Saturday 7 December 2013

Dream Wife

You know you are spending too much time on maintaining the FTL (sponsored by TFA) when your dreams include one about Peter Nordsted, who, and I kid you not, flew with his wife to Long Beach in California to meet up and discuss his College Football strategy with me. Why Long Beach, I have no idea, since my familiarity with the city is pretty much limited to attending one wedding on the Queen Mary there about ten years ago. The mind, or at least my mind, works in mysterious ways, and I remember being impressed that Peter could drive so naturally on the ‘wrong’ (right) side of the road, as I sat in the back listening to his ideas. The reason why Peter may have featured in my dreams could be because his midweek account bets did rather well, mostly on the back of Aston Villa’s rather surprising win at Southampton. He selected Villa to lead at half-time as well as full-time, and at prices of 6.5 and 6.0 respectively, these winners helped Peter make a profit of 10.05 points for his service. Still down on the season, but a step in the right direction. Incidentally, Peter’s dream wife – by which I mean Peter’s wife in my dream and not Peter’s ‘dream’ wife, who I am sure is the lady he is currently married to – is not as fierce as Peter implied in his now infamous “having to ring up and tell your wife you lost money” video.

The other big winner in midweek was Emp, returning after a few days off to make 13.04 points, and back to the top of the table, mostly on the back of Evian Thonon Gaillard’s even more rather surprising win at home to Paris St Germain at 10.27. Whenever there are a couple of ‘surprise’ results such as these, it is natural to think that the key to football betting is to bet the outsider, but while these relatively rare wins unsurprisingly gain attention at the time, as a long-term strategy, it is doomed to failure.

The latest FTL table after the midweek games is here, and then it all starts over again with the weekend matches:

1 comment:

Emp said...

While I agree that blindly betting on outsiders is, of course, doomed to fail, I am not sure these sorts of bets are inherently bad. In fact I doubt any sort of price range is an inherently bad one to bet on, though I am not sure if that's what you meant.

In either case, it's hardly the only long-shot I've picked. I did get Reims on a long-shot earlier as well as several winners at 5 or 6 (including Everton in the mid-week). In a league where being at home is such an advantage, the price did seem a bit of on Evian, and as for United, they are actually weaker than Everton according to my system, though that might prompt some laughs.