Testing, Testing!

If you’re like me and you’ve been betting/trading for any length of time, then you’ll have left a large number of “foolproof” systems, strategies, ideas and whimsies behind on the “exchange highway” – with many of them never even having seen the light of day. 

There are essentially two ways to test a strategy or idea, one of which (in my opinion) is far safer, more thorough, less time-consuming and generally more accurate. The other is perhaps more fun.

The fun method is test an idea out by trialling it with small stakes, perhaps even automating it so that you don’t have to slavishly sit at your computer to run the actual trial. This is okay but even with small stakes on a losing, high-turnover strategy, it’s quite easy to trickle away a reasonable portion of your betting bank. Also the question then becomes, how long should I run the trial for? Is one week, two weeks, two months sufficient? What is a reasonable sample? Tricky isn’t it?

The other, and far more practical method is to back-test any new strategy first. Now the lazy and feckless amongst you will probably be groaning right about now. 

“Hurrumph! It’s too difficult and too time-consuming to back-test something. Easier just to try it out.”

Yes, it certainly is easier just to throw a bet down and “see how it goes”, but even if you’re just a serious hobbiest, this is unacceptably dumb. If you’re a professional or semi-professional and working like that, then perhaps you need to find another line of business.

Back-testing is admittedly no substitute for live betting, but it can sort the wheat from the chaff before you even embark down that road and potentially cost yourself money. I have ideas and strategies flying around in my head all of the time. Most of them are completely daft and fanciful, but some appear to have real worth and substance. It’s these ideas that can be dangerous unless treated properly.

“Oh my God! This idea is amazing. I can really see this working.”

Stop right there. Don’t you dare put a penny into the market. BACK-TEST IT! 

In truth back-testing is really not that difficult. I’ll even take you through an example of back-testing to show you just how easy it really is.

First off, pop along to http://www.football-data.co.uk/data.php#download where you can download several season worth of data for all the major European leagues. This is all free-of-charge and is an amazing resource to have at your disposal.

These data files are downloadable as CSV files. What are CSV files, you may be asking? Well, these are text files where the data is separated by commas. The acronym CSV simply stands for Comma Separated Values. Once you click on a file and it downloads, what you need to do is open it using Excel and save it as an Excel workbook. The reason we do this is so that we can perform calculations on the data.

These data files are helpful to us bettors because they contain the average odds for each match, so we can not only see if one of our ideas will win lots of times or not, we can also see, given the average odds, whether the idea will actually make a profit or not. That is an amazing time-saver, isn’t it? No need to keep betting over and over to check an idea. Here we can test against thousands of matches in a few minutes. If the idea makes money after back-testing, well that is the time to start testing it in the live environment!

Okay, so we’ve downloaded our test file and we’ve saved it as an Excel workbook. We open it up and see a lot of data in there. On the same website, there is a key to each of these fields, but they are nearly all easily interpreted anyway.

Now so you can see a practical example of back-testing, I've provided you with a short example, In the link below, I have provided last year’s EPL data results. 

Download the example file here

If you open it up, you will see two sheets. The first one is the “E0” sheet. This is the raw data provided by football-data.co.uk. You will find it good practice to generally avoid adding formulas and calculations directly into the raw data. This is best left untouched and a new sheet used to work out the “winning strategies” (we hope). This way, you can apply your ideas to any set of data without having to try and unpick all the formulas and calculations from the data.

The second sheet is what I’ve created to help us perform our back-testing on the data. Right, so let’s suppose we want to test the idea that there is money to be made by backing Over 2.5 goals in every match where the odds are greater than or equal to 2.00. 

Now this is obviously a rather rudimentary example, but it should still be helpful to see the mechanics of it all. The whole test on last year’s Premier League took me less than five minutes. That's testing 380 matches, and I could very easily expand that out to several seasons or several leagues, allowing me to test my idea against thousands of matches.

In my “Test” sheet, I have written in plain English what I’m testing. This is easy to forget if you open the sheet up after a couple of months, so it’s always good to remind yourself of what you’ve already tested. I’ve also separated-out the odds I’m testing against (C3) so that I can change this and the results will update “on-the-fly”. This gives a bit more flexibility. For example, odds of 2.00 might be a loser, but what about odds of 1.90?

