Recent Articles
US Masters golf
First trade of the tournament is already done. When the market was formed Woods was way too short at 5’s so I laid him. His best finish this year is T10 and there is no evidence at the moment that he was anywhere near a 4/1 chance for the masters. It turned out a lot of people thought the same and he is at a much bigger price and I am out for the moment. Not very often you get …
Showdown
Barcelona are priced for an easy win against Shakhtar and I can’t see beyond that. Barca will want to put this to bed comprehensively in the first leg. However, there are decent trades available for this scenario. Goals give you plenty of scope to hedge good set ups.
Last night’s legs were uncompetitive and the return legs look a formality now, which is a shame. The same can’t be said of tonights showdown at Stamford Bridge. I would have priced …
When Harry met Jose
Home wins look the order of the day for the first leg of the champions league this evening. It’s difficult to see beyond that, but as we seen already, anything is possible. When Harry last visited Madrid he got mugged, most Spurs fans will hope it doesn’t happen again on the field of play.
The pressure has to be on Real Madrid to get a result at home against Champions league novices Spurs. Spurs best chance of progressing has to …
Tennis season warms up
With Novak Djokovic’s win against Nadal at Miami yesterday, things are warming up nicely on the Tennis front. Next month the French Open will provide more clues, but it looks like this season we could have some great contests ahead of us.
Miami was a repeat of Indian wells and it provide some excellent trading opportunties. Neither event is highest profile on the tour, but it provided many clues for the summer season. It is clear that Novak is right …
I predict another draw
A cursory glance at the Italian football today reveals two matches were the matched bet volume is 5-6 times greater than normal and draw odds much shorter than expected. I have posted the two matches in question on the forum. I backed Brescia to win against Bologna on Saturday after picking up on activity on that match. Brescia were 2-0 up inside ten minutes, so I traded out at very short odds.
It prompted me to see what happened …
Clean sweep
A very pleasing today on all fronts with lots of decent sporting action to get stuck into and generally favourable results all round for my most popular strategies. The highlight was racing where I managed a clean sweep on all 34 races I participated in. It’s pretty tricky to achieve that nowadays and there are many ways to get tripped up as the day progresses, so it’s a very satisfying result.
Coupled with some excellent results elsewhere it was a …
Fourth wicket fall key for Indian trade
After six weeks of thrilling cricket we are down to the final two nations as they battle it out for the World Cup trophy on Saturday.
Australia are the most successful cricketing side at World Cups, having won the competition no less than four times. However, after Ricky Ponting’s side team were beaten by five wickets in the quarterfinals by India, so there will be a new name on this year’s trophy. The Aussies were chasing their fourth consecutive tournament …
March
Mainly thanks to Cheltenham March went OK. It was a surprise to post my best ever March as, outside of Cheltenham, some of the racing was just shocking. Field sizes have been very small and some of the racing just wildly uncompetitive. You wonder why some of these races are going ahead?
I was ‘luck positive’ in March which helped. Last year in April I had several massive doses of luck so I have virtually no chance of repeating that …
Waves
For some time I’ve noticed curious elements within betting markets. I love analysing and studying what happens in the market, and it’s all to find out that critical question, why?
Getting a deeper understanding is useful because it allows you to build a firm framework around your decisions. I’ve often seen people stumble on something that works and then come up with things to justify that. Eventually they will fail a little while later and slip out of existence, why? …
World Cup Cricket
Some really massive matched amounts coming through these markets. New Zealand vs Sri Lanka reached £30m in matched bets and so did last nights big match between Indian and Pakistan.
I hadn’t considered doing much on this tournament but I’ll be taking a very keen interest in the final now given the level of activity on these matches. Advice to follow on another post.
Slapped wrists
Looks like Betfair have got slapped wrists again for their advertising.
This time is was for their claim that punters are 40% better off than industry SP when taking Betfair SP. I note the adjudication upheld elements of of the claim, but failed to take account of the fact a punter on Betfair who picked each winner in the manner laid out would never ever get to the number they quote as they would get thumped 20% of profits by …
£15
Not an impressive P&L. That is until you realise it was done with just £10 stakes, that’s a 150% return on stake! But not on capital, as you would need multiples of that to do this.
But the fact remains that I reckon using £10 stakes you could get profitable most days just picking and choosing your targets and strategies. The problem comes when you get to larger amounts, it’s much more difficult to do the same thing then. Today …
Quality over quantity
One trend I’ve noticed so far this year is the increasingly poor racing on offer, I hope it improves during the summer.
Today we are faced with three cards but only five races with 10 or more runners. Tomorrow, at the moment, there are only two races of similar ilk. It’s dreadful, fairly low quality races and very few competitors. 2,3 or 4 runners races are getting quite common at the moment. It seems to signify the underlying problems racing …
F1 season trading
There are some great trading opportunities through the course of F1 races, but you wouldn’t catch me betting on the drivers or constructors championships pre-season. There are just too many unknowns. However, here’s a trend that might be of interest and something that can be used to your advantage.
Over the past six years, partnerships have been increasingly fruitful for teams, particularly at the start of the season. In the first ten races of the 2005 season, only one one-two …
I predict a draw
Hold on, haven’t I posted that before? Has this happened before? Err… yes at the end of each Italian football season. I’m wise to it now!
