Time Off.

Well today was a fantastic day and has really topped off my month, so much so that I am taking Sunday, Monday and Tuesday off to relax and go visit family in Devon. I have doubled my monthly target and will start afresh on September 1st.

The betfair balance has improved, and my thanks today to Winning A Fortune who I have been following over recent months. The double stake bets havent really been firing but today they did so and also well done to Bet Cat. It has been a poor couple of months for Richard but this game is full of ups and downs and a nice winner come home today. My other tipster Terry came through with about 28 points profit for the month as well. The main bread and butter though were my selections which had the best month in the last couple of years along with the lays.
Today I backed just two horses in an 18 runner handicap in Ireland and managed to get first and second this helped me get my biggest days profit in a year.


Here are the others:

And Betfair for Friday and Saturday.

See you on the 1st.

Ring, Ring.

So the phone was ringing and I picked it up."Please do not put down the receiver" comes a voice "this is a public information call. " Jesus I thought, is the world ending? Is this how they tell us now days, no more wailing sirens like in the movies. No dark clouds hovering overhead and the rumble of UFO's like a Will Smith movie, no two hundred feet tall walking tri pods and a voice over from Richard Burton.
Then just as suddenly, "Are you in debt? Do you need help?"

Man, how many of these weird automated calls do you get in a day? Well I can tell you as I am home alone for most of it. It averages about three a day.

After replacing the receiver I go to my email and it doesnt get much better there, as many of you know that once you are down as a gambler your email address is sold to all and sundry.
Suddenly I am getting mail from the relatives of Nigerian King pins, who are unfortunately locked away.They have however managed to nestle away a very tidy sum and after scrolling through all the email addresses in the world have decided that I am the lucky one who can be trusted and offered a very large cut of the dough in return for my help. Then next up are the Russian and Thai brides and to help matters go with a swing a phenomenal amount of mail promising an everlasting supply of viagra from all over the World and to help with all this rigorous activity I can also get some pills and potions for making me bigger, thicker and harder than Arnie in Terminator.

On top of this junk I seem to get inundated with offers of systems and free trials and some of these are just the purest of crap. I think I will post up some web sites that I have experienced that dont work and if anybody does read this blog it might help you not make the same mistakes as I have done in the past. The first two in my experience are : Dreamlays and Its Lay Time both I have had the unfortunate luck to encounter. Both have scrapped their results from previous years and have restarted offering riches to behold. If you join either of these two services then good luck is I can say, because just like Keyser Söze, poof. There gone ....


Another strong day with a good profit, the horse lays are ticking over and three personal bets today giving me two places and an 11/1 winner.

The only fly in the ointment has been my tennis so called trading with me just constantly calling things wrong and having to bail out in the red . Over the past two days I have lost about £140 on this which is not a hugh amount but it grinds me because at the end of the day I need to make this sport profitable.

Fame And Fortune.

Interesting piece on Mr Pietersen, has fame and fortune gone to his head as well ? Pretty amazing really like football players refusing to turn out for their clubs when was the last time he played for his county ?



A casual remark from Pakistan fast bowler Wahab Riaz last week illustrated how swiftly life moves on in elite sport.

Riaz was asked which of the five England wickets he had captured in his test debut at the Oval had given him the most satisfaction.

The answer was not Kevin Pietersen, England’s premier batsman with more than 5,000 test runs and 16 centuries. Instead Riaz nominated Eoin Morgan, scorer of 234 runs with one century.

Even six months ago such a statement would have seemed inconceivable.

One transcendent innings at Lord’s in the final test against Pakistan this week would silence the doubters but something is clearly something amiss with Pietersen, who has not scored a test century since March last year. He dropped out of the 2009 Ashes series with injury and averages 28 in the current series against Pakistan, including 80 at Edgbaston where he was dropped three times.

The decline dates back to the start of last year when Pietersen, then the England captain, called for the removal of coach Peter Moores before a series in the Caribbean. Moores did go but Pietersen, misreading the implications of his stance in a highly political role, also lost his job.

Pietersen is currently without a county, finding the demands of playing for Hampshire incompatible with his decision to live in the upmarket west London suburb of Chelsea. It is an instability that has marked his cricket career.