In the raw data sheet (E0), the odds section begins at column X and finishes at column BS. Most of these are match odds, some are Asians and some are the 2.5 goals odds. We’re obviously interested in the 2.5 odds. Columns BI to BM contain “BbOU”, BbMx>2.5”, “BbAv>2.5”, “BbMx<2.5” and “BbAv<2.5”. In order these are:

• The number of bookies used to derive the averages
• Betbrain maximum Over 2.5 goals odds.
• Betbrain average Over 2.5 goals odds.
• Betbrain maximum Under 2.5 goals odds.
• Betbrain average Under 2.5 goals odds.

I think we’re just interested in the averages here, so we want the BbAv>2.5 column (which is the BK column). Right, so in column B of my test sheet, starting at row 13, I have this formula:

=IF(AND(ISNUMBER(E0!B3), E0!BK2>$C$3), E0!BK2, "")

What I’m doing here is checking that the B column in the “E0” sheet contains a date. If it doesn’t, then it must be an empty row and I can ignore it. I do this because the EPL has 380 games per season, but the Championship and below have 552. I want to make my test sheet “data agnostic” if at all possible. 

The second check in this formula is whether the Over 2.5 odds in the BK column of the “E0” sheet are greater than or equal to my stated odds in C3. The little “$” marks around the C3 means it’s static, allowing me to drag this formula all the way down the sheet and it will still refer to C3. Anyway, if both those conditions are satisfied, then I display the actual average odds.

Column C just reports if the bet was a winner or a loser. A “1” is a win and a “0” is a loss. The “Return” showed is my stake (C4) multiplied by the given odds. Of course if you’re betting on the exchange then you will also have to take commission into account (C5), which gives us an actual P/L in column F. The final result is seen in F10.

Unfortunately, as you can see, this particular strategy would not have made me any money in the Premier League for last season. It could be worth checking other leagues and other seasons to see if there is any variation, but on the face of it, there is no edge here.

But hey, I haven’t spent a single penny of my bank finding out the answer. And that makes the last five minutes playing around with the data well worth my time. 

In my next post, I will provide a more complex example, that performs lookups based on the previous match for each team. This also can then be used as a template for a wide variety of backtesting scenarios.

A Game Of Two Halves

I did have the second part of my Asian betting post all ready to go (including another large-breasted Asian beauty for you all), but I think I must have accidentally deleted the entry 'cos I can't find it for the life of me. Oh well, I'll knock it up again I suppose (the post, not the beauty) - but in the meantime, I thought I'd change track and chat about how first-half action can affect the second half in a match of association football. Nothing like a bit of axiomatic fat-chewing, is there?

I've been looking at the English Premier League and the Championship over the last three full seasons worth of data to see how many goals are scored by both teams after a particular scoreline. Hopefully it will be helpful to some of you out there.

Okay, so the tables on the left here show the average number of goals scored by the home and away teams when the given scoreline was achieved in the first-half of the match. So, for the EPL, we can see that if the first half finished 0-0, then on average the home side will score 0.85 goals and the away side will manage 0.63.

Maybe there's nothing too amazing with all that, but there are a few points to note. For example, a first-half score of 1-2 is quite a dangerous score for any away Premier League side as it appears to trigger something of a fightback from the home side (1.02 goals). This is also reflected in the Championship, although is not quite as pronounced. In both leagues, the 1-0 and 2-0 scorelines will probably also see the home side go on to stretch their lead in the second-half.

As far as the home side is concerned, 0-1 is a bad first-half result in the Premier League, causing the away side to improve even further - while 2-1 is rather precarious in the Championship, as that causes the away side to redouble their efforts even further in the second-half.

If you're looking for the maximum number of goals in the second-half, then 0-1 is top in the Premier League (with an overall total of 1.67 goals), and 2-0 triggers most goals in the second-half of Championship matches, seeing on average 1.65 goals.

Right, another pair of tables, and this pair is unfortunately perhaps even less interesting than the dull tables above (sorry about that). These two show the number of goals scored when the first goal is scored in a particular 10 minute section. For example, in the EPL table, if the first goal is scored in the first ten minutes of a game, then on average there will be 3.69 goals in the match. Unsurprisingly, the number of goals steadily dwindles with the passage of time. Shocker, huh?

______________________________________

Note, I do realise that I have a number of comments that require answering. I'll try and get round to those in my next post.

