Oddscatcher Review

Hello, JohnJ here again, with the third and final monthly report on my  trial of Oddscatcher.

This service offers a range of products, from arbs and dutching advice, to an add-on called Market Movers (which is basically a trading strategy).

Up till now, I’ve done quite well with arbs and dutching.

So: I decided to concentrated on Market Movers this month.

The big question being: is it worth the additional £17 you have to pay for it, over and above the basic Oddscatcher subscription…?

Market Movers is a bit different from any service I’ve come across… so how does it work?

According to the Oddscatcher website, the aim of the service is to provide racing tips from an in-house expert that will shorten in price during the evening/day.

Said expert aims to:

• Supply an average of 1 to 3 selections per day
• Post them the day before between 5.30pm and 7pm in a subscribers” area
• E-mail them directly to members.

During the period I looked at of just over three weeks, I received 17 tips. There was never more than one tip and on a few days there were no tips.

Oddscatcher informed members if there was no tip for the following day.

Tips always arrived within the specified time range.

The strategy for Market Movers is to back the tips when advised and then lay the selection when the odds shorten.

Simple! Only…

• Sometimes the prices advised had shortened. Within minutes of being posted.
• Sometimes the price would drift, meaning a loss on the trade, and ..
• Some of the odds were quite high. This could attract unwanted attention from bookmakers.

I placed modest back bets of £10 on each selection, then layed as necessary.

I ended up with a profit of £10.30.

Here is my complete Market Movers results log:

Some hints and tips are provided in a Market Movers Tutorial.

1. Stick to selections no bigger than 6/1 to keep liabilities low. (But how to do this when tips are given at 8/1 escapes me!!).
2. Use different bookies to go undetected.
3. Use BOG bookies.
4. Place Betfair pre-orders the night before.

The service also comes with a guarantee: namely that, if there are not at least 2 £25 risk-free winning trades, you get your money back.

Trouble is, I can’t really see how this is supposed to work.   Specifically, what sized stakes is the guarantee based on!?

I am not particularly impressed by this, as Oddscatcher can clearly pick and choose trades and stakes, and tell you that such and such made £25 – and you just had to stake a lot of money to make it work!

Bottom line: Market Movers is a bit more of a gamble than the arbs and dutching services but it did make me some money, even if it does come with a questionable guarantee.

Arbs Wrap-Up

I finished arbing, having placed 92 bets in all – i.e. 46 arbs.

My average stake was £22.41, and my total profit £45.30.

So I’ve made almost exactly £1 per arb: which I consider to be steady but unspectacular.

You can download the complete results log for my arbs by clicking here.

Dutching Wrap-Up

I ended up placing 86 bets in order to test out the dutching component of Oddscatcher.

I made a profit of £20.68, having used an average stake of £26.17.

You can review the complete results set by clicking here.

Summary

I’ve struggled to rate Oddscatcher – and would welcome opinions from readers who’d like to disagree with my final verdict!

The bottom line is:

• I’ve made very low-risk profit with all three services, and haven’t been using large sums to do so.
• However, I seem to have worked quite hard to earn myself the £80 or so that I’ve banked in total.

So I can’t say I’m too excited about what I’ve achieved here.

However, digging a bit deeper, I think there is a valuable distinction that can be drawn.

You see, I have decided to award a Neutral rating to the Market Movers add-on.

For although I think it will make you profits, you have to invest a fair bit of time: waiting for tips, then waiting for odds movements.

And, er, good luck trying to claim the money back guarantee! Because of course any trade at a profit can be made up to £25, simply by manipulating the stakes.

In contrast: basic Oddscatcher, with just the arbs and dutching, has, I think, done enough to earn a Pass. These products work, and allow you to make risk free profit every day.

The only thing I would say is that you have to be aware that, with this type of betting, you must take precautions to protect your bookie accounts.

But the dutching and arbing do work reliably: so it’s into the Passed folder with Oddscatcher on their account!

I hope you’ve enjoyed the trial, and feel free to comment below.

