April - May

April wasn’t a profitable month overall due to one stupid error, resulting in my first losing month since October last year, but the loss for the month ended up being trimmed to just 2.11% of winnings in the first quarter of 2009, (see chart left), but still a loss. 

Although I’d obviously rather not lose, I would rather take a loss from a mistake than from a previously profitable approach going bad. I’ll be back.

At first sight, it doesn’t look good that every month since February has been worse than the previous month, but this is a familiar trend looking at past years. May through August is always a quiet period. May last year was a minor disaster, so a steady month will at least see my year-on-year average increase, although sadly, with the Premium Charge these days, that’s not the cause for excitement that it used to be.

I’ve been reducing the impact of the Premium Charge by arbitraging on BETDAQ, and elsewhere, and of course, in the cloud of a losing month, PC reduction is the silver lining.

So what does May offer? The IPL has been profitable so far, and baseball is in full ‘swing’ and with greater parity these days (no team winning more than 62% of their regular season games in the last four years), I have come up with an idea that seems to be paying off so far. Betfair this week upped the in-play delay to 6 seconds, and whether that actually brings in more in-play money or less remains to be seen.

Football is winding down for the season, and there should be some cracking playoff games and cup finals, but football is still a tough nut to crack consistently. I was ahead last month on this, but not by enough to pay off the mortgage. Maybe one brick is now mine.

Ice Hockey is in full playoff mode right now, but is useless for trading, a result of increasing the delay time to 8 seconds a couple of seasons back. That’s why the future of in-play baseball concerns me. Like baseball, ice-hockey is one of those sports where the market tends to hold on to the pre-game favourite too long, and it is often possible to find value, if only there was some money around!

Basketball seems to have plenty of liquidity, and the play-offs have seen plenty of good games for trading, especially in the Boston Celtics – Chicago Bulls series which has had seven overtime periods (from four OT games) in the first six games. Game Seven on Saturday night I believe. Just lay the leader, and wait for the other team to bounce back. Basketball is very much a game of momentum, and if you watch the game enough, you will learn to recognize the momentum turning moments.

This should all be enough action to keep me out of trouble. I shall not be visiting the Casino, Exchange Games or Arcade anyway, and after reading about the cheating scandals at Absolute Poker and UltimateBet, I’ll stay away from the online poker too. For a while I played a lot of poker, but online poker just isn’t the same. You need to have your opponents there in front of you, it’s a key part of the game. Plus, it’s nice to know that the game is legit too.