The Wonder of Asians

For some reason, it seems that whenever the words “Asian” and “Handicap” are mentioned together, then many bettors and traders eyes immediately start to glaze over. Or else, they will profess to understand them and make assurances that they are fully comfortable with them – but then proceed to completely ignore them and never use them.

This is somewhat surprising because often-times there can be more value to be had using an Asian Handicap bet compared to your run-of-the-mill standard bet that we’re all so used to and comfortable with. Also, and perhaps more importantly, Asian bets have the potential to open-up new and different hedging possibilities that can lead to greater profits for all you traders out there, so they really shouldn’t be ignored as they tend to be.

How many people, for example, have you heard discussing a Draw No Bet but never once mentioning AH+0? You’ve probably listened to someone in the last day or so declare that they were going lay some team or another, but I’d be surprised if they also weighed-up if the odds were better on AH+0.5 for the other team.

If you’re not familiar with Asian bets, then you yourself may be muttering under your breath at this point, asking what the hell I’m banging on about – but I would ask you to bear with me. Of course if you fully  understand Asian bets, then by all means quietly pass me (and this post) by and we’ll say not more about it, but if you’re not overly-familiar with Asian bets or tend to swerve them, then perhaps you should spend then next couple of minutes reading. It may just be worth your while.

The Basics:

As the name implies, Asian Handicap betting incorporates a handicap system to adjust each team’s final scoreline, adding or subtracting a handicap value to determine a winner/loser. The idea behind all this is to remove the draw from the equation, leaving only two possible outcomes For example, if Man Utd are playing at home against Reading, then you may see something like this:

• Man Utd -2.0: Odds of 1.85
• Reading +2.0: Odds of 2.15

Do bear in mind that I have just made these odds up as an illustration. So if you back Reading at odds of 2.15 and Man Utd go on to win the match 2-0, then that means a win by two goals but then subtract their handicap of -2 goals, resulting in the match ending in a draw as far as the Asian Handicap system is concerned. Under such a situation, your full stake would be returned and the bet considered void. If Man Utd only win by one goal, then you have won your bet.

Actual Result:           Asian Result:

    0-0                  -2 - 0 (Reading win. You win)
    1-0                  -1 - 0 (Reading win. You win)
    2-0                   0 - 0 (Draw. Stake returned)
    3-0                   1 - 0 (Man Utd win. You lose)

Okay, so that’s a basic example, but now I’ll try and provide some practical, day-to-day uses for Asian Handicap bets so that you might start incorporating them into your usual weaponry of tactics.

Draw No Bet:

Forgive me if I start with the most obvious Asian Handicap bet first. But if you like a DNB now and then, it would definitely be to your advantage to also look at an Asian Handicap +/-0 bet also. If Liverpool are playing Arsenal and you see Arsenal +0, then that’s exactly the same as Draw No Bet on Arsenal. This is an Asian bet but there is no handicap applied to either team, and as there is no draw result in an Asian bet, it then becomes a DNB. This is always worth looking at across all the bookies you have accounts with, as you could well better the DNB price found on Betfair. SBOBet are good for this, as are the might Pinnacle and 188.

Lay a team

Instead of laying teamA because you think they won’t win the match, why not consider striking a +0.5 bet on teamB? This positive handicap on teamB means that if teamA don’t win the match (by at least a one goal advantage), then you will win your bet. A draw scoreline of 0-0, 1-1, etc plus the half-goal given to your team by the handicap means your team wins the match.

Back a team

This of course is the opposite of above. We back teamA for -0.5, meaning we think they will win the match. If they do win the match 2-1, then we take -0.5 away from their scoreline, leaving us with a 1.5-1 scoreline. Our team wins and thus so does out bet.

You may be sighing heavily at this point, so I'll leave it here for the moment. In the next post, I'll deal with more interesting ideas such as: “If teamA win by at least 1 goal…”, or perhaps “if teamB only manage to lose by 2 goals…”. This opens-up more possibilities and more flexibility. I'll also delve into the dark waters of split Asians, which do seem to intimidate some people.

____________________________

Just one quick answer to a comment:


Neil Daley18 February 2013 20:19
I've also been experimenting with MySql and PHP. Works great once you get it going. Have you managed to automate the process of getting data from Football-Data.co.uk straight into you database or do you download it first?

I haven't attempted to automate retrieving the data (yet) as I need to insert it into an Excel sheet first so that I can amalgamate that data with the score time data that I hold. I can then insert a fully-enriched data set into my database.

