Fixings And Riddles

Close on the heels of the 'Lance Armstrong cheated' shocker, seriously, who knew?, comes the news, or rather 'confirmation' for those of you who read Declan Hill's blog on the blogroll, that some football matches are 'fixed'. I have a problem with the use of the word 'fixed' when it comes to football, simply because you need so many people to be involved to 'fix' it. You can influence the game, and move the odds in your favour, with a key player or the referee, but fixing a game to end say 2-0 must be incredibly difficult without all players and officials being in on it. 

Anyway, the risk of a game not being played genuinely is always there in dead rubber games, meaningless friendlies, and on games in third-world countries or where player wages are relatively low. Or Germany.

If the numbers quoted are correct, and the:

biggest payment to an individual was in Austria for a total of £121,000

it's fairly obvious that the sums involved are unlikely to interest most players in the top leagues, and if you play games in Eastern Europe, Africa or Asia, you take your chances on how genuinely the game will be played.

It wasn't a good weekend for the FTL table, including for the XX Draws. Saturday wasn't too bad, with three winners from eight selections, but Friday saw a loser, and Sunday was a disaster with goals galore in all five games, and no fluked 2-2 or 3-3 results. The games were all fixed! The Bundesliga XX Draws had three losers as well, although the Bundeslayga did find a couple of winning home lays at Gelsenkirchen and Wolfsburg.

Premier Edge had their worst weekend since September dropping 4.29 points, while Neil went 0 for 3. Drawmaster found two winners from three for the second consecutive weekend, although Premier Betting had a small loss. Little Al joins the big boys in the green finding the Everton v Aston Villa draw at 5.1. Football Elite found a winner to start the weekend off but followed it up with three losers. Talkbet showed a loss too so with rare exceptions, not a very good football weekend at all.

Much to my relief, it does appear that it is not only me who finds trying to post on Peter Webb's blog a little harder than he implies with his

There is really nothing very complicated about how to post a comment.

Tim missed the point slightly, writing:

I can't see the problem? I've just had a look and registering was easy. It's normal to have to register for posting comments isn't it? It seems to me like you are just searching for another axe to grind.

The point is not the ease of registering, but that you have to register or log in in the first place. Al challenged Tim with:

Tim. Please post a comment on Webbs blog. I've never seen one and I'm registered with WordPress.

but no update from Tim yet.  My old friend, or is that sparring partner?, Big Al commented:

Most of the entries I have read on the Bet Angel blog are written in riddles, presumably designed to generate interest in his product.

I did take a look at his tennis trader thing once and the way I understood it to work missed probably the most important concept of all.

Little Al (no relation) wrote:

I have to agree with BigAl. Most of the entries are riddles and some random posts about how Peter is connected to the markets with VPS, Desktop PC, Laptop, Tablet, Mobile using broadband and a mobile phone connected to the Betfair API and also the website.

I also believe Peter is constantly gathering data from the markets and making graphs, calculating probabilities and making strategies. His first strategy was where he decided to enter a back and a lay bet in the horse markets.

TytteTrading has registered, or tried to:

I tried to sign up, to be able to post on the blog. Still waiting for the confirmation mail - and yes, I did check the spam filter.

And WhyAlwaysMe suggested:

Clearly there is a problem somewhere because there are never any comment's on Peter's blog. It would be great if it could move to a moderated format like Cassini has done. I've often had questions in the past and it would enrich the blog if there was more clarification at certain points.

Regarding the sentence that has caused so much fuss - 'you should have struggled to lose money if you were trading', perhaps he was saying that this was a game that fitted the trading strategy - if you were doing say 20 probabilistic trades in the match the risk/reward ratio was so favourable you should struggle to lose money. He didn't say you would win necessarily but that conditions were very favourable. Like if you did 20 trades and you were getting 4/1 when the true odds were 2/1 then you should struggle to lose money. That's what I think Peter was trying to say.

Again, the point I would like to make is that at any time in the match, the next point could see the end of the game. It is only after it is over that you can look back and determine that a certain strategy would mean you would struggle to lose money. You may have a strategy that happened to work in this match as it played out through a long third set, but where your strategy would leave you had a player withdrawn injured or the third set been a lot shorter is likely a different matter. At least with a team sport played over a time period rather than dependent on sets or wickets, you know how long there is left (with overtime possibly a factor) and you can trade with that in mind. Selecting one game, and suggesting - after it is over - that you would struggle to have lost money trading it, is misleading in my opinion.