Last February had twenty seven bets in it and made nine points. This February had seventy and made eleven. I'm putting those next to each other because they're the best answer I've got to the question I get asked most, which is how many bets there'll be.
The honest answer is that I don't know, and neither does anyone who tells you otherwise. The number of BSP Favourites isn't a quota. It's whatever passes the questions that morning. A dry month with full cards and plenty of fancied horses the market has gone cold on throws up three bets a day. A month of abandoned meetings and short favourites throws up one, or none. Both can be good months. Both can be bad ones.
What this February had was weather that behaved, a full all weather programme and, for once, a run of jumps cards where the favourites were at prices that paid. So there were bets most days, and the rate stayed where it usually is, a bit over half the win bets and nearly eight in ten of the places. Seventy bets at that rate is eleven points. Twenty seven at that rate was nine. The rate is the thing. The count is just the weather. If that shape suits you, two weeks is £5 and you'll see it for yourself.
Which is also why I never tell anyone to expect a certain number of winners a week. If a service promises you five winners every week, it either has a lot of bets or a short memory. I'd rather you knew the shape of it. Some weeks two bets, some weeks fifteen, and over a year roughly six in ten land.
The bets that paid best this month were the ones with a poor figure at the end of the line and a surface change behind it. A horse that was nowhere on soft turf and is back on the sand it's won on isn't trying something new (though the price usually thinks it is). That's not a comeback bet in the way I'm about to start doing them, more on that in April. It's just the form line doing its job.
March has Cheltenham in it, and I've learned not to promise anything about Cheltenham.
Lee
See exactly what I do for two weeks.
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Every bet I make, by email each racing morning, with the stake and my line on why. Pay £5 today, then £49 on day 15 for the winter pass to 31 March.
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More from the notebook: Year two of the book · Seventy seven bets in November, and the four point cap at work