I'm really getting to grips with it all now and am well down the road to having what I want. Working-out how to code-up all my algorithms in SQL and/or PHP will take some work but I'm well on track.

Exchange? What Exchange?

Have you typed-in www.betfair.com recently? I have and, over the last couple of days sometimes it comes-up with the exchange site that we all love/hate, - but more often than not it's also directed me to their "lovely" new fixed-odds "sportsbook" site with only a small button on the top-left to allow people to go to the exchange? Today, we seem to have the exchange back at the forefront, but what will appear tomorrow, I don't know.

Look at the screenshot here. Can you see the tiny little "Go to exchange" button?

So, perhaps the exchange is being relegated to only a bit-part player in Betfair's new and improved vision? If so, then it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Their selling point, their originality and innovation was the exchange. It was ground-breaking at the time and is still the reason that they have so many regular customers betting and trading on their site. So to suddenly plonk that summarily to one side and push the fixed-odds side and start swimming with the throng of other standard bookies out there, well it all seems rather bizarre. How are they going to differentiate themselves from Ladrokes, William Hill and Bet365? What do they have to offer straight punters that aren't being fully serviced by the normal high-street bookies already? And can they really be advertising the "best odds", but then direct people to the fixed odds site where they most certainly do not have the best odds? I don't think so.


Pinnacle
Okay the good stuff first. Pinnacle are by far and away the best bookies out there. Winners seem to be welcome, the given odds are good, it's possible to get large amounts on without being restricted or banned, they have really decent Asian offerings and cover a large selection of sports and markets. All excellent stuff and well done to them.

Oh, and by the way, if you're one of those people who often submit straight bets on Betfair, then my advice to you would be to stop doing that immediately. Take away the 5% (or slightly less) commission that you happen to give to Betfair, then the odds really do not compare to those offered by Pinnacle. If you were to transfer all your straight betting to Pinnacle lock, stock and barrel then, over the long run, you will win more money with Pinny than you could ever do with Betfair. Trading is another matter of course, but when comparing straight bet value, then it's not even a competition.

As you may have guessed, there is a "but" in all of this. Pinny themselves I have no bad word to say... but as for their website. Well, that's a different matter altogether. Any of you who have Pinnacle accounts and do any regular betting on there will may well be familiar with this particular page:

It drives me absolutely batty. Select a country and a league, spend fifteen or twenty seconds selecting one or two events and markets on that page, add-in your stake, then click submit. Oh, sorry, the money-line has changed in that time, and consequently the site has silently wiped-out all your stakes and so you're submitting no bets. Aaargh!

Now I do realise that Pinny is extremely price sensitive, but often this "refresh" of the odds doesn't even move the odds at all. It's simply a wipe and start again, but for punters who don't jump on a page, select their markets, enter their odds and submit within a few seconds, then there's a decent chance that they will have to do it all over again as their actions weren't within the designated "window".

This is slightly ironic of course as their website is just about the slowest site I've ever been on. I once saw a snail stuck in super-glue inside a wind-tunnel making more headway than Pinnacle's website. It's shockingly sluggish (or "snailish" should I say?). For all the money that must be passing through the site, I'm sure they could invest a few pennies to get someone to design a site that doesn't piss people off.


The Ultimate Football Database
Like many of you out there, I have a whole raft of spreadsheets and workbooks that I use to help me with my betting and trading. Many of them have been developed over a long period of time and are quite rich in features and heavy with data. However, some of them have now started to creak a little as I'm asking a little bit too much from them and they are not really up to the job.

Thus, I've decided to spend much of my time recently to writing a new all-singing-all-dancing database for all my lovely footy stats. Indeed, I’m finding myself spending every spare minute in the design/redesign and coding of the whole thing – which will at last combine all the usual football data, my prediction algorithms and – more importantly – all my score time data into one huge beast of a database that will surely result in me ending-up a multi-millionaire and driving my yacht around the Caribbean islands. Or perhaps not. We’ll have to wait and see.

For those technical people amongst you, I’ve decided to use MySql for my database and PHP for my access into it – and I have to say it’s great fun. I’ve been spending hours poring over my tables, re-shaping and normalising them, and all the tweaking and honing is going well. I’ve also managed to cobble together a working mechanism to automatically pump all the data from football-data.co.uk plus all my score time data into to one CSV file so that I can load a full and rich data set for each match directly into my database in one go. Once I have five years worth of data for all the major leagues around Europe in place, I will be a happy man indeed, and it will then be a case of maintenance. It's quite a big project but one that I'm sure will be well worth it when it's finally finished.

