My journey – Part two
My early foray into Gambling markets was on football pools. I learnt on the football pools that a lot of the money staked had no rationale behind it. People just used birthdays, lucky numbers etc. etc. The football pools was certainly a bit of a lottery, but it was a lottery that offered the chance for somebody using a bit of intelligence to place better positions in the market. With so much ‘dumb’ money around, I thought that in the long term I may be able to perform better than chance, which is exactly what happened. Due to the football pools limited appeal though, I started looking at gambling markets properly.
I started to examine how bookmakers made the markets, what drove those prices and where inefficiencies could exist. I knew nothing about horse racing so avoided those markets and focused on football instead. Borrowing a trick from the football pools I started doing some very complicated bets to cover off unlikely scenarios and maximise more certain ones. Despite being useless at maths when I was at school, my attempts on the football pools to predict matches that would end in a draw forced me to get my finger out and start working with probabilities and combinations. Basically I was optimising my entry by ordering bets in a certain manner and by using very efficient covering combinations.
I managed to bag some really nice wins, but it wasn’t long before I realised that with such huge over rounds the whole game was completely unfair unless you had some sort of special knowledge to over come the bookmakers margin. So I turned to the biggest casino of the lot, the stock market….
Category: General
