes past each hour 4,9,14,19,24,29,34,39,44,49,54,59.

This system was introduced before Betfair SP existed with the aim to record a price
that was genuinely available to all users within the last ten minutes before the race.

To try and match the price that we record I suggest that you place your bets about 10
minutes before the scheduled start of the race. It is not a bad idea to place half at say
4 minutes past, and the other half at 9 minutes past for a race that starts at 10 past
the hour. In theory you should get the same average that we do.”

Therefore, it would appear we need to instruct our bot to take place odds at different
times before a race. To match the Dazzler odds exactly, half the stake should be taken
6 minutes before the off, and the other half at 1 minute before the off.

Double The Odds Strategy

Double The Odds suggest a mixed strategy which does depend upon the pricing of each
selection. Relatively shorter priced selections (under 30.0) are recommended to be
placed early on in the day, so this maybe a simple case of placing a price request at
certain odds, and monitoring to see if matched.

DTO also recommend a case by case analysis of each bet depending upon the
yard/trainer/jockey and any other factors that could have a bearing on a price
shortening or drifting. You may therefore want to juggle your strategy as to when to
take a price depending on each horse.

We will at times though still need to request odds at different times of the day,
therefore we need to instruct Gruss to input our bet at a set time prior to the race for
DTO.

Conditional Function

The best way to request a bet be matched at a certain timing with Gruss, is by using
the conditional function which allows you to specify a timing trigger.

This can be setup by simply clicking the Red C next to any horses name once you have
loaded up a betting market (see image below).

By clicking this you are presented with a number of options to help trigger your bet.

For example you can back Marine Spirit if his price is back price is greater than a set
limit (in the image below we have specified if greater than or equal to 2.0)

Most specifically our interest here is in the trigger time of a bet where we can request
that a bet be placed at a set time. This can be activated by setting the ‘Trigger After’
time to a set period before the race.

In the above example we are instructing Gruss to trigger a bet on this particular horse
after 15:22 and 11 seconds. You can adjust this figure to represent the time you wish
for the bet to be triggered.

You can then apply this function to any number of bets and choose your staking, tick
offset, prices to be matched at and a number of other features.

This is a very easy and simple way to begin placing bets using the Gruss bot. Do bear in
mind you will need to keep your computer on, and Gruss operating and connected to
the Internet, as long as you have active bets requested.

In the next instalment we are going to look at using Gruss to place Big Mike Betting’s new Turbo Hughie
method.

As promised if you would like to discover who are the good the bad and the ugly of the tipster world here is the link to the Secret Betting Clubs website: Secret Betting Club.

Mike Marsland FCA is the internets leading authority on strategic betting techniques. Visit his blog and signup free to get blog updates by email, along with profit-boosting tips, tried and tested betting strategies along with free advice, live blog bets, additional resources and a lot more! Go now to www.bigmikebetting.com/blog

Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of five fantastic articles written by guest blogger Mike Bishop of The Secret Betting Club. To enable you to enjoy more similar posts written by Mike Bishop a link to the Secret Betting Club is provided at the end of this article.

ENJOY! - Mike Marsland

Service Name: Gruss Betting Assistant
Website: http://www.gruss1-software.co.uk/
Summary of findings

• Low-cost betting bot software.
• Relatively easy to use, stable to run and offers good functionality.
• Free month-long trial available for new users
• Works well with automating the placement of bets for a number of SBC recommended services.

Product Overview

Betting Bots are becoming more and more accessible these days and one of the most
popular products is that developed by Gruss Software.

Gruss Software is run by 2 brothers, Gary and Mark Russell, with the former using his
computer programming background to develop a solution to automate betting
procedures. This was called Gruss – (as in Gary RUSSell) and was originally supplied for
free between 2005 and 2007.

To enable full time support and development, a small fee was introduced in 2007,
which now stands at an affordable £6 per month (or £72 per year) for use. There is also
a free month’s trial available so you can test the water before purchasing should you so
desire.

The product is officially called ‘Betfair Betting Assistant’ and is offered for sale along
with a Betdaq equivalent, for those who like to bet elsewhere (The Betdaq program is
free). For the purposes of this review we focus on the Betfair program, which like it or
lump it, is the daddy of all betting exchanges.

Gruss is easy to download and install (although you do need the latest windows
framework installed – a link to which is available on their website).

Once Installed

Although it will take a while to get used to, Gruss offers some great functions.

There are a couple of ports of call to help get you started, the first being the
dedicated help section that is delivered with the software. Additionally there is a large
forum full of frequently asked questions that may well help you if you get a bit stuck
when starting off. The help section of the forum features over 900 topics and 4250+
posts so there is a lot there to assist you.

