Planet Horseracing Final Review
30 June to 21 September (84 days)
Planet Horseracing has been an interesting trial in that I have recorded some very different results, depending upon which way we view the system. The authors recommend a number of different staking systems. For the purpose of this review we used level stakes betting at £40.00 per selection (which equals 1 point at level stakes). In the interest of fairness the authors only record £38.00 if the selection wins money for us (equals 0.95 of a point at level stakes) as they have taken into account the 5% commission that Betfair deducts from all winnings. This is something that a lot of systems do not do and it can make quite a difference to the results. In this case it would have added up to £70.00 extra profit or an extra 3.50 points, depending upon the methods used for the Planet Horseracing Horse Racing review.
The other ‘complication’ is that the selections are given each day with a recommended maximum odds limit for each one. I decided to ignore this for the review, as I thought it might be possible for people to get their bets on during the day within the recommended odds limit, even though the horse’s price might drift beyond that recommended limit before the off. I adopted this rule whether the selection won or lost. This caused a bit of a stir on the review blog as some people claimed it was unfair that I had taken the profit when the Betfair SP was above the recommended odds limit. As usual, they had not read the ‘rules’ and conveniently forgot to mention that it was OK to take losses when the odds went above the recommended limit! As you will see later, the results made quite a difference to the Planet Horseracing review!
For the purposes of this review a ‘Win’ is a lay bet that won us money (i.e. the horse lost the race) and a ‘Lose’ is a lay bet that lost us money (i.e. the horse won the race).
Over the 84 days this is a summary of the selections:
Using the Planet Horseracing method outlined above (ignoring the recommended odds limits) and using a level points staking plan, the results were as follows:
You can see that we had two profitable months and one losing month (well, part of a month as the review only went up to 21 September!) but made a loss overall of -£277.20 or -6.93 points at level stakes for the review period. However, if we had taken note of the authors’ advice on the recommended maximum odds limit, the summary of the selections for the period looks very different:
And the financial results for Planet Horseracing are definitely very different:
You will see that using the authors’ recommended advice, the loss of -£277.20 (-6.93 points at level stakes) became a profit for the period of £186.80 (4.67 points at level stakes).
So there is the dilemma – how do you rate Planet Horseracing with two conflicting sets of results? My personal opinion, based on the review period, is to give it a positive review, but under the strict criteria of Betting System Truths the maximum I can award it is Neutral. Under either method we had two profitable months and one losing month, so that is no bad thing in my book. Added to that is the fact that Planet Horseracing results, proofed to Tip Exchange, have shown consistent profits this year. It has been a very ‘up and down’ period during the review and the authors are quite peeved that they have not been able to show us the same level of results during the review period that they have achieved since they started. Under the first review method, they suffered from quite a few losing lays that drifted heavily during the day e.g. Kathleen Frances, Epic, Mr Irons, Northside Prince. The final Betfair SPs on these alone have cost a total of around 8 to 9 points compared to when the selections were posted. That fact shows just how we get the differences when using the second method. I looked at a few other laying systems over the same period and noticed that a few of them had also experienced some strange results.
As I said in my introduction, the Planet Horseracing service seems to be open and honest and the website contains many other useful sources of information such as their Trading Information, Weekly Blog, Race reviews/replays etc. The trading information is very interesting, because they even recommend and show you ways to trade out of your potential losses (using Geeks Toy, for example) if the price is drifting out.
Taking everything into account (particularly the fact that if we had followed the authors’ advice to the letter, the Planet Horseracing review would have made a very small profit) I would class this as neutral pending further review with 2.5 stars out of 5.
[Rating:2.5]
