Downer.

Not the best and not the worst of days is how to remember this Wednesday. Sometimes its just luck that you're sitting at the PC and opportunity knocks and thats what happened to me this morning. I was going through the nag races on the internet and had the TV on beside me which was showing the Roddick game. I had already layed him and was red on both sides to the tune of about £30. I had got out of the bet as it wasnt happening and he was steamrolling his opponent.

All of a sudden he went for the ball and seemed to be in some sort of pain. The market didnt really react so quickly, thinking it was nothing major but as he was 1.03 at the time I had a sneeky lay of £300 for £9 liability . The rest as they say is history. He quit a game later after having treatment and I made a few quid. It was a shame for him as he was playing some great tennis and for low backers as well. Personally I never get involved backing at low odds on tennis, as today shows its not like a team sport were everyone can retire, with tennis its just one slip or twist and thats it, you've done your dough. There must be a website out there for players that retire the most, it might be worth hunting down. For the record the one I never get involved with is Bartoli she's a nightmare.

That was my only highlight as I lost a total of £ 240 today, £ 150 backing horses and another £90 on Betfair.
I watched the second half of the England game last night which was obviously disappointing but in the grand scheme of things doesnt really matter. What bothers me more is the lack of players turning up to play for their country, its worrying that half the team cant make the first team for their clubs. The club v country debate will always go on but with their vast salaries and all the aggro from the press if results dont go our way I'm sure a lot of them are happy not to take part.

Well Serbia, that was the game I wanted to watch. Last weekend they tried to stage the first gay pride event in Belgrade which obviously didnt go down to well as rioting insued. Last night they went to Italy and continued the fighting so getting the game abandoned. I gather FIFA are going to award the match to Italy 3-0 , I wander if I can get a bet on that......

The Appliance Of Science.

God, what a boring day today has been, and tomorow with only two meetings on the card looks even worse. It got to the stage where I was casting the deciding vote in my own little election on what the most important appliance was but keeping to the betting mode it had to be "value" as well.

The answer that came to me was "the microwave." What an absolutely marvellous bit of kit for the man on the move, when you are busy trying to get your bets on and dont have time to cook then just whack in some pre cooked meal and wham, its done. My mate always said he was great at cooking "Sausage Ding" I thought it was some Chinese food but then I found out it was just the sound the timer made on his microwave when he had cooked his sausages, Ding !

Anyway mine is a sharp microwave and cost about £ 69 and its one of those things you cant remember how long you've had it. Its like when you go to the doctors and you've got a cut arm and he says " When did you last have a tetanus injection because if its over ten years ago you need another, to which you reply " Oh it was about three years ago Doctor" then after reading your file he pipes up with " It was actually 1995 before you went to the Gambia."

So £69 for about ten years worth of work, sounds like slave labour to me and tomorrow I will give it a loving clean as reward for all its sterling efforts in keeping me fed.

To more mundane matters. I had another up and down day especially with the horses where I traded very well but lost it all on one particular lay. The horse drifted and I could have greened it up but I didnt. Stll made a £55 profit overall on Betfair but lost £57.50 on my own horse bets.

If you followed the SBP predictions for the college football then another A, B and C bet all went down in the night on Saturday. As stated in my last post I am not doing them if they over lap so I was lucky not to get involved saving myself about £ 400. Thats now two system losses for the NCAA football this season which would have wiped out any previous profits. The question is with all gambles , is it worth it to continue?

I did however get on the NFL games but after the A and B bet went down in succession I went to bed with a feeling of dread for the C bet. Happily this came through as The Eagles +3.5 beat the 49ers .

Lets Go.

A strange week on the betting front for me. The whole week had been up and down with me giving a bit and then getting it back and vice versa. A bit frustrating but not a lot I could do about it except having the added pressure of being a third of the way through the month with only a small profit.

Today that turned around. It started with SBP C bet coming in over night. For the record I havent placed any of the NCAA bets issued over the weekend as I mentioned last week they seem to overlap. The NFL bets I will do tomorrow because I can get access to the results a lot quicker and live TV pictures.


