You should be finishing most weeks with more than you started with.
You study the form for hours, hunting for any small advantage you can find.
You're not that far away from your dream of making a few extra quid.
ALL FROM A FEW BETS ON THE HORSES
It's your passion, and if you're anything like me, your addiction.
And yet the balance at the end of the month never quite reflects the effort you put in.
You've had the Saturdays where three come in and you feel unstoppable.
Then you've had the fortnight afterwards, when those winnings drain back out a fiver at a time.
BUT YOU'RE MISSING ONE KEY INGREDIENT
The bookies have every bit of their power stacked against you.
They close your account, or strangle it, the moment you start winning too much.
You've felt it, even if no one ever spelled it out for you.
The good week that gets followed by a curt email saying your stakes are now capped at pennies.
The withdrawal that takes a fortnight while the deposits clear in seconds.
The friendly account manager who only ever rings when you're on a losing run.
The free bet that lands in your inbox the very week you'd sworn to take a break.
IT'S A SLOW SQUEEZE, AND IT WORKS ON ALMOST EVERYONE
It's about as unfair as a contest gets.
THEIR GREED KNOWS NO BOUNDS
Which is why, after years of up and down results on the horses, I went looking for a different way in.
Not a better tipster or a cleverer staking plan, but a better way of measuring how good a horse really is.
It came from the last place I'd ever have thought to look, a school sports hall full of children playing chess.
LET ME TELL YOU HOW I GOT HERE
My name's Terry Davies, and I'm a family man from Buckinghamshire.
I'm 51 years old, I've got a wife who tolerates my racing habit and a daughter who thinks it's hilarious.
For my entire adult life, I've been obsessed with betting on the horses.
I can still picture a typical Saturday gone wrong.
Four races studied for hours and nothing to show for it by teatime except a lighter housekeeping jar.
I kept a drawer stuffed with old betting slips that told one long, miserable story.
MORE RED THAN BLACK, SEASON AFTER SEASON
FRUSTRATED, BUT TOO STUBBORN TO QUIT, I WENT LOOKING FOR ANOTHER ROUTE.
For 22 years I ran the night shift at a newspaper print works on the outskirts of Milton Keynes.
Every evening the racing pages rolled off my presses by the thousand, and by then I'd usually lost on that day's cards already.
In 2019 the owners moved the printing up north, and my department was gone by the autumn.
I walked out with a redundancy cheque and absolutely no idea what to do next.
I bet, far too much and far too often, and I gave a decent chunk of that redundancy money straight back to the bookmakers.
THEN ONE SATURDAY IN NOVEMBER 2019 IT ALL CLICKED INTO PLACE
My daughter had just turned 6, and that winter she'd taken up chess at an after-school club.
I drove her to a junior tournament in a sports hall in Milton Keynes, 40 children at fold-up tables and their parents lined up along the wall bars.
Pinned to a noticeboard by the door was a sheet of paper with every child's rating on it
After each round, the man running the event typed the results into a laptop, and every one of those ratings moved.
The size of every move depended on who you'd played, so beating a stronger child sent your number jumping.
And a thought landed on me so obvious that I actually laughed out loud in a sports hall full of 8-year-olds.
Racehorses carry a number like that too, the official handicap mark, and every punter in the country bets with it printed in front of him.
It's set by a small team of handicappers at the British Horseracing Authority, using their own judgement, and it's only revised once a week.
Its whole purpose is to give every runner in a handicap the same chance of winning, by loading the better horses with more weight.
SO THE OFFICIAL MARK ISN'T A MEASURE OF ABILITY, IT'S A LEVELLER
Which means the horses that win handicaps more often than they should are the ones improving faster than the handicapper can keep up with.
Golfers have a word for a player like that, whose real ability has run well ahead of his handicap.
They call him a bandit, and he wins every club competition going until the committee catches up with him.
I HAD SPENT YEARS BACKING HORSES WITHOUT EVER LOOKING FOR THE BANDITS
If every child in that hall could carry a live rating, then so could every horse in training.
