Okay so enough take and time to give.

I've been playing around with the 1st 5 favourites according the Newspaper the morning or the day before for years. I know there is a system there, I just have to find it. I am a probability person more so than a form or class person. So to speak!

I got some ideas for how to trim down my selections over the past few days since joining this forum. The S/R for each of the favourites are okay but not enough to sustain by themselves at a flat bet.

I used the Saturdays and Wednesdays of the past few weeks to begin with.

Here are the % S/R to win for each of the 1st 5:

1st 24%
2nd 14%
3rd 9%
4th 9%
5th 8%

I never like to bet on the 1st favourite because I don't like to bet in volume so a 1.30 win to me is next to useless compared to the risk. 2nd is often not much better.

The average wins over this same period is:

1st $3.46
2nd $5.16
3rd $8.36
4th $7.23
5th $14.41

3rd, 4th and 5th are much better average wins but by themselves, their S/R would kill me. So I looked at combining them.

Betting on 3rd, 4th and 5th would return 24% of the time. That gives me a S/R matching the favourites with potentially some bigger returns. On average the dividend split over 3 places betted upon, may not be much greater than the $3.46 but sometimes they can hit the roof.

So I decided to look into weighting the bets based on a total bet for each race of $10. So if 3rd favourite was listed as 11/2 and 4th was 7/1 and 5th was 8/1, the bets would be rounded up to be $4 on 3rd, $3 on 4th and $3 on 5th with the intent of either paying off all the outlay and returning a profit.

Applying this to my last few weeks of Sats and Weds I get 90 races which would have cost me $897 and returned $814 for a loss of $83. Pretty close. Now I just need to fine tune which races I ignore to increase my S/R on the ones that can really pull it off.

After fiddling around with the odds for each I settled upon this:

3rd fav has to be at least 6/1
4th fav has to be at least 8/1
5th fav has to be at least 10/1
drop any race that has a fav over 100/1 (optional as risk to reward ratio is too great to be ignored for that one off win)

So the new figures are:
Outlay $183
Return $370
Profit +$187

I am pretty happy with that even though the perfectionist inside of me says "is this the best I can find?"

I will leave this for a while and test it out. I may even pluck up the courage to drop selections in here each morning (never tried it on midweek meets but willing to check it out).

Feedback/ideas/flaming arrows?

I realise all is good in retrospect but the truth will come to light soon enough.