Bet Catalyst came good with their two selections coming first and fourth. I backed both each way and also in a double so making £ 390. I am only doing half stakes on these at the moment but hopefully its a sign of things to come for their picks and I will increase the stakes but not until i think the corner has been turned.
The winner was Gunner Lindley and the other bet The Betchworth Kid managed to get the precious fourth place at 16/1.

I have missed the last couple of winners from Packed Pockets but today I got on their only selection in the 5.15 at Bangor which then went and won by twenty lengths at 3/1.


I managed to chip in with a couple of winners as well. I had ten picks today with two places, two winners and six unplaced. One of the unplaced was Monkton Vale which at 33/1 lost a place by a nose which was a gutter.To help top it all off I have had a good couple of days on Betfair.

I have used the bettor logic software when I have had time and I really do think it gives you a real edge when looking for that most important word in the bettors bible "value". It reminds me of the saying "how long is a piece of string."
The reason why is they both mean different things to different people but when you have something that tells you in black and white then it gives you an added confidence when placing a bet in the market. If you can go back over the last five football seasons and see that the chance of something ending in a particular result is 16/1 but you can lay that result at 4/1 then that to me is value. Even if that result does happen you still wouldnt change your thinking or actions if you had to do it over again. I hope this makes sense, grammar is not my strong point as I guess you have discovered.

Anyway a great day with a good four figure profit and tomorrow is a day off.

Fragile.

If you are old enough to remember bands like The Sex Pistols, Sham 69 and The Cockney Rejects then you know what the pogo is. For those that dont its a dance where the basic steps allow for a variety of interpretations, some of which might appear quite violent. Pogo dancers have their choice of:

• keeping their torsos rigid or thrashing them about;
• holding their arms stiffly at their sides or flailing them;
• keeping their legs together or kicking about;
• jumping straight up and down, jumping in any direction, or spinning in the air.

So last night I was going to have pizza and a quiet couple of drinks with some mates but there I was at midnight in Po Na Na Brighton with lots of students doing the pogo to the song below, it took me back some I can tell you. Great fun apart from the obligatory morning after headache which takes a lot longer to shake off then when I was a Teenage Dirtbag . I hope you have a listen to the song below and have a go yourself. It is most invigorating.





Not made any headway over the last couple of days literally finshing about even. I managed to make £ 4 on Betfair , and had a few horse bets with no winners but plenty of places.

The tennis system didnt work so well but it did have a bumper week so a correction was/is due. I did go through some data and what i am looking to do was profitable but I dont really have a big enough sample size to see if it was just luck, but I will keep a record.



The NFL A bet for SBP came in very easily, shame it wasnt the C bet from the weekend and there are over the next couple of days some more NCAA bets starting tonight with UAB Blazers ( whoever they are.)
Hopefully I will be fully functioning tomorrow.

Easy Does It.

After a hectic weekend, today was a much more soothing, slower and profitable day. A lot less work but better profits, isnt that the way it should be?



The NFL game was reported in yesterdays losses but because of the time it finished it ended up in todays P&L but no matter everything else went well.

The horse lays seem to come in spurts like buses at the moment with few and far between and then many together. I managed to only hit one winner today so picked up a nice profit, along with the tennis system which again had a really good day. This week I am going to go through some more data on the tennis matches to see if I can improve this further more . I have an idea but I dont have a clue whether it will help but I will by the end of the week. I didnt have a single bet on the horses today as nothing struck me as value.

The biggest downer of the day was after spending all of last week checking football odds today I checked that my figures from the weekend matched with football data.co.uk and guess what? They didnt. My odds were different to what they posted up so I contacted them to find out why and found out they take the odds for the weekend matches on Friday before 5pm, where as I have been taking the odds about an hour before a game kicks off. Now you might not think it matters but two losing games for me this past weekend wouldnt have counted.

Got an A bet tonight on New England -1 with the SBP, fingers crossed.

The Boy Done Good.