THE MAN WHO TOLD ME HOW TRAINERS USE THE MARK
Another dad at that chess club was a chap I'll call John, and I've changed his name because he's still working in racing.
John had spent 14 years as an assistant trainer at a jumps yard in Lambourn before moving on to buying horses at the sales.
TRAINERS PLAY THE HANDICAP LIKE A GAME OF CHESS
He told me every decent handicap trainer in the country spends half the year thinking about one thing, the mark.
An improving horse is worth much less to them if the handicapper spots the improvement too early.
So they'll run it over a trip that's too short, or on ground it hates, and let the mark drift down a few pounds at a time.
Then, when the mark is where they want it, the horse turns up somewhere that suits it, with a jockey booked who knows what he's doing.
He told me most punters study the horse and ignore the number it's running off.
Yet that number is the one thing in the race a trainer has been planning around for months.
The secret, he said, was keeping a rating of your own and waiting for the races where it disagreed with the official mark by a wide margin.
I went home that afternoon and started building.
MY FIRST ATTEMPT WAS AN ABSOLUTE DISASTER
I typed in results by hand from the previous 18 months of British racing, one race at a time, most evenings after tea.
By the end of January 2020 I had over 40,000 runners entered, and my back was in bits.
I gave every horse a starting rating and wrote a formula that moved it up or down after each run, just like the chess ratings in that sports hall.
It looked marvellous, and for the next two months it lost me money every week.
Then lockdown stopped British racing in March, and for the first time in years I had no bets to place and nothing to do but work out why.
THE REASON IT FAILED STILL MAKES ME WINCE
My formula treated a beaten length as the same thing in every race.
But a length at the end of a 5-furlong sprint is a big margin, while a length at the end of a 3-mile chase barely counts at all.
The second mistake was worse, because the ratings passed from horse to horse through every race they'd shared.
One horse that didn't stay the trip, or fell asleep in the stalls, could drag down the rating of every horse it had ever finished near.
BRINGING IN IAN WAS WHERE IT STARTED TO GET SERIOUS
The man typing results into the laptop at those chess tournaments was a database engineer called Ian, who built stock forecasting systems for a supermarket chain during the week.
IAN DIDN'T KNOW ONE END OF A HORSE FROM THE OTHER AND HE STILL DOESN'T
But he'd been running chess ratings as a volunteer for 20 years, and he understood the maths behind them better than anyone I've met.
He also knew how to hold 10 million rows of data and query it in under a second, which was the very bit I couldn't do.
We agreed a straightforward split of anything it ever made and got to work in June 2020.
We pulled in 15 years of British and Irish racing, with every runner from every meeting.
We collected going descriptions, rail movements, headgear changes, days since the last run, race times and the miles each runner had travelled to get there.
We ended up with roughly 1.4 million individual runner records, and every one of them had over 200 fields attached to it.
Then Ian threw my home-made formula in the bin and we started again from scratch
His first fix was a conversion table for beaten lengths, so a length over 5 furlongs at Epsom and a length over 3 miles at Haydock each count for what they're really worth.
It puts a value in pounds on every length at every distance, then adjusts it again for the ground, because horses finish further apart in heavy going.
His second fix was to weight every race by how far it could be trusted.
A big, truly-run handicap with 16 finishers counts heavily, while a muddling 4-runner race run at a crawl barely counts at all.
Then we tested it by running it forward through five years of races one day at a time, with each day's ratings built only from what came before.
Our new ratings came out of that process making a small profit across all five of those years.
WHAT BLACK MARKET BETS WEIGHS UP EVERY MORNING
Let me walk you through what happens between five in the morning and half past eight, because this is the part I'm proudest of.
The moment the overnight declarations land, the program pulls in the full card for every meeting in Britain and Ireland.
The first thing it looks up is that horse's place on our ladder, a live rating rebuilt from every race it has ever run and every horse it has ever met.
Then it sets that rating against the official mark the horse is running off today
It weighs up how the horse's past form changes with the going and the trip.
