Top Man

Well the masses voted,and they all voted for AP McCoy to be Sports Personality Of The Year.

AP's landslide success in the 2010 BBC Sports Personality of the Year awards on Sunday has been greeted with jubilation from the entire racing industry.The 15-times champion jump jockey was clearly touched by the overwhelming public support, which gave him 42 per cent of the vote. McCoy received 293,152 votes, 220,957 more than runner-up Phil Taylor. Ryan Giggs won last year's award with 151,842 votes.

McCoy, who came third in the competition in 2002, became the first racing figure to win the award, adding another accolade to his unrivalled collection. A sustained campaign by the sport saw the racing community and the general public rally behind this year's Grand National-winning jockey.

2010 Sports Personality of the Year results

1 AP McCoy 293,152 (41.98%)
2 Phil Taylor 72,095 (10.33)
3 Jessica Ennis 62,953 (9.02)
4 Lee Westwood 58,640 (8.4)
5 Graeme McDowell 52,108 (7.46)
6 Tom Daley 50,763 (7.27%)
7 Mark Cavendish 44,170 (6.33)
8 Amy Williams 43,056 (6.17)
9 Graeme Swann 13,767 (1.97)
10 David Haye 7,538 (1.08)

Well done to everyone that voted for him.

So after three Xmas do's last week I finally managed to do some football trading over the weekend. I didnt think the markets were to good on some games but then again if they are not helping you in one way then they should be helping you in another. To me it depends on how flexible you are to changing stratagies once the game has gone in play. This is where like all types of trading you have to have the correct mindset for each occasion.

Losses will come but stating the obvious its all about keeping them down to a minimum which I am trying to do! Traded the games in the X-Club room both days and really enjoyed the chat, got some very nice and knowledgeable people there. With the trading I am not sure if I will ever get to where I want to be. By nature I am a saver not a spender and my cautious behaviour seems to stop me from pushing forward to much because I am always trying to minimise my losses, where as to make money from this you have to be aggressive especially when in a winning positon. This is how I see it.

Still hoping to see some horse racing this month but that could just be a dream, and will have a look at the darts too.

In The Saddle

Great to have some quality horse racing on last weekend and today at Fairyhouse, god its so much better than having to watch Southwell and Wolves all weather ! Had some decent winners over the past five days and some very close things as well so the month is looking up.

After a successful Cheltenham I picked four yesterday in the 16+ handicaps and had a winner at 14/1 and a placed horse at 20/1. Also got a 9/1 from two selections from Terry.



These big handicaps are easily my most successful types of races and maybe more of what I should concentrate my efforts on. Today just the one big field, the 12.25 where I had the second and fourth and again Terry weighed in with one from two.

Some high class racing then with Hurricane Fly establishing himself as Ireland’s premier Champion Hurdle contender after slamming a fair benchmark in Solwhit who had match fitness on his side, but sad news here as Twist Magic had to be put down after falling at Newbury.

Concerning my comments about football trading thanks to Cassini for giving his views on his blog and the comments he received. Its a difficult one because we obviously all think differently which is why betfair exists. I was just taking an example of a guy on the forum who said what he had done during the game. I was trying to get an idea of his mindset when entering a trade.
With the amount of in play games and liquidity in the markets I think that football has to be part of a traders armoury. My own thinking on the game was that I wouldnt open up any position until I saw the team news, formations and then watched to see how the game was going. If twenty minutes in the game was end to end but 0-0 then I would go in on the over 1.5 market and see how it panned out, I certainly wouldnt be bailing out because a goal at 55 mins would put you in a profitable position, and even one in the 70th minute would give a break even situation.

This particular game finished 0-0 so you could say he was right there,but he counteracted that by doing a chasing trade of laying 0-0 in the full time market.

A good example was last nights game with Hearts and Motherwell which was attacking from the start. With no goals coming I layed under 2.5 goals thirty minutes in and was rewarded with three by the 60th minute. Lucky? Well of course when entering this you need goals to be scored, I did the same in the other live match Charlton v Brentford that finished 0-0 , but it was just absoutely terrible finishing that didnt give me any opportunity to get out. If you saw the game you would know what I mean. This meant I was up in one and down in another, so maybe we are both right ! No I wasnt in the red card market though ...



Cricket starts in the early hours and a draw is definitely not on the cards here. The Waca pitch is known to deteriorate and crack very badly depending on the weather. I fancy Johnson to come back into the Aussie attack and if he can get his direction right he will certainly have the speed to get the ball bouncing around a few heads, a watching brief for me but with a start time of 2.30 am I doubt it will even be that.