Magnificent weekend of sport with action and thrills and spills everywhere. The highlight for me was the great line up of racing at Longchamp and what a day for local lad (local to me!) Ryan Moore as he got Workforce up to win the prix de l'arc triomphe. The colt, who looked in fantastic condition before the race, was given a brilliant ride by Moore, who was also securing his maiden victory in the prestigious contest. For owner-breeder Khalid Abdullah it was a fourth success following Rainbow Quest (1985), Dancing Brave (1986) and Rail Link (2006).

If the closing stages of the race were exciting, further drama followed as a stewards' inquiry was called into what looked a rough race. It did not affect Workforce and the Stoute team were able to celebrate their victory.

Earler in the afternoon champion jockey elect Paul Hanaghan won his first group one race with Wootton Bassett who led from start to finish and sandwiched between these two excellent races the brillant filly Goldikova won her eleventh group one race the most ever by a European horse.

Had a really busy weekend of betting. On the racing front it was strange as on Saturday I didnt have a single bet of my own. I couldnt find any value with lots of uninspiring racing mixed in with big fields and terrible weather it was a pin in the paper type of a day. Instead I concentrated on football, tennis and some golf.

Today was more of the same with only three horse bets with two placing at 18/1, 12/1 and one unplaced.

Below is the weekends Betfair screen. A few horse lays came in, the golf strategy chipped in a few quid ( pardon the pun) and the tennis really helped after having a rough last week. My new football strategy got off to a poor start as is normal when you use real money and I had a few kicks in the teeth with this. The worst being Rangers scoring in the 93rd minute and Udinese doing the same in Italy. I have looked back at eleven leagues over the last eleven seasons so I have done it to death and I just hope its a blip ! Famous last words and all that.

SBP had a successful college football weekend. I am having difficulty with these bets as the games seem to over lap and I dont know whether the bet needs to be an A or B or C etc.

Last night the first game handicap was + 10.5 and the team were losing by 13 but obviously I had to wait to see if they scored in the last quarter before I knew if it was an A or B bet next up. By the time I found out the other game had already kicked off so I couldnt get the extra money on I needed.

The bet I did get on was the C bet in the NFL on the Colts -6.5 which lost so costing me £ 200 so not good, but i salvaged £90 back on the Chargers.

Ian Erskine had another three system 3 winners and a three FTS winners although the majority of the games it was seat of the pants time, especially the lay of 1-1 in the Palace/QPR game with Palace scoring at the death but Rangers managing to get a winner straight away.

A busy weekend with just over £ 200 profit which for all the hard work wasnt so good, but thats life !

The Sun Always Shines On TV.

Remember those immortal words uttered by Aha many moons ago, well obviously it doesnt in Wales. The Costa has about three hundred odd days of sun a year and Wales probably has about three and they are all in July. I dont know much about the Ryder Cup or schedules but surely picking such a venue at such a time of year was going to be a nightmare. I reckon if the fog comes down to tomorrow as predicted then the USA team might get home for Christmas! At least I got my bets in play this morning and managed to have a lay in and finish my Ruth Rendall book.

Always nice to start a new month with a feeling of excitement to see what it brings, if anything in the way of profits. So the tennis system had two winners out of three today which would have put it nicely in profit if I had remembered to put the bets down. Typical but they are down on paper at least! Nothing doing on Betfair as I lost a bit on the horses and got a percentage of it back on football.Had a good day with the horses as Ballyvasey 9/2, Approve 12/1 and Zamina 13/2 placed , one other didnt and a winner came at 14/1.


Had various ideas as mentioned in previous posts and after spending a lot of time back testing one in particular, I shall start having some bets on laying particular odds on Football favs in leagues around Europe. I am going with a staking plan that hasnt broken the bank in the past and am confident enough to back this up with money.

Great piece from SP on his blog about the Betfair Float and this one thing in the article struck me and I quote :

As English points out, "one side effect of the float is that Betfair now has to make available a huge amount of information it could previously keep under wraps. That's likely to prove mouth-watering to wannabe competitors". In other words, the risks of rivals trying to muscle in on Betfair's business are rising.

Which hopefully can give them some competition and us better commission rates.