Small Fields And Exotic Convex Bets
In horse-racing, Convex betting is predicated on frequent small losses and infrequent big wins. But in order to take advantage of this strategy, we require markets with fields of 11+ runners to generate live outsider prices.
Unfortunately, in the last couple of years, British racing has begun to noticeably decline in terms of competitive fields in both Flat and Jump codes with the consequential drop in price ranges! We, sports traders, cannot fix the current problems facing British racing so we must either adapt or die!
One possible solution for us is to look for better prices in the exotic (e.g. Betfair's 'Forecast' and 'Reverse FC') markets.
To that end, using an Excel spreadsheet, we can set up a table as follows to generate either 'Forecast' or 'Reverse FC' tickets subject to the following conditions:
- Runner saddle numbers as both row and column labels,
- Populate the table
with 1s and 0s subject to the following constraints:
- Row totals must equal two.
- Column totals must equal two.
- Use Solver to generate a possible solution. Otherwise, use trial and error.
- Read off the row labels of the columns containing 1s to generate a subset of all possible tickets.
- There are multiple valid combinations of tickets.
- No matter what is the winning combination of the race, the generated set will contain two tickets with at least one of the winning numbers.
This is an example of generating a 'Reverse FC' solution for an eight-runner field.
and this is an example of generating a 'Forecast' solution for a five-runner field.
Enjoy!