Summer Rules

It's been a quiet week on the betting front following the conclusion of the World Cup. Nothing doing on football, with friendlies of no interest to me, and the competitive games in leagues or competitions that I have no interest in.

This week also saw very little baseball action with the All-Star break meaning just one game in three days, but liquidity is still poor on most games. Perhaps liquidity will improve as the season reaches its conclusion, but I'm sure it's down on previous seasons.

There was a welcome alternative to baseball with the NBA Summer League from Orlando and Las Vegas that concludes today. The liquidity has been surprisingly good with all games available online very cheaply. The lower quality of play, and a rather lackadaisical approach to the enforcement of rules from the officials, has meant some frustrating moments, but the basic principles that produce profits in the regular NBA season, for the most part work well in these games too.

A couple of the frustrating moments have been one game last Tuesday - Milwaukee v Memphis, when I had a lay of Memphis at 1.07 looking great with the game tied and just 0.7 of a second left. Memphis in-bounded and 'hit' a three-pointer which in an NBA game would have not counted because the clock was down to 0:00 before it left the shooter's hand. But being Summer League, the referees didn't bother to review the play, and the game was over. A little frustrating to say the least, especially with the commentators laughing about the fact. Don't they realise that people have money on these things?

The second was a couple of days ago when a team I had backed had three bites of the cherry in the last two seconds to score a basket, but missed all three times and lost the game by 1. They had also missed two free-throws a few seconds earlier. The players are all young and trying to impress the coaches, so these are risks we take when we invest on these games, but overall the Summer League has so far been profitable. Definitely something to watch out for on the calendar next year.

I also made a small profit on the golf today backing Louis Oosthuizen to hold on to his lead in the British Open. Going into the final day, the leader at St. Andrews has a good record, (winning 7 of 11 since 1945), and my logic was that he had handled the pressure well on Saturday and 1.97 was a value bet that he could do the same on Sunday. I missed the 990 that he traded at on Thursday!

It'll all be relatively quiet for the next month or so too. A quiet sporting calendar for my interests followed by a little more than two weeks of holiday from work, before life gets back to normal on August 16th and the football season will be in full swing.