He quit his native South Africa to seek his fortune in England, citing a racial quota system he controversially claimed was hampering his career.

A contract with Nottinghamshire began brightly before ending in acrimony and he opted to decamp to Hampshire. Due to his international commitments he has not made played a championship at their home ground since 2005 and announced in June he wanted to leave.

In 2008, Pietersen was named as England captain, celebrating with a century against South Africa at the Oval, only to be ignominiously sacked early in the following over the Moores issue.

Pietersen’s meteoric trajectory recalls the rise of another South African, Tony Greig, an accomplished all-rounder in the 1970s who also sought fame and fortune in England. Greig ascended to the English captaincy before he was sacked for recruiting players for Kerry Packer’s rebel world series. He did not play test cricket again and has lived in Australia since.

Pietersen is only 30, a prime age for an international batsman. He was the player of the tournament at the Twenty20 World Cup in the Caribbean this year and still averages a healthy 48.23 in test cricket.

But does sporting immortality still beckon for a player who scored more runs in his first 25 tests than any other batsman aside from Don Bradman? Will the grind of test cricket without the glamour and high profile of the captaincy be fulfilling?

Could his future ultimately lie in the Indian Premier League?

A pretty boring day for me when the only highlight was getting the 1/8 fav in the 2.50 turned over and luckily for me I managed to get the winner at 8/1.

Catch Up.

A weekend in which it helped having a few strings to my bow. After dropping money on last weekends football I managed to make a nice profit this weekend which made up for the horse lays which didn't pan out as expected. I missed out on most of this tennis as I had a busy weekend and am under orders not to work on Sundays anymore. This works out well for me as theres not to much happening apart from the same footy teams being shown on Sky Sports each weekend and any bets are placed long before kick off.

Below is from Saturday through til Monday evening.




As you can see nothing amazing but a profits a profit and to help bolster these my winning run continues when backing horses as on Saturday my only bet of the day came in at 17/2.

I havent put this on the blog or shown the results before but I also get tips from someone I know. He doesnt advertise but has a group of about twenty of us that he supplies tips to everyday. On average it works out at about two tips per day and I pay him per point, so if he makes a loss he doesnt get paid. Suffice to say he has been getting paid and has a year to date profit of over 270 points which I imagine would put him very high in any tipster leagues.

Concerning Ian's Elite I am currently standing £ 6 down after two weeks of bets. The first two FTS games he picked both finished 0-0! I couldnt believe my bad luck but over the past weekend the losses have nearly been made back.

All in all a profitable last three days that has put my bank at a high for the month.

Todays Bacon.

August really has been the best month for me this year.I had five bets today and managed to nail the first two winners at York as Mount Athos in the 1.45 and then Rio De La Plata in the 2.15 brought home todays bacon.
The lay of Andy Murray came through as he bowed out to Mardy Fish in todays quarters losing the deciding set in a tie break. I am really surprised he managed to get that far as firstly Chardy and then Gulbis really did seem to crumble under the strain of possibly taking his scalp.

With the US Open starting in a couple of weeks he can now go into that tournament fresh and as one of the favourites if not the favourite. Unlike Wimbledon and Roland Garros I believe the weather will be one of the utmost importance features there. Obviously just like this week the top seeds will play a lot of the time in the evening where it might be humid but not half as bad as being out in the blistering heat. I reckon you would get short odds if Djokovic is playing in the afternoon of him calling for a trainer or suffering from some sort of heat stroke. He is a right drama queen who always seems to throw the market into panic.

After yesterdays blurb trumpeting my lays as is normal when you speak to soon I managed to pick up three winners out of three today which was a bit of a gutter and cost me about £ 270 !

Managed to get a lot of it back though and won a few quid on the tennis too.

Hip Hip Hooray !

A nice touch for me with Hooray winning the 2.15 at York today. I managed to get on at 16/1 in the morning and though I didnt see the race reading the Sporting Life it stayed on well in the final furlong and done the business.