It factors in trainer form over rolling windows from a fortnight up to three months, because a yard in form and a yard out of form are two different animals.
It reads each jockey's record at that track and over that trip.
It looks at the weight carried today against the weight carried when the horse last ran well.
It checks headgear, because a first-time visor tells you a trainer has been trying something at home.
It counts the days since the last run and compares that break to the breaks that particular yard usually leaves before a winner.
THEN IT MEASURES HOW FAR THE TRAINER HAS SENT THE HORSE TO GET THERE
That one came from John, and it's my favourite thing the program does.
Nobody loads a horse into a box at four in the morning and drives it 280 miles to make up the numbers.
Ian wrote a routine that measures the road distance from every yard to every course, and checks how that trainer's long-distance runners have fared.
When a horse that's already ahead of its mark gets sent the length of the country for a small race, the program sits up and takes notice.
All of that gets boiled down into one figure for every runner, which is our own view of what that horse is really capable of today.
AND THEN COMES THE ONLY QUESTION THAT ACTUALLY MATTERS
The program compares its own rating against the official mark the handicapper has given the horse.
If our ladder says a horse is worth 78 and it's running off 78, we do nothing at all.
If our ladder says 78 and it's running off 84, we do nothing, because the handicapper has got the better of it.
We only ever act when our figure is clearly higher than the official mark, and that margin has to clear a set threshold before a penny goes on.
On top of that, the horse has to sit at the top of our ladder for that race, with daylight between it and whatever is ranked second.
THAT THRESHOLD IS THE HEART OF THE BUSINESS, AND IT TOOK US THE BEST PART OF A YEAR TO SET IT.
The figure we landed on is 6lb, and it hasn't moved since.
SPEED IS THE PART PEOPLE ALWAYS UNDERESTIMATE
The official marks only change once a week, so a horse that runs a big race on a Monday can turn out again on the Saturday off the very same number.
Our ladder had moved that horse up within minutes of the Monday race finishing.
But speed isn't the real trick, it's what the ladder can see that we can't.
The ladder knows that the horse which beat yours by a neck last month has since won twice and gone up 9lb, which makes your horse's defeat look a lot better than it did.
THE DAY WE FINALLY PUT REAL MONEY DOWN
So in the spring of 2021 we started betting the selections for real, at £2 a time, which felt about right for a man who'd already burned his redundancy money once.
The first fortnight went well, but by the end of the first month we were £64 down.
Ian, who's a more patient man than I'll ever be, asked me one question that saved the whole project.
He asked whether we'd been taking the prices the model told us to take, or the prices that happened to be in front of us.
I WENT BACK THROUGH EVERY BET, AND THE ANSWER WAS UGLY
On more than half of them I'd taken a shorter price than the model required, because I'd got on late or I couldn't be bothered shopping around.
The ladder hadn't lost that money at all, my own laziness had.
SO WE BUILT THE RULES THAT MADE IT WORK
The first rule was that a bet only goes on if we can get the price the model demands, or better.
If the price has gone, the bet is dead, and we don't take a shorter one out of stubbornness.
THAT ONE RULE TURNED A LOSING MONTH INTO A PROFITABLE ONE ALMOST IMMEDIATELY.
The second rule was flat stakes on every selection, with no favourites and nothing skipped for looking boring.
By the summer of 2021 we were making a few hundred pounds a month, which sounds tiny and felt enormous.
By the winter it was closer to a thousand, and I'd stopped checking the balance every hour.
THEN CAME THE UPGRADE THAT DOUBLED OUR PROFITS
In the autumn of 2022, Ian rebuilt the way the ladder handled young horses, and it altered the shape of our results completely.
What he did was teach the program to read the direction each horse was travelling in.
A 3-year-old that's gone up 15lb across its last four runs is telling you something.
A 7-year-old that's been rated within a pound or two of the same figure for three seasons is telling you something completely different.
The ladder learned to project where a young, improving horse is likely to be next time out, based on its age, its number of runs and how its family tended to progress.
