About
Welcome to the Formbook – the blog dedicated to discussing horse racing, sport, gambling and anything else I find interesting.
Before we begin, despite appearances to the contrary I most certainly am not a jockey. At 6ft and 14st this will come as some relief to thoroughbreds everywhere. I was the lead programmer behind the one4racing website.
I must say a big thank you to Albert Thomas Media for their permission to use the graphics, design and layout of the one4racing site in order to create this blog.
So what will I be writing about? Well, I plan to cover four main subject areas horse racing, sports betting, how to and the one4racing nap of the day results.
For horse racing I’ll post information, news and offers which I believe might be of interest.
Having been established for a number of years one4racing has built up a close relationship with a wide range of bookmakers. From time to time these bookmakers provide editorials, news and offers on a wide range of sports. Being tied to horse racing and not wanting to be too aggressive with the marketing the owners of one4racing decided not to post or mail too many of these editorials. So under the heading of sports betting I’ll post some of theses offers / editorials.
A few years ago I wrote the sports betting calculator SportTrader+ to assist with exchange betting. Betting on exchanges has seen tremendous growth over the past few years and is proving incredibly popular amongst the general public. That said I believe there are a fair proportion of sports enthusiasts which would like to place a bet on a game using the exchanges but are frightened off. Under the category of how to I plan to write a number of article explaining how to use the exchanges to place a variety of bets. I’ll also cover any new technologies which I feel could be of benefit to the sports betting industry.
Finally (and in truth this is how the whole horse racing blog came to light) I’ll be covering the results for the best bet of the day. I’m in touch with the one4racing team on a daily basis and follow their best bet of the day. I’ll be perfectly honest here I’m the first one to fire off an email when their good thing trails in last. Admittedly I’m a little less forthcoming when they start banging in the winners. So to complete the blog I’ll be posting the performance of the best bet of the day under the category of Nap Results.
Besides horseracing I’m a keen follower of Welsh Rugby. So as far as I’m concerned we shall only talk about, 2005 the grand slam winning year. Unlike most Welsh rugby supporters I don’t go for all the usual we must beat the English at all costs. Mind you Scott Gibbs at Wembley, and Gavin Henson at Cardiff are all very sweet moments. Just in case any Englishmen (or women) are reading this and have a short memory Scott Gibbs scored a try in the closing seconds of the match to win the game for Wales 33-32 and in 2005 Gavin Henson scored a long range penalty to sneak a win at the Millenium Stadium 10-9.
I’ve been interested in horseracing for as long as I can remember even doing a horse racing project for my degree in software engineering. The project created an online video formbook – this was back in 1999.
I worked on the one4racing site full time for 2 years taking care of all the IT and Internet related issues. I then rewrote the systems, code and back office infrastructure and as a result reliability increased to a level of requiring only a few hours maintenance each week.
I then worked as a self employed IT consultant for 2 years working for a number of companies from new start-ups to large multinational organizations. Feeling it was time for a change in 2004 I completed a PGCE at Swansea University, enabling me to teach secondary (11 to 18 year old) school children the joys of computing, or not as the case maybe! With another qualification under my belt I now work as an eBusiness consultant.