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I ran a Twitter poll today, curious to see what people thought was a realistic number of bets a bookie might allow, given that he is monitoring whether you beat SP with there early prices and using this to judge if or when to ban you. Here are the results

What I was curious about was how many of these beating SP bets could a new punter consequtively have and yet still be a losing punter. I stared off looking at a punter betting randomly into Betfred’s 10am prices with a restriction that he only takes prices under 20/1. To keep things simple I also considered races with no non runners at off time across all racing codes in 2019.

We can easily calculate how much a punter will typically lose doing this but what I wanted to know first of all was how many bets he would have to have before we could be sure he is a losing punter by only examining results. I ran a 1,000 run simulation with each run containing 1,000 bets. This produced 20 profitable simulations so clearly 1,000 bets is not enough to be sure. After a few trials it turned out that 2,500 bets produced no profitable iterations and so 2,500 bets was taken as a measure that a punter is truly a losing one given the above. However what if a bookie was watching how well they beat SP during these opening bets. It has been suggested that even though you may not have struck a winning bet the fact that you can get banned, according to many punters, after 3 or 4 bets, is due to the fact that bookies are monitoring your ability to beat SP.

I ran the same simulation but this time checking how often a run of X initial bets were ‘value’ bets according to price taken and SP. Looking for a run of 3 initial value bets occurred 58 times in the 1,000 sample runs. This means 58 times losing punters would have been discarded by a bookmaker if 3 was their tolerance level.

Testing for 5 opening ‘value’ bets we have 7 occurances so 7 losing punters wrongly banished.

Not until we got to 8 initial value bets did we find zero occurances and hence no losing punters were discarded. In the pre poll run it was 7 but obviously due to the random generation of selections this number can vary slightly.

The twitter feedback stated that some bookmakers may be banning one or two bet people because the cross bookmaker intelligence service has already flagged them as people who take too much interest in the sport. This may be true but I am not convinced this accounts for all the 3 bets and out people.

Every one knows my opinion on this topic, if you are a losing punter you will lose less or more slowly on Betfair and if you are a winning punter then you will end up on Betfair eventually so go figure Betfair