The London Bloke and his 80% Strike Rate

This week I've handed over the stage to John Cutts, over the course of the week he will be sharing the research behind two systems and will then share the systems. Today he tells you who he is and how he got to where he is today…

Let me introduce myself. My name is John Cutts and I made my debut on the internet marketing scene around this time last year when my brother Mark and I, launched Bet2Win.

This wasn’t our first sojourn into the horse racing tipster business as we had done it before – with some success I might add. Way back in 1991, in the last recession, we both ended up on the dole. So we thought we would try working for ourselves doing something we thought we knew about – tipping horses.

We knew a man down the pub whose Brother was a vet working with some of the well-known trainers, especially up north. He was invaluable.

It was Saturdays only but what Saturdays! Just to jog some memories here are the names of some of the more famous horses I remember backing and tipping in those days, (Originally we were called “the Winning Circle”): Wonder mare Lochsong, (every time she won from the 1992 Ayr gold Cup at 10/1 onwards), Branston Abby at 10/1, Palacegate Jack 14/1, the super Irish mare Kooyanga when she won the 1992 Coral Eclipse and Mellottie when he won the 1991 Cambridgeshire at an SP of 10/1 . Great days!

However, all good things must come to an end and our friend’s Brother, who we never met, moved to France and away from the horse racing scene altogether. So, we set up in business in Mark’s trade, glazing, and carried on with the horse racing part time.

We had a brief flirtation with tipping again when a friend called Eric, who we had met through the tipping service, introduced us to selections from a man he met at Haydock one day, henceforth only ever known as “the London Bloke”.

The London Bloke was apparently a rich property developer. He had paid £10,000 for a system that produced 80% winners, which were on average odds against!

Eric was a staking wizard and this chap wanted him to place his bets. Eric asked could he pass the bets to us and we took it from there.

Before we offered the selections to the public though, we wanted to make sure, so we watched for a while. After 19 of his 21 selections won, (without us having a penny on by the way!), we booked a full page ad in the Sporting Life offering the service , for a post-dated cheque, effectively a month’s free trial.

That certainly put the mockers on the system as it achieved ‘only’ 55% winners and we returned the cheques. This system had served the guy for four and a half years and it badly affected his health so he gave up. Which was a shame as even systems with an 80% strike rate could, because of the mathematical laws of fluctuation, have a bad month.

That was the end of that but we were now more intrigued by betting, and more specifically systems, and for all we were still “on the tools”, we, (Mark especially), never gave up trying to find out what this system was. We never did… at least not yet!

But the lessons we learned through trying, led to Bet2Win and the three systems that we use in our betting portfolio.

After a long and arduous search for the “holy grail” of the London bloke's system we felt that we had something worth selling again when we offered the selections from a system, which was the nearest thing we had found to that system and which we still use in a modified form today. We went public with that at Christmas 2003 and we wound it up in the new year of 2005. That service was called Percentage Betting.

This was our first attempt to sell on the internet and we did quite well. We used something called Google Adwords to sell the service, you will have seen them, the paid ads that are always at the top of a Google page. We did so well that I was able to devote myself to it near enough full time as by now we had a young lad working for us, Brendan, who could do my job most of the time and I could drop in when they got too busy for two people.

Our research, and indeed our experience backing them, had shown 63% at an average SP of 11/10, producing a 132.3% Return On Investment, (ROI).

Things were going well until one George W Bush got involved.

In April 2004 the US government forced Google to ban gambling adverts – and this applied to the UK too!

We limped on with ads in the Post etc, until the New Year 2005 when we wound up the service. The US ban had made it very expensive to attract replacements for the inevitable drop outs and a bad run in November 2004 had badly diminished our numbers.

Mind you, overall it didn’t do bad at all with a strike rate of 55.5% at 2.08 and a 114.4 ROI.

Bet2Win got off to a flying start, tripling the bank in just three months. But we paid a price for such an exceptional run later and gave most of it back. Thankfully our staking strategy for this method meant taking half of each month’s profits out so half of most of the profits were withdrawn before the series of losing runs. Overall in the first year we managed to increase the starting bank by 80%.

So, that is my racing CV, if you like. In wider terms I am of my generation. I am 55 and, as one who gets bored easily, I left school at 15, the very last year before the school leaving age went up.

Coming of age in 1979 I was unfortunate enough to live through the mass de-industrialisation in the north, Manchester in particular, so I have had all sorts of jobs from managing the local Co-op to working on the bins, selling chemicals, working on building sites and more, quite an array of jobs really.

For the past 17 years I have settled down as my Brother Mark and I owned and ran a Glazier’s business which we have now finished with and landed here in Brittany so we can spend more time on this sort of thing and taking some more money off the bookies.

Today's Selection

Doncaster 1.20 Call Me a Star – eachway bet – 9/2 Bet 365 Will Hill Paddy Power