Disheartening

This month, and year, started full of promise and hope. The NBA season was underway, the XX Draws had hit a winner and ended their losing run, and all was good in the world. Unfortunately the XX Draws have embarked on another depressing losing run, and after a good couple of weeks, even the trusted NBA has gone rapidly sour. This past week has been one of those where I just can’t get a thing right. I lay a team after they go on a run, ‘knowing’ that after a time-out the run will end, and yet they continue on their run. If I make the call that the run will continue, it stops immediately. If I take a loss, it turns out I should have let the bet run, and if I let the bet run, I should have taken the loss. For a couple of nights, I scaled back, and of course was successful, winning small amounts, but when I up the ante again and start risking four figures again, the bad ‘random fluctuations of probability’ recurs. I can’t remember a run like this, and whether it is a blip or there is something fundamentally different about the NBA markets, I’m not yet sure. This season is certainly different, with teams playing a condensed schedule, with teams on occasion playing on three consecutive days, but I’m not convinced that is the source of my difficulties. The Super Premium Charge is now further away than it was at year's end, which is some good news I suppose, but 2012 is not starting out as I would have liked.

Perhaps the XX Draws will get back on track this weekend. The first selection went down in flames as Borussia Moenchengladbach, refreshed from their winter break, easily beat Bayern Munich last night. One of the XX Draw subscribers went so far as to suggest that Google has started to review the draw selections, as my e-mail this week was consigned to his googlemail junk folder. Now that hurts. Griff has selected no less than half the EPL schedule for draws this weekend, selecting Everton v Blackburn Rovers, Fulham v Newcastle United, Queens Park Rangers v Wigan Athletic, Sunderland v Swansea City and Wolverhampton Wanderers v Aston Villa.

Mark J’s value selections are Wolverhampton Wanderers (2.625) v Aston Villa, Freiburg (2.2) v Augsburg, Dundee United (2.25) v Motherwell, Espanyol (1.82) -0.5 v Granada, Borussia Dortmund (1.91) –0.5 @ Hamburg and Rayo Vallecano (2.11) -0.5 v Real Mallorca.

Geoff has an even more diverse selection of draw picks this week, venturing as far afield as the Africa Cup of Nations for two of his eight:

Undergroundtrader posted up his views on statistics in a post on his new blog, and reproduced here:

Nice discussion around in various blogs about a mostly overrated subject, "mathematical approach". In the view of undergroundtrading it goes like this:

With the assistance of maths you solely describe the past! The past is almost nothing but smoke and mirrors, you could it solely take as indicator what the mass are thinking about the event and reference point for bookies and punters. Next step is to take a look at the present (i.e taking into account change the manager, upcoming CL match and so on), to scale the own expectations. Pretended a little bit more experienced traders are going now to define value or not by comparing reference point on maths with scaled "Odds" and given odds. ok, so far so good but real undergroundtrading and value riding is starting only now. You have to think about future aspects (expectations) or better yet to have "valuable" informations about the future (i.e manager will announce "parking the bus" in the team briefing, heavy snow at match time, ...)

Thinking about what most likely will happen or of course insider informations define the real value and give you the edge.

Just want to sharpen punters mind not to stay in the past and to look "under the ground" of upcoming trading opportunities. Trade the third dimension (future)vs (past,present)!

Looking forward to give you a real trading example in one of my first postings on my new blog. Perhaps already this weekend in German Bundesliga I or II, where i "get deeper insights"

Of course, we would all like inside information, exclusively, but that is not going to happen, at least at the top level of the game - perhaps Geoff has a friend in the Annan Athletic dressing room? - so I think UndergroundTrader dismisses the importance of mathematics, essentially rating form, too easily. Statistics give you an excellent starting point, even if they are not the whole answer. I think I have written before that perhaps our biggest advantage as punters is that we do not have to bet in every event. We can be very selective, and this, together with some solid probability calculations and a sprinkling of subjectivity at the end is the way to make profits. But it's not easy.