JohnJ

Update: 17th September 2014

Hello, JohnJ here again, with the second monthly report on my  trial of Oddscatcher.

Essentially subscribers get access to software and trading methods that, Oddscatcher claim, will enable them to make risk free money every single day.

My first report detailed a very positive start using the Back to Lay product and I ended the month £25.36 in profit.

This month, I had a look at the dutch betting part of Oddscatcher.

This is called The Markets on the Oddscatcher website.

As with The Back To Lay product, The Markets service takes advantage of the user’s information that has been fed into the software.

The information being: those bookies you have accounts with, and their balances.

When you open Markets, a list of races pops up. The races at the top of the list have the lowest overround and therefore are the most suitable for dutching. The list also gives the number of runners in the races.

When you select a race, a new window opens showing:

• your bookies
• the odds of each runner at each bookie
• the best price for each runner
• the stake required for each runner
• the potential return for the winner

The default total stake for a race is £100, but this can be altered by the user to any stake required.

The software divides the total stake between the runners and calculates the stake required for each runner. These stakes are rounded up to the nearest pound.

You have to open your bookie accounts and check that the prices quoted are correct before placing bets.

There is a refresh button on the page which updates the odds for the race you are looking at.

It is always good practice to double check on the bookie’s website, as sometimes it can take a while for the odds to be updated on the Oddscatcher site.

What we are looking for with this system is a winner whose odds drifted after the bets were placed.

For this to be successful we need to make our bets with bookies who offer Best Odds Guaranteed (BOG); i.e. when a bet is placed with one of these bookies at fixed odds and the price drifts, giving a better starting price, the bookie will pay out at the higher odds.

I paper traded 15 races using the default £100 stake.

The actual stake is usually just over £100 pounds due to rounding up the individual stakes, so there is potentially a small loss on each race.

But this should be recovered when a winner wins at greater odds than it was backed at (i.e. a BOG drifter).

Two of the races I traded benefited from Best Odds Guaranteed and I ended the month with a profit of £34.60.

The full results log for the period using the Markets product is as follows:

I find this system easy to follow.

The hard number crunching is done for you by the Oddscatcher software.

My concern with this type of betting would be keeping my bookie accounts intact.

Although the stakes are rounded up, I feel that, placing bets at £19, £33 etc would still draw unwanted attention from the traders.

Back to Lay

I also continued to use this product this month, and placed a further 12 bets, resulting in 13.04 points profit.

Making a total of 38.40 points overall.

This month, when I used ’32 Red Bet’ to back, I was only allowed quite low stakes.

The odds were not particularly long either.

I also used Smarkets on a couple of occasions as the 2% commission really does increase the profit margins considerably.

The full Back to Lay results for this month are as follows:

The complete results log is available here.

Summary

I’m enjoying using Oddscatcher and continue to make risk-free profits.

The dutching product bothers me a bit, as I suspect it leaves you vulnerable to unwanted bookmaker action. But Back to Lay has gone very nicely thank you, and is particularly attractive when you use it with a low-commission exchange such as Smarkets.

I have got a few more options to play with yet, so I’ll give it another month.

Next update around the middle of October. 🙂

JohnJ

Update: 17th August 2014

Hello there, JohnJ here with the first monthly report on my new Oddscatcher trial.

I wasn’t supposed to be testing this one, but Lucy’s original triallist had to drop out… so I jumped on the chance, as it does look quite intriguing.

Oddscatcher is a very well set up website…

It’s full of tutorials, downloadable PDF files and 24 hour support. However, I have not actually had to contact support, as everything on the site is so easy to understand.

There are a number of products available. The two main ones being:

• “Markets”, which is a dutching tool, and
• “Back To Lay”, which I recognise as arbitrage opportunities.

Back To Lay is the product I have been concentrating on so far.

The premise is simple.

Back a horse at the odds given by a bookmaker. Then lay the same horse at an exchange at a lower price than you backed … and hey presto, you have a profit!

Oddscatcher finds runners that are priced higher with bookies and posts the back and lay prices available at that time.

You simply place a back bet with the bookie and then lay it off at the exchange.