Thats it for me until after the weekend, good luck with your betting.

Christmas Spirit?

Well its been another exciting week in sport with the best news being England thrashing the Aussies. As I mentioned in my post last week I layed the draw from the beginning and was very fortunate that England took three quick wickets very early on Day One leaving me in a positive position from the start. I wasnt brave enough to let it run but did leave zero on the draw and green on any winning outcome .

The thing that struck me most about the match was the "Swann Factor." We now have a World Class spin bowler who can bowl at any time in a match not just on Day Five. No surprise that the media in Australia is praying for Shane Warne to come back because I can see a role reversal between the two nations and maybe we can have the Ashes for a decade or so. Lets hope so !

Below is a photo of who I reckon must be the most hated man in England right now.

He looks cool in his Newcastle track suit doesnt he? The below from the Guardian :

"Christmas must be coming, the Premier League has started to sack managers. This is the season of goodwill to all men but not if they are Chris Hughton whose departure from Newcastle United has confirmed that at St James' Park the spirit of pantomime is alive and well. If Hughton was Aladdin, restoring stability with the magic lamp of common sense, his successor,Alan Pardew, must be Buttons, which is about all he will have to spend.

The treatment of Hughton has been roundly condemned by fans, media and players. It seems his biggest mistake was in taking Newcastle to fifth place after the win at Arsenal. Next to losing matches, the worst thing a manager can do is to raise expectations to levels he will find difficult to maintain.

Apparently Hughton lacks managerial experience, which seems a bit rich coming from a club prepared to put Alan Shearer, whose experience of management was zilch, in charge towards the end of the season before last, when Newcastle were on their way down. Pardew is several sackings ahead of Hughton in experience and at least he is not a messiah, which should help.

Maybe, just maybe, Ashley will get this one right. Hughton was popular with the players but not so popular, apparently, that the team felt like breaking sweat at West Bromwich Albion last weekend, when Newcastle did not so much have an off day as a day off. A manager should never be one of the boys because boys occasionally play truant."

Well chat rooms, forums and the polls were not for Alan Pardew but Big Mike was as Maggie put it " Not for turning" so all the opinion fell on deaf ears. Personally I think he deserves a chance and I think it is a good appointment . Only time will tell ,but at West Ham he got us out of the Championship , to an FA Cup Final which being unbiased we were robbed of but most of all was tireless and shrewd in the transfer market. He is not naive enough to think he will last the five and half years on his contract which is why he got such a contract because when the time comes he will get a nice pay off. Football is a very fickle business and if it goes well he could be heading the next England manager market on Betfair ina few years time. So you might laugh but we had Keegan and Hoddle so why not? I remember when I went to watch West Ham play Aston Villa and they were at the top of the league and had a new manager in place called John Gregory. He was like sliced bread and the media loved his style and the way he spoke in a very forthright manner. He was being touted as the next England manager then. Where is he now? The media can pick you up and put you down very quickly in life.

Betting wise not a lot doing the last week. The racing kicked back of today in earnest with some proper stuff at Cheltenham and what a relief that was. I got stuck into the meeting and picked eight horses , two in each big field handicap race and also did a little e/w double which came in. I managed to get the winner in the 1.50 so a nice profit was made.



I havent managed to do any trading this week as I have had a couple of birthday do's and with one more tonight and three Christmas do's next week its a busy time.

I have read the X -Club manual a couple of times over but will need to do a lot of practise for a long time before I can get my head around all the stuff. One thing did hit me last evening when I watched an Argentian match on Betfair. I went onto the forum and read what peoples thoughts for the match were. One guy had put £300 on over 1.5 goals. No goals were forthcoming so after about twenty five minutes he said that he had taken a red book of £60 because he didnt want to lose his £ 300. Now this guy will never make money as far as I can see. You cannot do your homework, decide on a course of action and then bail out because the required result is'nt hit within twenty five minutes of your trade. In reality just one goal would have given him the opportunity to get out with a profit, or break even if the goal comes later on (within reason). To my mind he was overstaking and out of his comfort zone because otherwise while bail out? If he had bet £100 he would probably of let the trade run a lot longer than just panic. To compound his logic he said at half time he would lay the 0-0 full time result to get his £ 60 back. So as happens to all of us the game finished 0-0 and he lost £ 571.

