What a relief

I turn my back for a few moments, and all kinds of whacky happenings have been going on in my absence. Yes, I'm back home and, although I had an absolutely fabulous time abroad, I'm relieved and happy to be home.

However, all the footy shenanigans have been going on whilst I've been away. Very interesting indeed.

All change in Manchester I see, with Mancini out, Fergie and his purple nose safely wheeled off to the retirement home, only to be replaced by yet another jocular, bubbly and excitable Scot. The Special (Needs) One back at Stinkford Bridge. Mark Hughes, who's managerial skills seem almost inversely proportional to his skill as a player, miraculously finds himself back in gainful employment after Stoke advertised at JobSeekers Plus, so on and so forth. All very exciting.

I was more than a little gutted to see my lovely Spurs yet again fail to reach the last four. The usual blip that we always suffer at the same time of year did for us yet again. Consequently, we'll be lucky to keep hold of our little monkey-faced genius Gareth Bale, but if someone is foolish enough to offer £85 million for him, I'd be happy to see him go for that. We could replace him with Ronaldo I suppose :-)

In other areas, I've noticed that those decent people at tradingfootball.eu have also been busy while I've been away, and seem to have been doing okay. They've added some interesting new strategies up which I will be analysing in due course.

Of course, I'm not about to detail what those strategies are here as that would be grossly unfair, but their strategies did make me knock-up yet another little spreadsheet that some of you may find useful. 

When looking to create a new strategy for yourselves, you obviously want to cover as many of the possible scorelines as possible, even if some of those scorelines will end-up as a scratch or smallish loss. You may decide to cover a selection of scorelines at the outset of a chosen match, and then work towards covering off any remaining danger scorelines as the game progresses. Or you may just be the type of person who likes maximum coverage right from the word go.

Either way, to help you all work-out what a possible strategy could be, I have created a little hedging spready.

Download Hedger Here

This is a rather simple spreadsheet, and the only changes you need to make are in row 4, where you can choose to Back or Lay any selection (or selections) in the match odds, both teams to score, Under/Overs and Correct Scores market. Click on each item in row 4 and a dropdown will appear allowing you to choose either Back or Lay. 

Playing around with the spreadsheet will allow you to see which Backs and which Lays cover-off which scorelines, allowing you to develop a strategy. 

It's mildly lame, I suppose, but some of you may find it helpful.

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On a different note, I have to report that I've been (correctly) taken to task regarding my last "testing your strategies post. I had a couple of basic mistakes in the spready and some anonymous chap was kind enough to spot them and point them out to me:

Anonymous1 June 2013 15:36

I am afraid the spreadsheet is not correct.

1. The column K : Result column needs to look at the Full Time Result (and not part Time result). Your need to look at column G instead of column J.

2. The calculation of the return in incorrect. For example your first return for the match Blackburn3 Everton2. You lay Everton , and Everton wins 1-0; you should therefore lose your stake and not win.

3. The result and return columns were incorrect.

Unfortunately once all corrections are done, the return is

- £ 61.

Happy to send the amended spreadsheet to anyone. Just send me an email to jmf@btinternet.com

Anon is of course spot-on about my silly mistakes, but largely I suppose it doesn't matter in this instance. The main point about the post was to get you all to start testing your own strategies. The spready that I knocked-up took about half-an-hour and was specifically for the post in question.

I will, however, endeavour to do better in future. Do bear in mind though, that the spreadsheet I've just posted above also only took 30 minutes and so there is a decent chance that has errors also!