OUR MONTHLY PROFITS DOUBLED IN THE SIX MONTHS THAT FOLLOWED
That was the biggest jump we ever got from one change, and it's the reason so many of our winners are young horses the handicapper hasn't caught up with yet.
By 2023 the two of us were pulling out four figures most months and I'd stopped calling it an experiment.
By 2024 it had become the thing I did instead of a job, and my wife had stopped asking when I was going to get a real one.
THE SYSTEM WAS NEVER THE PROBLEM, MY EMOTIONS WERE
One day in particular has stuck with me ever since.
It was a Thursday in the spring of 2024, with three selections across two small midweek meetings.
I loved the look of the first one, so I trebled my stake on it.
I didn't fancy the third at all, so I put a token £5 on it and thought I was being clever.
The one I'd trebled finished fourth, beaten a neck for third.
The one I'd barely backed won at 6/1, and the middle selection won as well.
TWO WINNERS FROM THREE, AND I STILL FINISHED THE DAY DOWN
If I'd staked them all the same and kept my opinions to myself, I'd have finished well in front.
That was the day it stopped feeling like a hobby I could fiddle with and started feeling like a job with rules.
From that afternoon on, I've never once overruled the machine.
WHY THE MONEY HAS ALWAYS SLIPPED THROUGH YOUR FINGERS
You're not losing because you're daft, or because you haven't tried hard enough.
You're losing because you've been fighting blind in a fight the other side can see clearly.
Every morning of your betting life, it's been you against the handicapper.
So you back the horse with the best form, and the handicapper has already loaded it with enough weight to stop it.
The only thing that ever changes the result is having a rating of your own.
The horses didn't get any easier to pick, I just stopped picking them blind.
EVERYTHING HAS FINALLY FALLEN INTO PLACE
This year alone, between January and the end of September, our bets have brought in £50,617.65.
January opened with £5,873.65 off the back of the all-weather and the winter jumps.
February was shorter and wetter, with a run of abandoned meetings, and still returned £4,415.90.
March was our best month at £6,942.35, helped by the spring handicaps and all the horses returning from a winter break on marks that no longer fit them.
April was our smallest month at £3,596.80, because the turf Flat season had barely started and the ladder had little fresh evidence on the 3-year-olds.
May bounced back to £6,315.25 once those young horses had run once or twice and the improvement curves kicked in.
Then the summer arrived, and with it the busiest stretch of racing in the calendar.
June brought in £5,127.45 and July added £6,204.70
August came to £5,684.35, despite a fortnight where the selections thinned out to one or two a day.
September finished at £6,457.20, our second-best month of the year, as the big autumn handicaps filled up with horses on unfamiliar marks.
Not one month of 2026 has finished in the red
And October has started the way September finished, with £1,386.40 added in the last seven days alone.
Ian still runs the technical side, and now he's well paid for it.
We split every penny of profit straight down the middle, and neither of us has ever had a cross word about it.
I've enrolled my little girl in a private school.
And cleared every last bit of my old credit card debt.
My wife is over the moon with the extra coming in each month.
THIS ISN'T ABOUT ONE GIANT WIN THAT TURNS YOUR LIFE AROUND OVERNIGHT
In April we took the whole family to the Maldives for a fortnight.
A world away from our usual caravan trip down to Devon.
And in August, for the first time since my redundancy, I bought a car outright instead of signing up to another finance deal.
None of that came from a lucky week or a single big punt.
It came from a small advantage, applied every morning, month after month.
Let me show you what a typical morning will look like for you.
You'll wake up to find my email already sitting in your inbox.
Inside it, the day's selections, laid out with the course, the time and the minimum price to take.
NO FORM TO WADE THROUGH AND NO DECISIONS TO AGONISE OVER
You place the bets at your bookmaker, which takes five minutes at the most.
The races run while you're at work or out in the garden.
THAT'S THE WHOLE JOB, FROM START TO FINISH
WHY ALMOST EVERY TIPSTER EVENTUALLY LETS YOU DOWN
Even the very best tipsters are still, at heart, guessing.
