The Cambridge Target System : Final Review

That’s us come to the end of my trial of The Cambridge Target System and I have to say that the last couple of weeks have been interesting, at times tedious, but overall very profitable. Most of all I think I’ve learned enough about the system to provide you with a realistic idea of what to expect from it, how to finetune it for more accurate performance and also (hopefully) show you how to improve the profits you generate when you make the decision to use it.

First off, let me say that I DO very much like the idea behind the Cambridge system. I’ve operated in a similar fashion on the betting exchanges for some years now and I know from experience that the general idea is a solid selection method that will almost certainly produce decent profits. However, after speaking with the author of the system at some length over the last week or two there’s a “niggling” aspect to it that I feel I should address first.

It’s mainly about the way the company report their results. If you follow the system to the letter there are some subjective aspects to it, but to combat these I reported everything based on the final shows that were available on every single qualifier and this meant that my results should almost certainly be as close as you’ll get to perfect. There’s no room for subjectiveness at all when you do it like this, but Roger, the author, doesn’t do it this way and that bothered me.

I spent 40 minutes on the phone to him the other day and he’s a nice bloke, but he told me that he isn’t always able to watch the races himself and therefore when there are delays at the start or whatever he still picks his selections roughly one minute before the official off-time. Now, over the last two weeks we’ve had a lot of delays and a lot of meetings where every race was running late, so if there’s a 5 or 10 minute delay a lot can change before the races actually start.

This meant that on many occassions the selections he was backing were entirely different to what myself, and everyone else who knew when the races were starting, were backing. I’ve made it clear that when it comes to reporting the official results a simple check at the end of the day to compare the liveshows with the forecasts from the newspaper he recommends would mean that the results were 100% correct, and undisputable, so I hope he listens

Now that I’ve got that little grumble out of the way, let’s get onto the system test itself…..

The first thing you’ll notice if you read back through my results is that I hit the ground running on day one with a profit of no less than £378 to £25 stakes. I never did manage to repeat this feat over the next 13 days, but I think there are good reasons for why that happened.

For starters, I ignored the targets that Roger sets on the first day and basically sat there betting all day long. That isn’t something I’d recommend as I think it’s better to follow his lead and stop betting when you’ve made your wages for the day. Secondly, for a full week of this system test the racing conditions were terrible, there was a lot of abandoned meetings, an unusually high number of non-runners and days when the going changed halfway through the day.

I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the days where I lost money using this were the days where there was a lot of non-runners and the conditions were extreme, so my first piece of advice for you would be to avoid betting at meetings where the going is described as soft/heavy/firm and when you see that a lot of runners have been pulled. If trainers are pulling out their runners it’s because the conditions aren’t what they were expecting, so this is a straight commonsense approach that will almost definitely help to save you and make you more money.

My second piece of advice is with regard to the way the bets are graded. At this point some of might be saying to yourselves “you only tested this for two weeks, what do you know?”, but I’ve got enough experience with system analysis to appreciate when rules are cool and when rules aren’t so cool and I don’t really dig the grading system much. For those of you who don’t know there are two ways to grade the runners - grade 1 bets are as solid as you can get and should be backed, grade 2 bets aren’t so strong and in my opinion these could probably be dismissed.

I’m sure that in the big scheme of things the grade 2 bets won’t be nearly as profitable as the grade 1 bets and it will make life a lot easier on you if you chose to ignore them. That’s just my opinion, so take it with a pinch of salt if you like, but it seems pretty sensible to me.

Thirdly, in The Cambridge Target System manual the author recommends that you use a daily newspaper as the guide for picking your selections. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I disagree quite strongly with this, because the paper only provides you with a limited amount of information and I think you would do far better (as I’ve proved actually) if you were to use the Sporting Life website as your guide instead. If you do that you’ll have ALL of the info you need to hand.

So, all things considered, would I recommend The Cambridge Target System?

Well, in case you haven’t noticed, I’ve probably spent a good 70 or 80 hours on this in the last two weeks testing the system, tracking the results, answering questions about it and generally just trying to help people to use it in the best way possible and I wouldn’t have done that if I wasn’t particularly impressed with both the manual and the idea behind the system.

The fact that I made a tidy profit of more than £870 using £25 stakes, in just 14 betting days, obviously helped to cover the cost of my time on this, but I can’t help thinking that if I’d followed my own advice above that the actual profit would have been closer to the £1500 mark and there’s probably a valuable lesson to be learned there. I’ll continue to use this system personally and as time goes on it’s likely that I’ll continue to tweak the rules too, so stay tuned for more info.

If you haven’t got your hands on a copy yet, you can do so via the link below:

The Cambridge Target System

I’m going to be away for a week, as from this very minute actually, but I’ll be happy to answer any questions you have about anything I’ve spoken about here on my return.