After a few months of deliberation It seems Betfair Pirate has failed to do the business apart from the first 9 weeks of service. (Of which 8 weeks were a free trial) This has now been placed in the failed category.

BetFair Pirate Final Review

Have we been too premature in terminating our trial of Betfair Pirate after 84 days?

Or are we flogging a dead horse?…….You Decide.

It is tempting to say “You Decide”, but unfortunately I think it is my job to point you in the direction of a decision.

This is not going to be easy to write, so let us get the obvious things out of the way first……

Firstly, let us take a look at the author of Betfair Pirate, Jason.

I think we all have to agree that his commitment and dedication to his customers has been 100%. His enthusiasm and openness to the problems that have been encountered along our journey have been refreshingly pleasing and outstanding. I know in theory, we are trying to judge a Betting System, but at the end of day, the User of any betting system does need to have the confidence that the system that they are using has not been written by someone, whose sole purpose in life is to churn out system after system with no thought of customer care. So Jason scores a 10 out of 10 for Betfair Pirate customer care.

Secondly, let us take a look at the Betfair Pirate software that executes the trades for the system.

Jason’s decision to try and  produce an Automated Bot to submit the trades was a very brave one. Obviously, whenever anyone does something for the first time, there is always going to be a learning curve. As we all know, no PC setup is the same, so the chance of being able to accommodate everyone’s setup is virtually impossible. I think we all realise by now that, for Betfair Pirate, we are always going to have a timing issue in that different Users potentially could come up with different results. This is obviously not ideal. However, for me, the system never crashed and I had great confidence in leaving it running all day in the knowledge that it was trying its best to make me some money.

Now we come to the Betfair Pirate system itself. The results over the last 84 days have, to say the least,  not been inspiring. This is where we start getting problems in trying to decide how long a time frame we should give a system of this type to prove itself. I really don’t think there is an answer to that tricky question. It really does depend on each person’s requirements.

The only conclusion that we can come to is that during the last 84 days, Betfair Pirate has not performed as well as it had done for the previous 84 days.

The one thing that I do need to mention here is that whenever I have encountered a successful betting system, there has always been an edge that the system possesses and not only does the system possess  an edge  but that edge can be quantified.

So when I first encountered the Betfair Pirate, having seen the past results, I really was left scratching my head in trying to quantify the edge. I know, in theory, that whilst Betfair Pirate is making a profit why should we be worried about what the edge is. Now, that view is ok to take whilst things are going smoothly and we are showing a profit, but when things start to go wrong, how can we be expected to “Mend” something if we do not know how or why it works in the first place?

The problem that I have, is that I have studied the prices on Betfair for many years and I can categorically tell you that over a long period of time the horses that go off at odds of 5.0 really do win 20% of the time and that horses that go off at 2.0 really do win 50% of the time. One has to remember that the odds on the Betfair Exchange are set by hundreds of people’s opinions and it is not surprising that the efficiency of the exchange is comparable to a stock exchange.

The fact that the Betfair Pirate System tries to exploit a mathematical inefficiency within the Betfair Exchange does make me nervous seeing that I don’t believe that one exists.

So where does this leave us with the Betfair Pirate?

Being a “Mathematician” I am really struggling to convince myself that this can really work long term, however, being a “Romantic”, I really would love Betfair Pirate to prove me wrong so that everyone can experience a happy ending.

So, once the dust has settled, where do I stand on this system……?

Seeing that I am an Agnostic, I think I am going to have to take the Agnostic view that, at this moment in time, there is just not enough evidence to either pass or convict this system so the obvious conclusion is that, for the moment, it belongs in the NEUTRAL column……

I guess at this stage I ought to briefly mention the newly created Betfair Pirate Filtering System which basically filters out the races that potentially are going to cause us a loss. This filtering process is based on historical events. I personally believe this falls into the “Cyndi Lauper Syndrome”. I am not a great lover of reacting to past events so it comes to no surprise to me that it is not performing any better than its predecessor.

Going forward I intend to report back on a MONTHLY basis on both the original system and the filter system, say the first Monday of each month.

Marc Chawner Rating

Rating:

BetFair Pirate……

Success or Failure……

YOU DECIDE……