The mug is winning

Last season, with dry-ice swirling, flashing lights and trumpets blaring, Lee Dixon, the ex-Arsenal defender and TV pundit, was proudly announced as the Betfair Ambassador of football – and he was here to provide us with his sage advice and wisdom borne of many years experience in the game.

At the time, I thought to myself, “Hmm, just because he played the game, does that make him a decent bettor/trader?” A rhetorical question but one that I duly answered in my mind:   “No, it doesn’t.”

 Anyway, I started reading Dixon’s musings last season and, although I never officially recorded any of his bets (and most certainly didn’t follow any of them), it “felt” to me like he was losing hand over fist. Now this may well be untrue and, as I say, I have nothing but my instinct and a gut feeling to back me up, but I thought it deserved some closer attention.

Now at this point, it’s only fair to say that the task of a tipster paid by a newspaper or bookie is not necessarily an easy one. Amongst the general public, there are huge swathes of people who cannot/don’t want to build-up a solid assessment of a match for themselves, and they would rather let someone else do all the donkey work for them, to tell them where they should place their money. Fair enough, but there is then pressure on two sides for the paid tipster to come-up with regular and decent tips. Pressure from those who are paying them and from those who are following them.

We, as individuals, have the opportunity to just avoid a set of fixtures if we don’t like the look of them, or see no value there. The tipster, on the other hand, has to find something from somewhere in order to satisfy the insatiable appetites of his two masters. And its here that we have to give quite some degree of leeway to the professional, press or bookie related tipster. Because come rain or shine they have to come up with something.

Okay, so I thought I'd run a little spreadsheet and see how our Betfair Ambassador of football was faring this year. Ideally I would have liked to have downloaded his tips from last year and check how well he did in 2011/12, but those posts seem to have disappeared. No matter. I can still do it for this season.

To my mind, Lee Dixon would be classed as a mug punter with the kind of bets he recommends. There are a fair few sprinklings of First Goalscorer bets, which I generally think are something of a lottery, and for the last England match against San Marino, he was even recommending backing a hat trick at odds of 2.88. Not only is a hat trick bet a classic mug bet, but the offered odds were absolutely appalling and could never be considered value in a million years. I would also say that his reasoning for recommending certain bets are also suspect on occasions. He sensibly relies on advice from Opta much of the time, but when he strays away from that it’s possible to see him floundering, and his criteria become badly flawed.

Right, so the alarm bells are ringing for me. In amongst the decent analysis there are pockets of highly questionable advice and various tips to make a sensible person frown. But how has he been doing?

Surprisingly, he’s not doing too badly. It is, of course, rather early days. We’re only six games into the Premier League and things can reverse very quickly, but to my shock Mr. Dixon currently has an ROI of over 19% across 56 bets. There are, I should point out, the odd couple of bets here and there that I have deliberately missed out. In some posts he just rambles and says he’s not sure and if he had to be forced, he might look at this market, blah blah. I haven’t included those as definite tips. All too vague. Only his solid recommendations are included.

But using level stakes, he’s in profit at the moment – so congratulations go to him. However, before we all start patting him too hard on the back for a job well done, let me temper this with yet another small dose of reality. I will be absolutely shocked if Lee Dixon’s tips are still showing a profit come the end of the season. He started the season with a very long line of losers, and it’s only a couple of big priced winners that have lifted him into profit. If those one or two big wins had just gone the other way, he would be in the red. We do, therefore, need to take the current figures for what they are.

It’s at this point you may be asking yourselves what is the point in all this. A reasonable question indeed. My answer to that is I don’t really have an answer. If you’re like me, then you carry out your own analysis, settle on a list of possible selections – and then go looking for teams news and other views and opinions. I do this as other people often have managed to pull out interesting snippets or have viewed the forthcoming fixture in a way that I hadn’t foreseen. For Premier League matches, I might well pop-in and see what Lee Dixon has to say. If he quotes some Opta stats then it can be worthwhile just for that – but I wouldn’t strike a bet purely on his say so.

 

Then again, you may be the type of person who will indeed follow someone’s advice just because they’re on the telly. If that's the case then this post may be worth you while taking note of.

In profit now? Yes indeed. In profit over the long term? Well, we’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we?