All By The Book 2 (ABTB2)

Hi, I’m Carol and an honoured winner of free access to Lucy’s Skew Trader Pro (aka Lucy’s Skrewy Arby thing). I think Lucy then felt she had to keep me busy for the month I would need to wait until prize-giving. So I have ended up writing this review of All by the Book 2, by WinningMore, at £87 from all good book stores – oh no, sorry, just from on the net.

Having made a few New Year’s resolutions and spent much of January working my way through breaking them, February had held little excitement by comparison.  So what did I have to lose?  Not that I had even heard of this particular system before, but when someone offers you something for nothing in return for an impartial review, well, you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth do you?

In this instance the horse was dutch rather than gift, but more of that later.

The sales blurb concentrated on the amazing updates that had been made to WinningMore’s best seller. So I was eagerly anticipating something really special.  The refund policy was rather odd, inasmuch as there were no refunds!  This was based on the fact that the purchaser is deemed to be paying for information and that was what they were getting. There was no reference to the system or its effectiveness in that respect. By the way, those who have already bought the original ABTB can get this updated version for free.

Anyway, having made my ‘purchase’, I eagerly anticipated the arrival of the antipodean licence key.  The message was that it would be with me within 24 hours. I could appreciate that. Some poor guy in Australia did not want to be getting out of his bed at 3:00 in the morning just to e-mail some strange Pommie.

The next day I felt like a kid at Christmas. I was awake by 5:00 (well, there is only so much of your best friend’s home-made wine you can drink without having to get up during the night).  Sure enough, as promised, the key was there.

The way this works is that you need to purchase the system via the computer on which you wish to use it.  That is fine for the majority of people, and is a fairly standard restriction with software. Also, you cannot print or copy and paste any of the ‘manual’.  All of this is stated in the pre-purchase sales pitch. If the system were fairly simple that might not be too restrictive. However, based on an initial read I fear it may not be. So my thought is that certainly when you are practising you will need the manual beside you in order to make reference to it. But this means you need it to be open in a separate window on your PC and constant toggling between screens can add vitally invasive seconds to your bet placement times.

My next problem arose when I actually came to read the manual.  Unfortunately, it read a little like one of those instruction handbooks you get when you buy a piece of electrical kit which has been made in a far-off land.  The English was, to a great extent, incomprehensible.  I will not dwell on this point, but it was sufficiently unclear to necessitate my actually rewriting key parts in order to make sense of them. Well, every cloud has a silver lining: at least I now had a hard copy of the manual to reduce the risk of my developing repetitive strain syndrome from toggling!

Having undertaken this little rewrite of my own I then discovered what the system was actually about. In a nutshell, it is exclusively concerned with dutching horse races.  Several variations on a theme are given, with the old-hands (subscribers to ABTB) benefitting from tweaks on two variations and the exposé of a completely new one.

I thought I would approach this review from two angles. One would be a critique of the material itself and one would be of the system. The reason I have chosen to include the former is because the authors use the fact that you are buying information as a reason not to offer refunds.  So does that information, in itself, represent value for money?

Firstly, as previously mentioned, the manual is, without a doubt, very poorly written. Secondly, there are several aspects of it which I would feel very aggrieved about had I actually had to pay the asking price for it. There are two examples of this which I can explain here without giving away the system to any degree.

Firstly, I am sure we all know that you do not stake odd amounts via your on-line bookie accounts unless you want them to be closed on you fairly rapidly. The manual does, quite correctly, stress this. Yet the stake calculating tool that is included does not do this. As this is a dutching system the rewards are likely to be small each time. Manually, and fairly much arbitrarily, smoothing stakes can easily turn a small profit into a loss.  Considering that a tool which does incorporate smoothing is available free on the internet I was disappointed that something similar was not included with this package.

Secondly, the manual uses decimal odds throughout, stating that these are easier (hear hear to that one!).  Towards the end the reduction factor for non-runners is referenced. A relevant table is included to explain what these factors are. The odds in this aforementioned table are given as fractions. The reason for this is that apparently the authors ‘could not find one’ in decimals. It would have been easy enough for the authors to have written one incorporating decimals. So, again, I felt let down.

But enough of the written word.

I have scoured the internet for reviews of All By The Book 2 but could find none offering significant assistance. There are a few analytical ones for the original ABTB: for example one results-based one from horse racing man compiled 2 years ago.  But do be aware that these things can move from decent profit to indecent loss the longer a system is out there. So my original intention (which is almost bound to change as time goes on so watch this space) is to spend the first week ascertaining:

• the number of opportunities the system identifies
• how easy it is to take advantage of each of these
• what the possible returns are in comparison with the stakes
• what kind of exposure to risk is involved.

Once that is done I can then make a call as to how many bets I should use in my trial in order to gain an equitable view of how well the system works.

I am now off to the gym to try to convince my personal trainer that the need to develop a wrist flexibility exercise program for me is not based in immoral purpose.