If you follow WagerMate’s out-of-the-box betting advice, it will do a reasonable job of handicapping — but, you’ll be placing the same bets as every other WagerMate user.

I hope you’ve learned how to use WagerMate’s filters to develop your own strategies and how to save them as WMST (WagerMate STrategy) files.  Strategy files let you bring your own personal experience and wisdom into the WagerMate handicapping process — you’re customizing the process.  It’s easy:

1. Click Start Handicapping, and let the simulations finish…
2. Set some filters
3. Click Save Strategy

Here’s a very simple strategy applied to the 2012 races to date…

Main screen with a filter

…it simply sets the filters for Recency, Maximum Morning Line Odds, and Good Last Race Required.  Using this strategy for back testing  on the races run so far in 2012 yields:

Sample Back Testing Report

Does this mean you can expect a 20% profit (an ROI of 120%), turn pro, and live happily ever after?  Possibly not….

A few things to keep in mind:

1. This is a tiny sample — just 41 races.  My experience is that we need a back testing strategy that works on hundreds of races before we start to have faith in it.
2. When I applied this simple filter to my entire set of data (about 4 year’s worth of cards and charts) the results weren’t quite as good:
   

   Back Test Report on large sample

3. Although the average profit for the 4 years was 5%, the best year showed a profit of 23% and the worst year showed a loss of 7% — so the road to riches is not smooth.
4. Just because something works in back testing doesn’t mean it will work in the future.

You can download the related strategy file.