You’re speaking generally so I’ll try and reply generally Conan. I think that it is very hard to make money from any system per say – a number of factors work against it.
Firstly the particular conditions that give rise to a system bet will sooner or later be compensated for by the odds moving. Say for example horses in a particular draw at a certain racecourse tend to do better than others and punters notice and back those horses going off at prices bigger than the "true" odds. The bookies notice and prices contract to reflect the greater chances of horses with that draw. Most systems have a certain shelf life that is often limited. If I had a genuine winning system I'd tell absolutely no one
Secondly unless you have a large sample of systems bets to work from it is easy to give too much significance to results that are a reflection of other factors. An extreme example was the African Nations Cups recently where there were lots of low scoring games in Mali 2002 which led punters (and bookies) to a lesser extent to draw some conclusions that were not necessarily correct for the next event in Tunisia. In fact the reasons for the low games were mainly the poor pitches and normal service was restored in Tunisia and subsequently Egypt.
Finally I feel that getting too hung up on systems can blind people into making bets that aren’t really value and can encourage too rigid thinking. If you have a system I think it should be selectively used as a filter when making your bets. I’ll give a personal example – James Blake had until last night never won a 5 set game in 8 previous attempts. Last night a heavy jolly at 1.13 and expected to romp home instead he got into a 5th set dogfight with French veteran Santoro. Based on those stats prior to the 5th set starting you would have to say Blake was vulnerable but watching the game I thought Santoro was wilting badly at the end and that Blake would triumph and he did. Having said all that if Lleyton Hewitt got into a 5th set decider I’d probably back him blindly as a system bet – he is W19 L3 since 2000 which is pretty astonishing.
System Betting