As a consequence of said database, I haven't been as fully focused on my trading as I perhaps I should. It's wrong, but I find myself already looking forward to next season, where my new database will be ready to unleash and hopefully bear fruit.

Below is the last seven days P/L. Profits are decidedly small but that's the way it goes sometimes.

Football: £203.14  Total P&L:  £203.14


Football Showing 1 - 20 of 27 markets
Market Start time Settled date Profit/loss (£)
Football / Tottenham v Newcastle : Correct Score 09-Feb-13 12:45 09-Feb-13 14:41 32.73
Football / Tottenham v Newcastle : Over/Under 3.5 Goals 09-Feb-13 12:45 09-Feb-13 14:41 4.34
Football / Union Santa Fe v Arsenal FC : Correct Score 08-Feb-13 22:10 09-Feb-13 00:26 2.40
Football / Watford v C Palace : Correct Score 08-Feb-13 19:45 08-Feb-13 21:43 20.33
Football / Watford v C Palace : Over/Under 3.5 Goals 08-Feb-13 19:45 08-Feb-13 21:17 11.23
Football / Watford v C Palace : Over/Under 2.5 Goals 08-Feb-13 19:45 08-Feb-13 21:14 0.00
Football / Monaco v Le Havre : Over/Under 2.5 Goals 08-Feb-13 19:00 08-Feb-13 20:31 2.94
Football / Nimes v Laval : Over/Under 2.5 Goals 08-Feb-13 19:00 08-Feb-13 20:28 0.05
Football / Auxerre v Tours : Over/Under 2.5 Goals 08-Feb-13 19:00 08-Feb-13 19:24 -11.00
Football / France v Germany : Correct Score 06-Feb-13 20:00 06-Feb-13 21:52 16.18
Football / France v Germany : Match Odds 06-Feb-13 20:00 06-Feb-13 21:52 -10.00
Football / England v Brazil : DRAW NO BET 06-Feb-13 19:30 06-Feb-13 21:32 23.85
Football / France v Germany : Over/Under 2.5 Goals 06-Feb-13 20:00 06-Feb-13 21:32 -1.81
Football / England v Brazil : Correct Score 06-Feb-13 19:30 06-Feb-13 21:26 22.90
Football / L Orient v Southend : Correct Score 05-Feb-13 19:45 05-Feb-13 21:44 28.02
Football / L Orient v Southend : Over/Under 1.5 Goals 05-Feb-13 19:45 05-Feb-13 21:44 1.02
Football / Gillingham v Wycombe : Correct Score 04-Feb-13 19:45 04-Feb-13 21:40 13.91
Football / Gillingham v Wycombe : Over/Under 1.5 Goals 04-Feb-13 19:45 04-Feb-13 21:40 15.32
Football / Man City v Liverpool : Correct Score 03-Feb-13 16:00 03-Feb-13 17:55 17.25
Football / Man City v Liverpool : Over/Under 3.5 Goals 03-Feb-13 16:00 03-Feb-13 17:37 15.44
 Pages: 1  2   of 2 Pages

To hell in a handbasket

This is the poor soul who has landed himself right in the middle of a storm of protest in a place he probably couldn't find on a map before he arrived. Yes, please welcome Mr. Maricio Pochettino.

Huh? Who?

Precisely. Who the hell is Maricio Pochettino? Why have Southampton sacked a decent manager who looked like he was finally starting to get to grips with life in the Premier League, only to replace him with an unknown Argentine who doesn't speak English, has no knowledge or experience of the Premier League and has only ever managed one mediocre Spanish club who sacked him after he left the team nine points adrift at the bottom of the La Liga table? It is quite beyond reasoning.

Talk about a steep learning curve. Pochettino must have the abilities of a mountain goat to survive this tenure.

And what complete and utter wanker made this decision at Southampton? Where in the hell is the logic? Where is even the smallest scintilla of loyalty and common-sense? Southampton fans, former players and managers have been quick to castigate the Southampton board and howl in protest. And who can blame them? I'm a Spurs supporter but I do have deep sympathy with anyone following the Saints. With Adkins, I'd have given you a decent shot at staying in the Premier League this season. There was no guarantee of that, of course, but as mentioned, they did appear to be turning a corner.