The lays keep on losing with another two today.For a couple of months over the summer I back tracked an idea. It did seem to work but as everybody knows putting it in practice is what matters so I did. I started with a £2k bank which took two months to double which was a bit sooner than I expected and is now standing at just over £4.5k. Now its whether the greed kicks in and I start raising the stakes or do I just plod on and hope in two to three months the bank doubles again. Being very sensible or very boring I will just continue at the current stakes, in case its just a flash in the pan!

Football wise I havent really got to involved the last couple of seasons mainly because of two reasons, number one being I dont have the enthusiam to sit through a game and more importantly I havent made any money! So this season I have joined Ian Erskines Elite Club and I will see if he really does as well as he says. I shall keep you posted on this.

Value Odds.

Now I love to watch tennis and have the occasional trade, i have been watching solidly for the past year since finishing work. From staying up all night in January for Auckland to the Australian then on to the clay in Brazil,Chile and Argentina and Dubai and Croatia and Germany and France and Wimbledon and all over the USA, my body clock has slowly been adjusting to Tennis Tournaments around the globe.

Now I really watch OK ? I dont buy newspapers I dont watch any soaps,most of the time I havent a clue what is going on in the World.I would be good as a phone a friend or something like that if Chris Tarrent asked you why Ms Peer had to play Ms Venus Williams on some shitty court in Dubai this year in the semi final. The reason I am saying this is if you want to be good at anything you have to put in the leg work and you have to make it something you enjoy otherwise you are kaput ! I obviously browse lots of forums and blogs etc and that is the only thing I can say on the subject of trading. You need to know where the odds are going and why and you just need to sit and watch for as long as it takes. As i said it is nearly a year since I quit work and I am still a novice trader which is kinda of upsetting especially after staying up all through those freezing nights in December and January while the rest of the country slept.

Recently have I started seeing some really crazy odds being offered up on some players so maybe its loony season but there seems to be more value in recent weeks and I hope this continues into the US Open.

Today was a good day with all my horse lays losing and also a couple of winning back bets bringing home the bacon. Long may it continue.




As a special treat below is a trick shot that I taught Roger Federer.

The Weekend.

Football season is back and in full swing. On Talksport the other day they were saying how boring certain leagues were because of lack of competition but to me the Premier league falls into this catergory. Chelsea 6-0 winners and then tonight I watched the first half of Man Utd game before I glazed over and switched back to the Tennis. Is there going to be any challenges to these teams this season? I dont think so somehow. I think the market will flip flop between the two all season.

Had a very tricky weekend following some so called tipsters on football dropping about £700, the only rest bite was getting back a couple of hundred with laying Arsenal when leading and also Sunderland who managed to throw away a two goal lead. The horses turned over well with my own lays pulling in about £ 300.

The tennis helped save me when Sharapova managed to throw away match points in the Womens Final as she traded at 1.02 and somehow lost.

I have layed Andy Murray to win this weeks tournament in Cincinnati in the Winners market and managed to get some at 4.0 and 4.2 which I am very happy about. I personally think this is far to short as the US Open is his main target, and I imagine he wouldnt mind some rest between now and then. Throw into the mix Nadal deciding to play here and Fed plus all the other top players including Roddick and i think its gonna be a toughy to win back to back tournaments.
As we all know time will tell.
On a sadder note another death from my musical past, you always remember the sounds of your youth ! Down the roller disco on a Sunday night ........oh the joy!

Crossroads

To be honest ( isnt that a terrible saying) I have been a bit of a ditherer the last few days and I hate the way it effects my bets. This month has started of so well with my lays that I am getting nervous of continuing to do them. I have a nice profit for the month after having about 25 lays in a row lose at average odds of 4/1, so yesterday I decided not to do them, as expecting the wrath of the betting gods to strike me down and give me a load of winners so wiping out the last twelve days worth of hard work. As happens another eight losers came up yesterday so my abstinence cost me £400, on top of this I backed £275 worth of losers. So instead of showing a profit of £125 I showed the £275 loss for a long day in front of the computer.

Now this occurence happened half way through last month as well when I realised I had made my monthly target so decided to stop doing the lays. The same thing happened as all my lays carried on losing some even coming into 1.01 and still getting beat. As you can imagine I was aghast so I plunged back in thinking that sometimes you have to make hay when the sun is shining.

