14/03/2024
Can You Make Money From Horse Racing?
Short answer: maybe. But not much.
The Start
I got into horse racing after looking up ways to make money from gambling. Obviously a silly thing to look up, but as it happens, some people do make money from gambling. Well, not exactly. They make money from matched betting, which is a way to exploit free bets offered by bookmakers. It's not gambling, it's a mathematical certainty that you will make money.
So I did this, and it was amazing for a while. During Cheltenham festival I made literally over £1000. But then bookmakers started to catch on and I was banned from most of them.
But I had a taste for it now. I wanted to make money from gambling, so I started playing around with horse racing betting systems.
The Middle
Okay so I didn't exactly lose money from horse racing, but I didn't make much either. I don't like losing money, so if I had a reasonably big loss, I stopped.
But occassionally I would get a thirst for trying again, trying stupid betting systems which worked and then didn't work, using other people's tips because for some reason I trusted them but not myself.
I tried backing horses, I tried betting against horse, I tried trading on Betfair. I tried everything.
Once me and my dad won £300 from a £5 bet because I was using some stupid statistical system I decided to try and it picked a stupidly priced horse that won. But that was just a fluke. It wasn't long term sustainable.
So I hung up my boots and decided to focus on other things.
I think what always brought me back was basically, depression. I wasn't happy with where I was in life and the idea of making money from horse racing seemed like a way out. But it wasn't. It just kind of crushed me when things didn't work out. And this is how a gambling habit is formed.
Fortunately the pain of losing money was too much for me to bear, so I never got too deep into it.
The End
Well in a surprise turn of events I now actually am profitible from horse racing, so far. Over 5 months my returns are £17.93 based on £1 level stakes. That's money. From gambling. I made money from gambling.
Well it's not exactly life changing riches, but you know, it makes me feel pretty happy that I've finally made money from horse racing. I finally made it.
But this really shows how much the odds truly are against you, my win rate sits at 52%, which is extremely high for horse racing, and I've made £17.93.
So how did I do it?
Well it was easy.
All I did was spend 6 months at a Data Science bootcamp, which I paid £1500 upfront for, and took out a future finance agreement for, learnt Python, SQL, machine learning, stastical analysis, and then applied it to horse racing, utterly failed, got up, tried again, succeeded in principle, made loads of mistakes getting my model applied to real world data, deployed a service to automate everything, realised my data collection was failing for over a month meaning all my bets were based on old data, fixed it, and then made £17.93.
Really, so simple.
So there you have it, if you want to make money from horse racing, just spend 6 months learning data science and then apply it to horse racing and get a computer to tell you what to do and before you know it you'll be making a fairly insignififcant amount of money.