Part of my preparation for the weekends football fixtures, I suck in all the matches via Bet Angel into a spreadsheet and a couple of pre-set formula’s point out areas of interest. Last night it threw up Padova vs Atalanta as ‘odd’. You can see why on the following graph. The volume of matched …
Doing a Moonee
Tuned in to the William Reid stakes this morning at Moonee Valley in Australia to check on the market and progress of the best sprinter in the world at the moment, Black Caviar. I doubt if many people outside of the UK have paid much attention to this horse but having seen the odds on it get shorter in each successive race I think it’s obvious something special is going on here.
Even at the remarkably short odds she was …
Snooze to lose
I quite like novelty bets as they are difficult to price, but I missed this one yesterday. In hindsight an opportunity missed!
https://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/
Ken Clarke netted a punter a decent return at 16/1 by officially / unofficially falling asleep during the budget speech yesterday. Some of these other more esoteric bets didn’t come in.
Should I green up?
People often ask me if it is worth greening, or redding, up; hedging your profit so you win what ever the result. In a word yes, but a longer description follows.
First off the market is very efficient, so in essence you could argue that it makes no difference. If you hedge you need to place another lay order. The hedge value is calculated by laying off the profit at the current lay price, thereby dividing your profit by the …
Bump..
Now Cheltenham is firmly behind us and the champions league football pauses for a few weeks, it’s time to come back to earth with a bump. On the racing front, the weeks before and after Cheltenham are often starkly different, so it’s time to dig deep and stay out of trouble.
I’ll be adopting a cautious approach in the coming week and not trying to push too hard to find an opportunity. Doing that gives you a tendency to look …
Great finish to Cheltenham
“Phew, that’s it then”. That was my feeling at the end of play today. An exhausting but rewarding Cheltenham. The gold cup was an excellent race and one that lived up to expectations, it’s really nice to enjoy the racing. We will be brought back done to earth for sure today! I have never had a good Saturday on Cheltenham week. If I do manage to pull a good day out of the hat, I’ll be in touching distance of …
Perspective
A better day again at Cheltenham so I will upgrade myself to a 9/10 for yesterday’s performance. I continued my strategy of trading on both exchanges this week. I now have a headache, it’s a bit intense!
I’m looking for a 10/10 tomorrow, but I think that’s a bit of an ask; but you never know!
It’s funny, while results can look impressive year on year, you often forget how you managed to dig a result out. This year is …
All green on St Patricks day?
Yesterday was an interesting day at Cheltenham. I did OK and, combined across both exchanges, I actually did pretty well so I’ll give myself at 8/10. Volumes on Betfair are almost exactly the same as in previous years, it’s very flat.
I have now gathered enough information to determine what is and isn’t working at Cheltenham. First off, the markets are much ‘slower’ than usual, getting an order matched is a painful experience; more painful that previous years for sure. …
Something odd
Hmm, I’ll give myself a 6/10 for my efforts on the first day of Cheltenham.
The markets were not particularly easy today, but I didn’t do a great job; in comparison to other people I know anyhow. Still chucked in some good numbers, but as others did a better job I have to mark myself down as a ‘could do better’.
The first day of Cheltenham is generally spent now looking at how things have changed since last year. I’ll …
Efficient Cheltenham
Just had a browse at the first few markets at Cheltenham and it’s amazing how small the book percentage is on a lot of them. Some of the books are only just over 100% and this makes it fantastic value for backers or people dutching the market.
I’ll be gathering data all week, so I’ll let you know if I spot anything interesting. But that’s the first thing to jump out at me this morning.
Detailed Cheltenham preview
As I mentioned in the newsletter, register now for GX Magazine and get a detailed preview of the Cheltenham festival to download today. There is a multi page spread in the magazine which contains information from us full of key stats, hints and tips.
Sign up here: –
https://www.gx-world.com/uk/register.html
Betfair offer an explanation
Betfair have offered an explanation of the significant outage yesterday, to view it click on the following link: –
https://promotions.betfair.com/explanation
They have promised to attempt to do any further work on the site for the whole of next week.
What a joke!
Just two days before Cheltenham we find ourselves facing another Betfair outage. Not just that, but this is the second day in a row that the site has been offline. This is the worst period for reliability I can remember on Betfair.
Some years ago Betfair used to boast about how many transactions they did per day, but that took a back seat when the focus turned to reducing the load on the system, which no doubt reduced costs also. …
Morgan inclusion offers opportunity
England’s World Cup bid suffered another setback with the news of Stuart Broad’s injury that has ruled him out for the remainder of the tournament. The loss of Broad was even more of a blow as Kevin Pietersen has already returned home for surgery. Paceman Chris Tremlett has been called in at short notice to help out with the bowling duties.
Eoin Morgan will step in to fill KP’s boots and is likely to have his first opportunity to impress …
Europa success for Liverpool?
I must admit to being sceptical when ‘King Kenny’ was appointed as Liverpool manager. I felt that after many years out it would be difficult to adjust to the modern game. However, Dalgleish has had a mercurial affect on Liverpool’s confidence and at the top level of a sport that is critical. People perform with similar skill at the highest levels and confidence is a BIG factor.
Last Sunday’s defeat of Man Utd will have given them a real boost …
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