Leaving Home

Not a good weekend for anyone trying to find value on home teams. Just one winner for me in Olympique Marseille (1.87) from seven selections, although I mistakenly included Kaiserslautern despite them qualifying as a (winning) Bundeslayga pick. This is what happens when countries take a winter break!

The home value picks quite often overlap with Football Elite's picks, and this weekend was no exception with Schalke '04 and Birmingham City being two of the Recommended Bets. Neither won, and nor did Sunderland and Wigan, their other two Recommended Bets. One winner from two Short List bets with Stoke City winning, but Cesena losing. Regarding Sunderland, I also had this as value, but discarded it because of the 'derby' factor.

The one away pick won, and the 'Strong' draw and Peter Nordsted's Drawmaster systems were both profitable. I had two strong draws, and both came in - St Pauli v Freiburg at 3.55, and Tottenham Hotspur v Manchester United at 3.45. The weaker draws were less successful, with only Wigan v Fulham (3.35) winning from six selections. For 2011, the strong draws are 3 from 5, the weaker draws are 5 from 11. Not too shabby.

I traded the Tottenham Hotspur v Manchester United game today, watching the price on the 1-0 score which I layed at 12.5 pre-game. I'd read that in a goal-less game, the 1-0 price shortens to about 54 minutes. Well, at 54 minutes it was around the 6/6.2 mark, and I layed it again (a little cost averaging here) thinking it would move steadily up from here. Not so - it stayed there until 72 minutes, and just as it started inching up, the sending-off occurred and the price dropped to around 5.0. The best laid plans... Even at 90', with 4' added on, the price was only back to pre-game, but in the end all was well, but that wasn't the smoothest bit of trading I have ever done.

Not much luck in the NFL play-offs this weekend. Small wins on Green Bay and Chicago, and slightly bigger loss on the other two games. Once again, it appears to be easier trading regular season games than post season!

Finally, there was a comment on my last post regarding RQ telling me "and stop pinching things from the BF Forum to put on your blog ;-)" Well, sometimes there's a little gem to be found there, and as anyone writing a non-P&L blog will know, we need all the help we can get.

Of course, a lot of what is on the forum is to be ignored. For example, take this comment from a clearly delirious, certifiable Enola Gay last April in reply to the perennial question "Any good betting blogs out there?", he wrote:

Mark Iverson - aka Marky Sparky is a great read.

I thought my sides were going to split when I first read that!