The Place To Lay

Kevin will be conducting this review.

Thanks James. I’ll give a quick introduction and then explain a bit about how I will do the review. My name is Kevin and I’ve been betting for about 3 years now. One of my pet hates is when sales pages report profits for laying systems to SP and/or exclude Betfair commission. So any reviews that I do will be done either using Betfair prices taken at the recommended time or Betfair SP and I will take 5% Betfair commission off.

The Place To Lay is Paul Fowlies’ latest system. His previous Lay For The Place system has been generally well reviewed so I am hoping this will live up to the sales page.

The system is such that you have to be available to monitor the racing live. The author also states that it is possible to use a bot (and he suggests using The Grey Horse bot), but that results could differ from following the system strictly. As a lot of people may be unable to follow the racing live I will follow this as if I was using a bot and report the profit/loss based on prices taken at the official race start time.

So as to protect the author I won’t be putting the race/selection details on here but just report number of selections, number of placed/unplaced selections, prices of any placed selections (losing bets), strike rate and daily/total profit & loss.

*** I intend to run this test until the end of July.

**** I also forgot to mention that the author recommends using a 50pt bank.

In future I will aim to post results after each day’s racing, although sometimes they may not get posted until next day depending on circumstances.

Well on to the results….

So what is The Place To Lay system all about? As with Paul’s previous Place Lay system this targets certain races but only 1 selection per race. As the name suggests it involves laying the identified selection not to place. It can be used on all racing types (turf, all weather and jumps). Unfortunately you have to be able to follow the racing live to be able to use this (or use a bot). It’s difficult to say anymore without giving away the rules.

The Place To Lay system supposedly made a profit of £15,590 in 2008 and £6,371 in the first 5 months of 2009 (using £100 stakes). It also supposedly made a profit in 16 of those 17 months with the only losing month producing a 2.5pts loss so it was very disappointing that this trial produced a) a loss and b) it’s biggest loss (although still not a major disaster).

Cumulative P/L = -8.56 points! (minus)

I queried a couple of things with Paul before the start of the trial and got a quick and helpful reply.

As I pointed out in my opening statement I have tested this using a bot and so it is possible that some of my selections would differ to somebody following this system manually, but Paul does point out that over a period of time the differences should balance themselves out. That is pretty much what happened on the days I monitored the selections manually as well.

One thing I noticed is that Paul says that the average winner (losing bet) is odds on but during the trial the average price of a winner has been 2.06 so I don’t know if we’ve just been unlucky during July or maybe sales from The Place To Lay have pushed the prices of selections out a little.

The other thing I noted during the trial is that it didn’t do very well with weekend racing so I’ve looked at what happens if you remove weekend racing results and it still made a small loss but it was only approx. -2pts.

Conclusion

On the face of it the thinking behind this system appears sound, but after a promising start it just hasn’t performed well. I have to put the system in Failed Test section and means I cannot recommend it based on the results this month. However this does not mean that The Place To Lay won’t produce a profit through out the rest of the year, and past results suggest that it will normally produce a profit each month, but we have only conducted a 1 month review.