If downloading and installing Gruss, do take the time to read how the product works
and what it can do for you. By spending 30 minutes doing this, it could well save you a
lot of extra time in the future and maybe even improve your profit margins on Betfair.

Once installed, Gruss offers solutions to help with a whole variety of betfair betting
methods, depending on your needs.

Here is a list of just some of the features on offer:

• Login and place bets via different Betfair accounts.
• Have multiple markets open and active, which you can switch easily between using the tab format.
• One click betting, with the option to take a profit (or minimize loss) quickly.
• Adjust the method of staking (for example fixed, liability and stop loss staking).
• Adjust the refresh rate of the Betfair market.
• Place conditional bets (I.e. if a bet meets a certain criteria).
• Dutch betting, fill of kill, tick offset options.
• Price history graphs
• Weight of money indicator which shows the money being placed on each selection.
• Specific trading mode option.
• Field bets (back or lay the whole field).
• Triggered betting with link to Excel (more about this later)

Visually Gruss won’t win many awards, but it is functional and does a fine job
especially bearing in mind the low cost.

Below is a screenshot of the full screen of Gruss with a market open. On the left hand
side is the usual dropdown menu of Betfair markets, allowing you to select the event
you wish to bet upon. Across the top are a variety of further options allowing you to
quickly alter settings as you wish. Below is a screen grab of the whole Gruss screen
with a market loaded.

The next image below is that of an actual live market in close-up, this one is the
2.10pm at Kempton (Shown in Mike’s local Australian time).

You can see the 3 prices for both bet and lay markets as per the usual Betfair
interface. In addition there is a WOM (Weight of Money) indicator, Price history graph
and options such as reverse bets & dutching.

You can also add other features (not seen in the image above) such as projected SP,
reduction factor, last priced matched & total matched. You can pick and choose what
you want to see on your market interface via the preferences menu, which is a handy
option.

You are also a number of additional features such as viewing the usual price over time
information per selection (as the image below). There are also options to view a
moving average and candlestick graph per selection as well.

The ability to place a conditional bet via Gruss is also most welcome, as this offers real
flexibility in terms of placing a bet only if it meets your specific criteria.

For example; if you wanted to back a selection only if it meets certain price criteria, or
after a certain time, you can easily do this.

Have a look at the screenshot below to view how easy it is to do this. You can simply
enter the price range between which you wish to bet, what price you wish to take. You
can even set the trigger time for the actual bet, and request a tick offset if required.

It uses logical statements which cause certain action. If you can’t quite read the image
above, the drop down boxes from left to right read as follows:

Selection Check Price IF Price (price 2) Bet type Bet price Stake Trigger after
Liberty Trail Last Price matched > 1.01 Back Last price blank 23:40

Translated into English this means that the bot is looking at the last price matched on
Liberty Trail. If this is greater than 1.01 (>), then back at the last price matched. This
order is set to trigger from 23.40 (Australian time for Mike).

Or in simple terms, the bot will back the selection at 23.40 which is 10 minutes before
the off. 1.01 is chosen because every price is above this. If you wanted to, you could
set it to back only if a certain price is available.

Gruss In Action

We had no problems with the stability of Gruss on our computers, and it didn’t appear
to eat up too much memory or processor usage. It has yet to crash once whilst we have
used it, and we do put our computers through the mill with a lot of programs open at
once!

One downside is that there isn’t a save option to keep a record of any bets you have
lined up, if you do decide to re-start your computer at any time. If you are likely to do
a lot of intensive action with Gruss each day, it may be worth having a standalone
computer to perform its tasks. After all you do need to keep your computer running for
as long as you have bets you wish to place.

After we became acquainted with Gruss, it was fairly straightforward to place a
number of bets to certain criteria, and we were impressed with some of the options in
return for its pricing. The depth you can go to when utilizing the triggered betting
when aligned with Excel is a great feature, which we also feature in more depth later
on in this issue.

There are other options on the market such as Bet Bot Pro, Grey Horse Bot and Bet
Angel, but for us the value for money from using Gruss is excellent. It’s a neat bit of kit
and well worth taking advantage of the 30 day free trial if you have an interest in
automating your own betting.

The next instalment in this series will discuss how to use Gruss to take pre-race Betfair prices.

As promised if you would like to discover who are the good the bad and the ugly of the tipster world here is the link to the Secret Betting Clubs website: Secret Betting Club.