The next day the sun stopped shining....bloody typical! Anyway there are plenty of mind games when you are doing this full time that I dont think people realise. If I had a full time job I could go at these with gay abandon and if they won at least I would still have a nice monthly salary coming to bale me out on the last Friday of every month.

Football Talk

Well if I have any readers I hope some took advantage of Mr Fallon yesterday who after my previous post obviously decided to prove me right by having three winners in a row. I wasnt on the first two but got a bit on the third one !

Meanwhile after the World Cup the English players went on holiday to exotic destinations around the globe while on the other side of the World there was anger:


Soccer officials are investigating reports that North Korea's outmatched national soccer team faced punishment by government officials back home after losing all three of its matches in South Africa.

Sepp Blatter, president of the International Federation of Association Football, or Fifa, said this week that the organization had received tips that players and coaches "have been condemned or punished" after an embarrassing appearance in which they conceded the most goals of all 32 teams in the tournament.

World soccer officials have sent a letter to the North Korean football federation about the allegations. "The first step is the federation and we'll see what the answer will be, and then we can elaborate on that," Blatter told reporters in Singapore on Wednesday.

In June, television images showed a dejected North Korean coach Kim Jong-Hun consoling players after the team was trounced 7-0 by Portugal, the last of three demoralizing losses. Playing in the tournament for the first time since 1966, the team had previously suffered defeats to Brazil and Ivory Coast.

Radio Free Asia reported that the team except for Japan-born Jong Tae-se and Ahn Young-hak was summoned to Pyongyang for "harsh ideological criticism." The report added that the players were ordered to reprimand Coach Kim, who was then sentenced to hard labor for the team's failings.

The players also faced a public scolding by more than 400 students and sports fans, according to reports.

North Korea's state-run news service has been silent about the allegations, which the radio station said were made by unidentified sources in North Korea and a Chinese businessman described as knowledgeable about North Korea affairs.

Soccer officials also considered claims made by Chung Mong-Joon, the former Hyundai chairman and president of the South Korean Football Association. Reached in Seoul on Thursday, South Korean soccer officials said they have no information about their counterparts in the north.

Asian Football Confederation chief Mohammad bin Hammam this week told reporters that he spoke to four North Korean players last month, and that they did not mention mistreatment.

"There was an unconfirmed report that these players have gone through torture or something like that, but…I haven't seen anything with my eyes or heard anything with my ears," he said.

The team's poor showing publicly embarrassed the officials in the secretive state, who had planned to ban the broadcast of the live soccer games to avoid ridicule.

But after the close 2-1 loss to Brazil, state TV made the Portugal match its first live sports broadcast ever.


One analyst on North Korean said Thursday that that punishing sports players and coaches for poor performances was a low to which even Kim Jong-il would not stoop.

"I don't think the North Korean government, however a despotic state it may be, would do such a thing resulting from an outcome of a football match," said Yang Moo-jin, a professor of the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul.

"I'm sure there could have been precedence of such punishment, but I'm not aware of any."



Just imagine poor Jermaine Defoe with his little diamond ear rings working in the sanitation department of London, cleaning out the city’s sewers for a few weeks wouldnt that be some reward for us fans?

"Oh Jermaine, Youve lost your ear-ring back down the shitter you go."

Nice Won Sam.

Somebody, somewhere told me to follow jockeys that won the previous race and to back them. Its a bit like being in the casino when your number comes in, you double up your stake because low and behold that little white ball tends to land in the same spot again . Now it does amaze me and makes me wonder if its one of those things you only notice because subconsciously its in your mind or whether there is proof that it actually works? I am not talking about roulette here but jockeys and today was another case. I had a very easy day not to many stresses as all my lays were losing and a couple of bets came in. I saw Twiston-Davies ride a winner and then I looked for his next ride but didnt fancy it because I couldnt see any value in it. However his third ride was in my favourite sixteen plus runner handicap and looked a nice price at 14/1, 4 places a quarter the odds. So anyway his second runner won , so as quick as a flash i jumped on at 14/1 with Ladbrokes about a millisecond before other betfair punters woke up and backed him.