The question is what would you have done in his situation? To me its the same in a lot of the blogs I read, mine included. Overstaking, taking a red to soon , closing winning trades to soon, chasing small losses and compounding them to bigger ones and not really knowing the dynamics of the markets before entering them. If I was Ian Erskine I could charge money for writing the obvious....Oh and by the way I did receive an email from him telling me why he deleted my comments on his blog and telling me that the bets were ahead this season but not by much , but over the last few seasons in his words he was "miles ahead." Maybe he meant "light years ahead" that would sound better. Sarcasm aside at least he sent me a reply.

Anyway I shall hope to trade some football this coming weekend as long as i dont get roped into anymore Christmas stuff, humbug !

Footballs Not Coming Home....

Nothing more can be said after our bid for the 2018 World Cup went down in flames in Zurich. We cant blame our players as we sent out the best team we could. With a Prince in our team if this had been a fairytale we would have had it all sewn up with enough time for a bedtime story. Sadly from reading all the reports our bid was top in everything, and in the corridors of power when asked if we could depend on votes we were assured that we could.

As it was, only one other member voted for us, not the best way to spend £15 million pounds but as we all know you've got to be in it to win. Where we go from here is uncertain , if FIFA do want to send it to all parts of the globe then we could be waiting a long time for the football to come back to the "motherland" as Sepp called it.

So well done to Russia and lets hope that they can host a true and fair World Cup, and that recent comments from the Wikileaks about" a mafia state " are not true. Otherwise it could be a bit like betting on the ATP tournament in St Petersburg last month with some rather strange odds and results.

So to 2022, and a laughable result with it given to a rather rich country (Emirate)called Qatar. We cant even use playing in 115 degree heat as an excuse as they are going to air condition all the stadiums. I should think so to, if you watch tennis then the last few years at Doha the women have just withered away in absurd humidity.

So the good news is I have started tracing back my family tree to see if I am in fact related to any Qatari people just in case there's any chance of me getting a game .I'm sure Sir Stanley Matthews managed to play in his fifties, and with such a small population I bet they are always short of a couple of players to get a full team out. I also hear that they will be one of the seeds which is just pushing it a bit far.

This is what wikipedia says about Qatar:

"Qatar is a destination country for men and women from South and Southeast Asia who migrate willingly, but are subsequently trafficked into involuntary servitude as domestic workers and laborers, and, to a lesser extent, commercial sexual exploitation; the most common offence was forcing workers to accept worse contract terms than those under which they were recruited; other conditions include bonded labor, withholding of pay, restrictions on movement, arbitrary detention, and physical, mental, and sexual abuse.

The government maintains that it is setting the benchmark when it comes to human rights and treatment of labourers."

So to all those labourers this is what you will be building, and it all looks bloody nice.

Better get cracking guys....

El Classico ?

What an amazing game of the football. The skill, touch and ease of these players was a sight to behold and really proved that dreams can come true as the scoreline showed. The last twenty minutes was just a show of keep ball as the game as a contest was over.

The oppostion only had two shots on target all night and to celebrate I even cracked open a couple of Stellas. When my other half came in from her evening university course I said " Can you guess the score" to which she replied "1-1."
I then moved out of the way of the TV and there it was in all its glory "What!" she screamed "West Ham 4 Manchester United 0."

So she joined me and had a glass of wine and we watched Alex's face getter redder together. Oh and by the way the game on Monday was pretty good those Barcelona boys sure can play some.

Back to reality and another month has shot by, December is here and the first snows landed where I live this morning. Not sure how much blogging I will do this month as I am not following any tipsters and with just my own bets it will be pretty sparce I imagine. After great months in August and October, November will go down as one of the worst this year. My own bets only made a small profit and the two tipsters both lost money. Luckily I traded some good profit from horse racing and amazingly football.

So this is where I am for now. I have dropped all tipsters and joined "The X Club" to try to improve my trading especially in the football department. I am sure if you read blogs like mine that you will have seen it on the web. I have bought enough crappy systems with the money I spent to join so personally I think this will be a great investment and help improve my mindset and skills in this area. Once I joined I spoke to Matt for an hour on Skype and I must say I have never met anybody before who is more astute and knowledgeable about Betfair markets. I do feel a complete novice because even though I have traded the markets for a number of years you speak to someone like him and realise you really havent got a clue. Whether I can cut the mustard is to be seen but I shall try my best!

Finally I have the Winners Market below for 2010/2011 I was going to set a goal to see how far I can get but I wont because I am not really sure and dont want to push it. As it goes up or down I shall update it and see where we are come May next year.