Ceád Mile Fáilte

The counter on this blog shows almost 100,000 hits. In a little over two years, that’s a lot of eyeballs, but no doubt Anonymous will suggest that the counter was initialized at 99,000 or that my son and I account for 99,000 of the hits, but in truth the counter started at zero and although I confess that I am a regular reader, (there’s some good stuff here from time to time), I am not sad enough to pound the F5 button 100 plus times a day.

Nor am I sad enough to have spent the past two years making stuff up as Mr Misery Anon pretends to think. I’m not quite sure what that would achieve for one thing, but the truth is that human nature means that we are more enthused by positives than we are by negatives.

Like many of us I suspect, if my sports investing wasn’t profitable, then I would move onto something else, and my blog would just quietly die.

There are not too many bloggers out there who have it in them to write about losing for a long while. Many blogs come, but many are soon abandoned as the apparently easy pickings on the exchanges turn out to not be quite that easy.

Just look at all these challenges which start with great fanfare and enthusiasm, but when it turns out that the person has no edge, and the laws of probability catch up with them as will always happen, they slip away into the night, usually without so much as a farewell, although some become so bitter and envious at the success of others that they show up as Anonymous commenters who don’t read the blog in full and have nothing positive to offer. At least they keep the hit count moving and their self-evident jealousy is entertaining. Seriously, do successful people in life go around with a negative attitude or are the bitter and twisted people in the world those who are less successful?

Human nature is like that I guess.

Now my turn to be negative - the Sports Betting Professor (SBP), and I have to say that I consider myself lucky to have had my payment declined. It’s really not a very good system. Now some readers of this blog will no doubt disagree, but in a nutshell the system seems to me to be flawed.

First of all, the selection process is based on the fact that over a number of years, 15 I think it is, certain handicaps statistically show a trend that (presumably) is statistically significant, but no actual numbers are revealed and no explanation offered as to why these handicaps should offer an edge. With handicaps ranging from 1.5 to the occasional 30 or so, there are always going to be a few anomalies, but I would be happier if there was some reasoning as to why that might be, and why they might continue to be, rather than simply regress to the mean.

Handicaps are set so that (ideally) the price will be 1.9+ on each side, i.e. a 50/50 shot. The SBP had a winner tonight, following two losers, but the winner was at 1.75 on the exchanges. With a Martingale based staking system (maximum of three losers) you will not get too many sequences of three losers, but they will come along and when they do the loss will hurt. I missed out on the winner today, but then I missed out on the two previous losses. I’m uncomfortable with the selection process and the staking, but it was interesting to find out more about the system and to get it all for free was a break.

I read about a baseball system from someone with a similar sounding name (could be the same guy) which operated on similar lines. He would pick a team that was much stronger than its opponent in an upcoming three game series (the baseball schedule works in series if you are unfamiliar with it) and the staking would be 1 point on the first game, and if it wins, the system had a winner. If it lost, then triple up on game two, and if that won, the system recorded a win. If bet 2 lost, then triple the stake again (triple because many baseball favourites start at 1.4 or less sometimes, and doubling just wouldn’t cut it) and hope for a win there. Not surprisingly the system had a high number of ‘system’ wins, but those bet threes would be too much for my liking.

Finally a comment from Mark Davies’ blog about Betfairs pricing structure, which makes perfect sense with regard to the Premium Charge:

The answer, of course, is that we price our product like any successful business venture: we charge the price that attracts the largest number of our target customer as we can, while extracting the best commercial return we can in exchange. Primark sell cheap clothes in both senses of the word; Armani sell at a premium to a specific type of customer. In Jim's terms, the Telegraph sells for £1 a copy; the Sun sells for 20p. They have different types of customer, and the arrival of the Sun brought a whole new set of people to newspaper readership. But having got them on board, if you now sold the Sun for the same price as you can sell the Telegraph, you wouldn't increase your profits five-fold; instead, you'd lose most of your customers.