A SELECTION IS JUST AN OPINION DRESSED UP IN CONFIDENCE
Not one of them will tell you what mark a horse is running off, or why that number matters more than its last three runs.
AND HERE'S THE ONE ALMOST NONE OF THEM WILL ADMIT TO.
A lot of tipsters aren't even backing their own selections with real money.
A tipster has an opinion, while Black Market Bets has a rating, and that's the difference in a single line.
SO WE DECIDED TO LET MORE PEOPLE IN
Ian and I got talking at the start of the summer and decided a few more people deserved these bets.
A chance to fight back against the greedy corporate bookmakers.
To put real money in the pockets of the little guy, in amounts they'll never even notice.
It's not even a rounding error in their accounts.
But for anyone who follows these bets, it can be life-changing.
So, just over a month ago, I opened up my own small private service.
I started with just 14 members, emailing them my selections first thing every morning.
Priced at £100, those places filled up in under 12 hours.
THROUGH SEPTEMBER ALONE, I PERSONALLY BANKED £6,457.20
And those 14 early followers were every bit as impressed as I was.
MEMBER RESULTS
“Five weeks in I'm £2,210 up, and I've not opened a form guide since the first email arrived. I'd have laughed at anyone who told me that back in August.”
Stuart Henshaw, Kendal
“Have you ever watched your betting balance climb four Saturdays on the bounce? Mine has since I joined in September, and it's now £1,965 higher than the day I started.”
Carol Pennington, Lincolnshire
“I've played off 14 at my golf club for years, so the idea of horses running off the wrong handicap made sense to me the minute I read it. The horses Terry's ladder calls bandits have paid me £2,340 since the start of September.”
Dennis Adams, Burnley
“Last September I lost £585 following a tipster who charged me £40 a month for the privilege. This September I'm £1,870 in front for a one-off £100, and I placed fewer bets doing it.”
Geoff Marsden, Whitby
NOT A SINGLE LOSING MONTH IN 2026
MORE MEMBER RESULTS
“For six years my bookmaker's account manager rang me every month with a free bet to tempt me back. He hasn't rung once since I joined, and my balance is £2,105 better off for it.”
Lynn Fairbrother, Grantham
“My brother-in-law and I have had a fiver a week riding on each other's tips for 20 years, and he's always come out on top. Last Sunday he asked me what I'm following, because I've finished the last four weeks £2,280 up.”
Barry Ogden, Rochdale
“I spent 30 years as an electrical engineer and I don't trust anything until I've seen how it works. Terry's explanation of the beaten-lengths table is what got me to try it, and £1,780 later I'm glad I did.”
Alastair Munro, Perth
“We had a losing Tuesday in my second week, and the old me would have doubled the stakes to win it back by teatime. I left them alone like Terry says, and by the Friday I was £640 up on the week and £1,690 up overall.”
Sandra Kilby, Taunton
'Black Market Bets' HAS PUT UP TO £2,500 INTO SOME OF THEIR POCKETS IN 30 DAYS
All 14 members have stayed on, ready and raring for the next 30 days.
WHY I'M SO SURE THIS WORKS
Black Market Bets has a record of winners stretching back to the spring of 2021.
It picks the horses whose real ability has run ahead of the mark they've been given.
The results speak for themselves, with nine winning months out of nine so far this year.
Seven years on from that chess tournament in Milton Keynes, it still catches me out with how well it reads a race.
WHAT YOU GET WHEN YOU JOIN TODAY
Join Black Market Bets today and I'll throw in free lifetime support.
Email me any time, seven days a week, and I'll reply within the day.
You'll also get my welcome guide, which covers staking, account management and everything I wish somebody had told me in 2019.
YOU ONLY HAVE TO DO ONE THING
Place the bets I send you, the very same ones I'm backing with my own money every morning.
There's just one catch, I'm only releasing a small number of memberships.
I answer every member's email myself, and I won't hand that job to anybody else.
50 new members is the most I can look after without the replies starting to slip.
