Our story starts, as all such stories do, with a big win.

It is the middle of the last decade. I’m on the lawn at a sunny Flemington racecourse during Cup week for a bucks day. Five of us have been picking a horse each for a shared trifecta bet in each race and we have got absolutely nowhere. As the last race of the day approaches, I scour the list of horses for my contribution to our final bet of the day. This time my choice is the type of informed decision that all the most experienced punters make: I pick one paying double figure odds that sounds a bit like the name of an obscure song I quite like.

A few minutes later, bet duly placed and with the ticket in my hand, the horses round the final bend. Two of our selections are up front but the rest are nowhere. Once again we are set to miss out on a win. But then something remarkable happens. Out of nowhere my rank outsider swoops around the outside and storms home into third place, completing our trifecta and sending us all home several hundred dollars richer. This is the olden days as well, so we get to walk up to the TAB and collect a wad of beautiful green hundred dollar bills, which somehow feels even more like a win than the modern equivalent of watching some numbers change on a smartphone app.

And so it begins. 

I spent much of the following decade becoming the kind of customer that the corporate bookies love: the occasional bet on my footy team; backing outsiders at the races or placing pricey trifecta bets based on similar levels of research guesswork.

Sometimes I’d win and sometimes I’d lose. And while I never bet with money I couldn’t afford to lose (it was always an entertainment product to me; losing $50 at the races was really no different to wasting it on booze, and definitely better for my liver…) I never recorded or tracked any of my bets and so had really no idea which one of those was happening more frequently. (Spoiler alert: it was the second one).

And then about a year ago all of that began to change. It started when I stumbled across the excellent Daily 25 betting blog and decided to give Steve’s Daily Profit service a go. I started with the value and risk free betting service, which basically suggests strategies for exploiting bookmaker promotional offers. I’d never really understood how lucrative these can be. The thing is that all the corporate bookies operating in the Australian market are competing for a limited number of punting dollars. In the olden days the TAB could basically do what it liked. If you wanted a bet that was your only choice, unless you were actually at a track with the old school turf accounts. Now the corporates and their competitors are all offering essentially the same product just a couple of clicks away. As a result they need to do something to differentiate themselves. And one way they are doing that is through promotional offers: enhanced odds on a particular outcome; money back or a bonus bet if your horse comes second or your team leads at half time and goes on to lose.

The thing is that often these offers can be played against each other for much better effective odds than just taking a team outright. Back all the outcomes, with a promo or two on each side and you stand a very good chance of profiting, at least until the bookies work out what you are doing and ban you from playing their promotions.

This is the story of my attempts to become a more informed punter: I’ll be exploring the mathematics and psychology behind gambling, writing about the industry and documenting my own attempts to take a buck or two off the corporates before they shut me down…