There are, however, pitfalls to this type of betting:

• Prices can change while bets are being placed. And the closer to the off, the faster prices fluctuate.
• Liquidity may be low.
• And the biggest problem (for me, anyway), is how long you can keep your bookie accounts.

After a few bets using this method, many bookies will severely limit your account.

They may even close your account completely.

There are ways of delaying or even preventing this problem. Lucy has some tips to help keep the bookies from noticing you.

So how did I get on?

I did not actually do too many bets this month, as I wanted to see if I could just spend an hour here and there and still make money.

There were technical difficulties and the service was not working for about a week. It was when Goodwood was on, unfortunately.

I tried to select arbs with lower odds, with only small differences in prices.

I also kept stakes low, unless the price was shorter. Then I would stake a little more.

I backed and layed 26 horses and made a risk free profit of £25.36.

I could easily have made more.

Higher stakes would have been an option.

Another option would have been to invest more time, waiting for arbs. (Don’t forget the system was down for a week too). And whenever I visited the Oddscatcher site, there were arbs available.

The complete results log for the month reads as follows.

Life with Oddscatcher

You can use the site to record all your transactions.

Just enter your bookie and exchange details and Oddscatcher will update balances automatically as you make the bets.

There are also filters so you may set minimum runners in a race, minimum liquidity, maximum back odds, and so on.

So the bottom line is: you can make money, risk free as well, from Oddscatcher.

But care will be needed to keep the bookies onside.

I’ll be back in a month or so’s time with my next report.

JohnJ

Introduction: 25th June 2014

I recently received an email from a reader called Graham asking if I’d trialled a service called Oddscatcher…

As I’m never one to miss an opportunity, the answer was “No – but if you’d like to lead a trial ……” 🙂

Which is how we come to be launching our fourth new trial this month, with another brand new triallist!

So what is Oddscatcher?

Well, from a look at the very professional website, complete with promotional video fronted by a glossy haired girl, it’s clearly a slick set up.

Although the less than seamless editing means Oddscatcher girl does jump about like a weeping angel, 🙂

And who wouldn’t be intrigued by claims of being able to make £500-£2000 tax-free per month from just an hour a day’s work?

For a monthly subscription of £57.00, Oddscatcher offers several zero- or low-risk horse racing systems:

• Arbs Markets (trading)
• Back to Lay
• Bet365 Offer Loophole
  
• Bonus Bagging (free bets)
• A 14-day free trial of Market Movers (daily selections from their in-house expert)

Subscribers get access to software and trading methods that, Oddscatcher claim, will enable them to make risk free money every single day.

Also included is a secure system to track, update and record all daily bets, so you can have your bookmaker balances and betting history just a click away.

Clearly some of these methods are already in the public domain and/or may be done better by others (e.g. Mike Cruickshank’s Bonus Bagging and the well-known Bet365 loophole).

But maybe the value of the product arises from having all of them in one neatly integrated package, backed up by phone, email and online chat support?

After all, the very same could be said about Mike’s Bonus Bagging… you can do it yourself of course, but it does make life easier if someone guides you through the minefield.

“Proof Our Methods Work”

It’s notoriously difficult for betting systems websites to prove their products deliver, hence the existence of sites like mine.

However, this doesn’t stop them trying!

Oddscatcher’s site contains one such “proof” page, full of alarmed emails from disgruntled bookmakers, along with somewhat contradictory assurances that Oddscatcher can show you precisely how to avoid the bookies’ ire.

You can see their point though, I guess… If the bookies want to close you down, you must be doing something right.

Though the risk of account closure may discourage some from signing up in the first place…

Incidentally, please don’t miss my own article on 8 ways to stop the bookies limiting your account. It remains one of the most visited pages on my site.

Summary

Graham, who enquired originally about Oddscatcher, is now all set to run the trial for me.

As Oddscatcher is primarily arb-focussed, a three or four week trial should be enough to provide a fair review.

Essentially, arbs either work or they don’t… and it doesn’t take long to figure out which.

Graham will be here within a fortnight or so to give us his first impressions.

Lucy