Mike Marsland FCA is the internets leading authority on strategic betting techniques. Visit his blog and signup free to get blog updates by email, along with profit-boosting tips, tried and tested betting strategies along with free advice, live blog bets, additional resources and a lot more! Go now to www.bigmikebetting.com/blog

The football predictions I am about to share with you are absolutely guaranteed to be correct, an astonishing claim, but I can assure you one I can back-up! Prepare to be amazed by these laser accurate predictions, Nostradamus eat your heart out:

Prediction Number 1

The first prediction is coming to me now through the mist, I can see a football match, several football matches, yes now I can see clearly, my amazing prediction is….in most games someone will score a goal (92%). What do you mean that’s rubbish! OK prediction number 2 is even better.

Prediction Number 2

I see a pitch and teams, lots of teams, and they are scoring goals, I can see exactly how many they are scoring……they will score……. 2.7 goals per game. What? Not good enough for you?

OK, even I’m getting bored with this now, but the point is a serious one. You will see hundreds of soccer tipping websites giving predictions for games, goals etc but obviously no one knows for sure exactly what is going to happen in any given match. What we do know however, are the hard and fast statistics surrounding the game.

And this applies not just to football, but for all sports. If you are prepared to do the ground work, research the statistical information surrounding a sport and contrast it with the prices and markets available, it is quite possible to pick up anomalies, or areas that show promise from a strategic betting approach. It was not that long ago that the “hole-in-one” gang were able to back at prices of 100/1 on an occurrence that should have been priced at even money!

Now I’m not saying that you will find such amazing pricing errors, but being armed with the statistics gives you the ability to apply a strategic approach to your betting, cover the most likely outcomes and identify the value. In-play football trading is a perfect medium to exploit this and gives us ample opportunity to cover multiple options across several markets and plenty of opportunities to minimize losses if things don’t go our way. All backed up by the statistical information we know before the game starts.

For instance, and I’m afraid I can’t divulge the exact market, but there is an occurrence in tennis that should be statistically priced at around 20/1 but is routinely available to lay at 10/1 or less! Now if someone can find a pricing discrepancy like this in a fairly high volume market, imagine what could be found if you delve deeply into the thousands of subsidiary markets surrounding hundreds of lesser known sports and sporting events.

By doing the groundwork, knowing the statistics and betting selectively these opportunities are ripe for exploitation. Happy Hunting!

Mike Marsland FCA is the internets leading authority on strategic betting techniques. Visit his blog and signup free to get blog updates by email, along with profit-boosting tips, tried and tested betting strategies along with free advice, live blog bets, additional resources and a lot more! Go now to www.bigmikebetting.com/blog

When laying horses to lose became widely available with the emergence of Betfair, there was a huge amount of excitement over the ease at which you could now “play the bookmaker”. Everyone knows the bookmaker always wins in the long-term don’t they?, so making money laying horses is surely going to be like taking candy from a baby, isn’t it?

As we all know, that’s not quite how things panned out. Many people dived in trying to lay the outsiders knowing that the winner of any race in the majority of cases may come from one of the first 3 in the market. The trouble with this is it’s this end of the market that the Betfair odds diverge most from the true prices, the real 10/1 shot can be available to lay at 13 or more on the exchanges, the 15/1 at 20 plus the 50/1 at 100 plus. The problem being that whilst it is fairly easy to have a long run of successful lays, lulling the unwary into a false sense of security, when the winners do come in, and they will, they are at odds that will wipe out your bank in one fell swoop.

It’s not all doom and gloom though, at the other end of the market, among the front runners where prices are much closer to the true odds, finding the over-bet favourite, or picking the “value” lays in the same way you would look for a value horse to back, can pay dividends. Irrespective of this, laying on betfair should always be in the back of your mind as a tool to increase or lock in profits. The following are just three of the common ways we exploit laying horses within the Betting Service on a daily basis:

Laying in running

The ability to bet in-play gives us ample opportunity to exploit the “lemming” effect. Most notably we are using this to great effect on the “Hughie” place bets. Given that they are solid place bets, profitable in their own right, more often than not the prices will shorten dramatically in-running giving us the opportunity to lay off our original bet and lock in a guaranteed profit.

Laying the field

There is obviously (usually) only going to be one winner in a race, but in the races most likely to be closely fought in the latter stages, the odds can shorten and lengthen over several horses in the space of a few strides. We can look to capitalise on this and attempt to lay multiple horses at low liability during the course of the race, such that if 2 or more are matched we are guaranteed profits.

Trading

Obviously, the ability to lay a horse gives us an opportunity for out and out trading, backing high and laying low for guaranteed profits. Whether this is in the frantic pre-race market, during the race or at a more leisurely pace on any potential steamers or drifters spotted as the markets form, there are multiple opportunities to trade for profit.

These approaches can be equally applied to almost all sports and betting markets, so to those armed with the right mindset and approach, as discussed in a previous article, laying should be a profitable weapon in your betting armoury.