With Pinocchio (as he must surely be called) how will they fare now? Well, I suppose it all depends on how motivating/demotiviating this absurd action is for the players. How frustrating is it going to be having to converse with your manager through a translator? How easy is it going to be performing for someone with no real pedigree or track-record? How easy will it be to adopt to a foreign manager's methods and tactics? Only time will tell.

For the fans sake, I hope he proves competent, but I now fear for their survival. The ship has well and truly sailed in the port of Southampton.

Breaking News: water is wet

Yes, water is indeed wet, it gets dark when the sun goes down, big tits are not good on a man and smoking 100 Rothmans a day is not healthy for you.

... oh, and yes, Luis Suarez is a diver.
Hm? What was that. Suarez is a diver? Are you sure? Well, yes, apparently the man who is whiter than white has confessed all when giving an interview to Fox Sports Argentina, admitting that his ridiculous swan dive when playing against Stoke was indeed an example of, how shall we say?, not so honest behaviour. That's right, Suarez is a contestant that didn't quite make the grade to appear on Tom Daley's reality television series Splash!

Of course the fact that Suarez has finally done the decent thing and admitted what every person on the planet already knows is not the interesting thing about all this nonsense. No. It's Brendan Rodgers sham anger at Suarez's admission, calling it "unacceptable" and letting us all know that the matter will be dealt with internally.

It seems that simulation begets simulation. Suarez's fake pole-axing after being assaulted by a feather, followed this week by Rodgers fake ire at finally finding-out in print what he'd seen first hand anyway. It's beyond belief.

Being the wise monkey with his hands over his eyes is not a sensible or credible approach, and it's halfway down the road to Kenny Dalglish's style of "deny everything" management. Perhaps Rodgers still believes the Earth is flat because he hasn't been up to space and seen it for himself? Maybe he's still holding-out hope that the Loch Ness monster will be found. And perhaps he still thinks that Liverpool are a big and important club.

In my view both Suarez and Rodgers should receive some kind of sanction for their gross dishonesty. Neither are oil paintings, so maybe they should be forced into this years annual gurning competition as a penalty - although Suarez does have an unfair advantage there.

____________________________________________________

A couple of comments now. The first on my post about maintaining records of all betting activity:


Laurie Wakeham17 January 2013 02:27

I too have spent ages setting up spreadsheets.I have created a new one for 2013,along with a statsitics and prediction model spreadsheet(during work hours as im bored to death and need a new job desperately).

I'm hoping these pain staking hours of inputting statistics will pay off this year.So fingers crossed. Altho i still have to do an unders/over model too,but cant be arsed at the moment as its just too hot and being couped up in dark cave whilst its 40 degrees outside just isnt healthy,(almost as unhealthy as my betting account).

Good luck on your effort Laurie, although putting-up with that heat must be troublesome. You poor dear! And here we are in England, lucky enough to be enjoying snow blizzards and temperatures of -10 degrees. How you must envy us.

The other comment I have received recently was from Swearbox in response to my post on his blog:

Swearbox16 January 2013 19:22
"Don't spend more than three or four minutes reading the absolute shite in there as it will surely melt you brain. "

Hmmmm...I can't make up my mind whether you are referring to my blog posts or the comments that follow some of them. Hopefully it's the latter but clarification would be great.

As far as it becoming a 'mini-forum' then that's fairly accurate. As you pointed out in your piece above I am currently banned from the forums and have been for the best part of a year now. So if I have something to say that I would have said on the forums I say it on my blog. If others want to comment then I welcome that and it's fair to say that I don't spend too much time on moderating comments though I did go through a period where I had to censor a bunch of posts due to repetitive stupid remarks aimed at mr Bob Vegas that were uncalled for.

My own moderation policy has led to a tremendous amount of 'same old same old' crappy flame wars and my advice is if you don't want to read that then don't read it. In between the insults the comments also serve as a place where pleasantry is exchanged too (shock horror)! Having said that the meat of the blog is the posts and not the comments and I try to make it an interesting read and I've had many folk tell me they enjoyed reading it. 

I'll conclude by saying thanks for putting me in the spotlight...I'm not sure what sort of a readership you have but I suspect it's not huge as my stats don't show a tremendous influx of traffic coming from your site...nevertheless your post did generate some interest so thank you. If you really do find my blog distasteful then you always have the option of removing me from your blogroll which is entirely up to you but I would say that we're in the business of helping each other not obstructing each other. Anyway I'll shut up for now and end by wishing you the best for 2013 and beyond.