He then proceeded to ride a great race in which he really battled to get the nag to win, coming a few fences out I thought he was cooked but the horse stayed on and he drove strongly for it to win. A great treble for him and for my selective winning policy. Now before you rush off and throw all your money on another Paul Hanagan double/treble you must understand that like all gamblers my losing horses are deleted from my memory bank.


For the duration of the World Cup I joined Trading Football Markets which i am sure many of you have seen/heard. There is a chat room and everybody follows trades, I only bothered with a couple of trades because I felt it was a bit of a shambles but one in particular had me in fits of laughter as a two game trade went badly wrong and we all lost over £ 200. (Needless to say losing over £ 200 hard earned wasnt the laughing matter !) But there was one particular guy swearing and complaining about the trade , but also saying he wasnt bothered so much for himself because he had loads of money, it was just everybody else in the room that he felt sorry for. He wouldnt stop going on about the loss but also that he was a wealthy guy so it didnt really matter as well as mentioning that he wouldnt be back again ! When my renewal came up I popped in to see what was happening and guess who was there ! I only bring this up because they didnt show this in their monthly results and when I left a comment asking why on there web site after a few days it wasnt replied to but just deleted. Cheeky devils !

Newspaper Talk

I watched the Sky interview with Miles Maclagan last night and thought what a nice guy who was genuiely happy to have had the chance to coach someone with the talent of Andy Murray. This was on one of the BBC blogs as well. Then when I go to BBC tennis headlines there is an article saying tensions caused rift . Now excuse me but I didnt hear him mention anything like this. This shows what is so wrong with some journalism. Just cheap headlining crap trying to fill column inches and its no wonder that some "stars" get fed up with being misquoted or just bullshitted about in the media.

This is what Miles said:

"I think a lot of people misunderstand the role of what a tennis coach is," Maclagan says. "Andy is a very smart guy and a very good tennis player. He doesn't need to be told all the time "you hit your forehand like this, hit your backhand like this".

"In my opinion the art of good coaching is knowing when not to say anything. You might only say one or two things in a week which might be important to Andy, that's why it's important to know when not to say anything so when you do, it's effective. That's my philosophy."

After two-and-a-half years in the job, did he feel sufficiently valued?

"I think so, yes. We had a good relationship, we still have a good relationship. We're not hugging each other and high-fiving every time something good happens. I was always aware that I'd been given a very good opportunity to work with someone like him. I was grateful for that and appreciative for the chance to be a part of the things Andy was doing"

During our chat, Maclagan never comes close to having a bad word to say about his former employer. Even when asked about the verbals Murray often dishes out, Maclagan says it was nothing personal, "just a general venting of frustration".

"I had to remind myself sometimes that he's a 23-year-old and not everything is perfect," he says. "I'd like people to wonder what they, or their kids, were doing at 23 and the answer may not always be as a comfortable as they'd like to think.

"Here's a guy who is driven, works very, very hard, is not falling out of nightclubs, and not being pictured with a different girl every week. He sets a very good example in a lot of different areas."

He also spoke about being in awe when watching Murray play some of his matches especially after beating Nadal at the US Open.

Currently I am reading a book about Tennis called "Double Fault" and after watching a documentary about the Nick Bollettieri academy it really brings home the amount of hard work and sacrifices from players, family,friends and coaches that is needed to make it.

So I have been here working hard in the background but never really having enough time to put my thoughts down on a blog. I have been keeping up to date with various blogs some funny, some sad and some just outright bullshit which makes me wonder why? I am currently running about nine different systems in a portfolio which are ticking over well and looking forward to the new football season, the tennis and horse racing.

Had a nice touch with the first race today when I layed the odds on fav and also had the winner, if only everyday was as easy.

After last seasons winning bet on Birmingham + 48 in the Premier Handicap at 15/1 ,this season I have gone for West Ham + 39 at 12/1 with Stan James. With new players, and a new manager to win the handicap league they would have to finish about tenth and this should be borderline but at 12/1 worth the risk.