Bundeslategoals

Another 90' goal today scuppered one of my two strong draw picks of the day, but similar goals for Kaiserslautern and Schalke '04 gave me winners there, and overall these things balance out. The strong draw at 3.6 was Wolfsburg v Nuremberg. For the record, the second draw is Cesena v Juventus at a tasty 3.9.

Mully asks:

Have you seen this link: http://greedallover.blogspot.com
Just found it in the O'Dwyer blog roll.

Indeed I have. I saw it a couple of days ago, and while imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I shall be consulting with my lawyers next week and issuing a cease and desist order shortly although I may accept a large cash payment instead. Pending receipt of the large payment, I have added the blog to my blog roll.

Mats asks:

Could you explain a little more about how you go about looking for value?

I have two main approaches to this. One is by maintaining ratings and looking for prices that are out of line with the markets, and the other, more profitable method, is to trade sports in-running and look for opportunities where the price has been driven too far. Here's a timely post from the Winner Is Winner blog that suggests the author has noticed the same things that I have in the NBA markets. It's not very eloquently written to be honest, but here is the key part:

NBA markets. Mug markets for mugs or are they more like mug markets for pros to make money? In my opinion mug market for pros. For proper mugs no market is good to make money I suspect anyway.

When bigger games come on the stage mug markets turn into pros market such as tennis and football - very competitive and in all honesty hardly you will find anything wrong with odds. And that is the only case when I find hard to make money in NBA markets. Apart from those games trading NBA is a must of course if you can handle night hours. I guess anybody who trades successfully other sports such as tennis football, cricket and others high volume markets could come and make money from the very first day in NBA markets. Piss easy and I mean it. Not so sure that "NBA only" trader could do the opposition.

Basically what the writer is saying, I think, is that while it is very hard to find value in tennis and football, less popular sports like NBA (and I would add the NFL), do offer plenty of value opportunities. With tennis you are up against court-siders, with football you are up against a lot of competition, but in the the NBA and NFL, you can often find big money at silly prices, and 1.0xs are turned over almost every night. A ten point lead can vanish fast, and momentum is everything.

While I wouldn't say that it is "piss easy", if you put in the effort to learn how the NFL and NBA markets move, and learn the rules of the game, this can be very lucrative. And be aware that the college versions of these games have different rules!

In the NFL, every opening touchdown sees the price on the scoring team drop too low. Greed to be on a winner before the reality sets in and fear means the market rebounds a few points. However, as I mentioned a couple of posts ago, when these games are play-offs, or the only game in town, the competition among traders makes it that much harder to find value. April is the one month of the year where overall I am negative, having suffered a losing month in three of the last four years. What happens in April? NBA play-offs. Tricks that work well in the regular season don't work so well in play-offs.

Why is Manchester United v Arsenal Suspended? More problems? Off to BETDAQ I guess.