There are a few points here, so I'll try to address them. First, yes I was referring to the comments section of your particular post and not your blog in general. I'd have to agree that some of your posts are worth reading and you  can be entertaining. 

I do also take the point about bloggers generally supporting each other and I have no intention of removing you from my blogroll. I don't recall whether I'm on yours or not, but if I am and you decide to remove it, then that's entirely up to you - but it will not result in you being removed from mine. I am childish in many ways, but that would be a step too far, even for me.

My post was largely meant to highlight the low and very poor standard of the Betfair forum, which one of your posts appears to have become an extension of. My target was the lame bunch of people who don't seem to have anything better to do than cause trouble amongst themselves.

Other than that, there does seem to be a bit of "dick checking" hidden within your comments, and a "my dad is bigger than your dad" aspect. What do I mean? 

"'Im not sure what sort of a readership you have but I suspect it's not huge as my stats don't show a tremendous influx of traffic coming from your site"

That sounds like a challenge! I've only been going just over a year now on this blog, but attract between 450 and 500 hits each day and have around 90,000 overall. Judging by the small number of posts you generally make, I'd be surprised (but not shocked) if your equate to that.

... so you see my dick is indeed bigger than yours, and my dad could almost certainly tear your dad a new arsehole.

Cheers.
 

A record disaster

As most normal long-term bettors and traders, I keep regular records of my bets and trades. Probably like most of you, I've also spent a great deal of time creating a snazzy spreadsheet to suit my needs and my betting style. Over the years, I've built-up a full record of all my bets, the type of bets, which markets/trades are successful and which are less profitable or fail.

This of course is absolutely vital as our brains can fool us into thinking that we're doing well in one particular area (a couple of big wins has the ability to blind us) when in fact we're in the red. Over the years, I've dropped countless strategies that I "thought" were doing okay, but the stats proved otherwise.

Recently however, I've got myself into a bit of a sticky patch. I've always been prudent in updating my stats after each day's trading, but for some reason I've recently allowed myself to become lazy in this respect. My stats are very important to me, but I've now created a situation where I have masses of results to input and, much like a tax return or doing one's expenses (which incidentally I'm also behind on!), it has become something to avoid. Now after each day's trading, I feel a pang of regret and also slightly nervous at the thought of attacking my overdue stats.

I'm back in my hotel tomorrow night, and with a very slim football card, I shall bite the bullet and start working my way slowly through my stats backlog. It's not something that I want to do, but it's absolutely vital if I am in any way serious about my betting.

It's an old cliche, but if you haven't started logging your bets in a bespoke spready, then I would urge you to start doing so. I'm personally vowing never to get behind again - once I've finally got myself straight.

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It was about this time last year that I said to myself (and I think I may have even declared it on this blog) that I was going to get up and running with some serious tennis trading during 2012. Well, as we all know, I'm full of shit and beyond some vague Slam bets, I haven't really taken it seriously. Firstly, I just haven't found the time as I do spend a lot of time on my beloved footy, but also (in hindsight) I do believe it is sensible to stick with a speciality. My speciality is not tennis, it's football. It's the one sport I love watching and trading, but even if I wasn't trading it, I would still watch it and absorb all that's on offer. I suppose I just have to be honest with myself and state that I will never be a serious tennis trader. It's not my first love.

Regardless of all that, however, I will be "auto-trading" the early stages of the Australian Open. This was first highlighted by Peter Webb, but rounds One and Two throw-up a few 1.03/4 "certainties" that just have to be layed. And when I say layed, I mean lay them with a view to backing later if/when they start shakily. For example, Murray plays tonight and can be layed at 1.04. I fully expect him to win, but if his opponent should start well, or Murray starts slowly, then there will be a small drift to be taken advantage of. Laying five or six of these means only one favourite "wobble" will be enough for some green. If there is no wobble, there is still plenty of time to get out for a very small red.

Personally, I'll be firing-up Betangel and doing all this through automation. Hopefully I can wake-up in the morning and seen some profit somewhere. Either way, the liability is neglible:

Haase v Murray (1.04)
Darcis v Kohlscreiber (1.17)
Paire v Federer (1.04)
Sela v Davydenko (1.17)