SO FOR THIS NEXT INTAKE, I'M OPENING JUST 50 PLACES
That way every member gets a reply from me inside the day, not a form letter from a helpdesk.
Before we get to the price, I want you to picture something for a moment.
Picture an extra few hundred pounds landing in your account in a quiet week.
Picture a few thousand in a strong month, like the ones we've had right through this summer.
That's what a real, lasting advantage over the bookies actually buys you.
HOW MUCH WILL THIS COST?
For the results I've laid out, I could charge hundreds and sleep soundly.
Nobody would blink at £100, or even £50 a month, for a service like the other ones out there.
But I'm letting you have my daily bets for a one-time fee of £20.
One payment of £20, with no hidden charges and nothing more to pay, ever.
Pay it once, and every jaw-dropping profit you make is yours to keep, for life.
NOT A BAD DEAL, RIGHT?
MY 30-DAY MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE
You're covered by a full 30-day 100% money-back guarantee.
Try Black Market Bets, even just following the bets on paper without staking a penny.
If you're not delighted with what you see, send me a single email.
And I'll refund every last penny you paid me, no questions asked.
A FAIR WORD BEFORE YOU DECIDE
There'll be losing days, and now and then a losing week.
No software on earth wins every race, and anyone who tells you otherwise is having you on.
What it gives you is a small, repeatable advantage over the weights the handicapper has set.
That advantage is tiny on any single bet, but it's relentless across a month.
Stack enough of those bets together and the maths does the rest.
THE QUESTIONS MY FIRST 14 MEMBERS ACTUALLY ASKED ME
WHY WOULD A HORSE THAT FINISHED DOWN THE FIELD LAST TIME TURN UP IN MY EMAIL?
Because where it finished matters less to the ladder than who it finished behind.
If the horses that beat it have won again since, its run looks a lot better than the form figures suggest.
DOES IT ONLY BET IN HANDICAPS?
Almost always, because handicaps are where an official mark decides the weights.
WHAT DOES 'AHEAD OF ITS MARK' ACTUALLY MEAN?
It means our ladder rates the horse higher than the official figure it's running off today.
If the handicapper has it on 72 and our ladder has it on 80, it's racing with 8lb less weight than its ability deserves.
WHAT HAPPENS IF A SELECTION'S NEW MARK KICKS IN BEFORE IT RUNS?
The program checks the mark the horse is actually running off on the day, not the one it carried last week.
If a fresh mark has wiped out its advantage, that horse never makes it into the email.
DO I HAVE TO INSTALL ANYTHING?
No, the program runs on Ian's servers and you'll never need to touch it.
Everything you need arrives in a plain email that opens on your phone or your computer.
HOW LONG SHOULD I GIVE IT BEFORE I JUDGE IT?
Give it a full month, because a month gives the averages room to work.
Judging it on one afternoon is like judging a cricket season on one over.
Your guarantee runs for 30 days for that very reason.
I'VE BEEN BURNED BY BETTING SOFTWARE BEFORE, SO WHAT'S DIFFERENT HERE?
Most betting software you'll have seen was built to sell, with the results bolted on afterwards.
Ours has been betting real money since the spring of 2021, and Ian and I still back every selection ourselves.
Remember, this is going to sell out very quickly.
SINCE I'M CARRYING ALL THE RISK HERE, IT SHOULD BE AN EASY DECISION
Land on this page now and a place is yours, as long as you don't click away.
Just enter your email below and complete the order form for lifetime access, all for £20.
YOU'LL BE UP AND RUNNING WITHIN MINUTES, READY FOR TODAY'S RACING
Enter your email and click the button below to get started.
P.S. Thank you for reading all the way to the end.
All 50 places will be gone by the end of today, so make your decision now.
Your first email will be with you as soon as you're through the order page.
P.P.S. If you take one thing away from this page, make it the lesson about the number next to the horse.
The horse matters far less than the mark it's running off, and that's the lesson that cost me years and a redundancy cheque to learn.
Thanks for your time,
Terry Davies