FTL, NFL And Un-BIRGing

I won't publish the latest FTL table until tonight's Everton v Newcastle United game is in the books, as a few people have selections. 

Premier Betting, Rubicon and Webbo all have selections, as do I with another Cassini Value Selection, although their 100% winning came to end at four selections, but the 'all selections end in 2-0' run continued as Getafe beat the value winning by that score at Espanyol.

Here's a quick run down of those entries who are done for the weekend. 

Emp's 23 selections included 10 winners, but a small loss of 1.93 points overall.

Skeeve found two winners from four selections, but made a small loss on the weekend, and Forza Fizzer continued his recent slump with two more losing selections. 

After two profitable weekends backing draws, Punters' Friend Neil came down to earth with a bump finding just one this weekend from 12 selections and a record 8.22 point loss. It rather highlights the challenge with backing draws - two weeks ago, it seemed like the Holy Grail when he found five draws from nine selections, but then you get weekends like this one where almost nothing goes your way. 

Football Elite found one winner from three selections, a lay of Monaco which wasn't enough to make a profit with the weekend resulting in a 0.67 loss. 

Fedslam made a little under 3 points on the back of Aston Villa's win over Manchester City, and Skeeve's Official bets made a 2 point loss. 

The two Bundeslayga selections came up with one winner for a small profit on the weekend, and Scatter Gun found three winners from his standard ten, but for a small loss.

And then there's The Football Analyst, for whom the good news was that he managed to improve on last week's loss of 5.31 points. The bad news was that it was by just one-hundredth of a point in a loss of 5.30 points. I'm sure 

I'll cover the 'live' entries later tonight or tomorrow. 

To the NFL now, and a much better weekend for John Walsh's selections up 4.26 points with seven winners and two losses.

Overall an excellent set of results, but that last loss hurt. With a lot of money looking to back the New England Patriots at 1.01 too early in my opinion, (as I often comment on), I gave up a lot of traded profit laying it. The Falcons came close to taking the game to overtime, but came up one touchdown short. It was high drama at Cassini HQ, and although I evened things up slightly and made £300 before commission, it felt like a loss. 

The regular baseball season ended yesterday, but there is plenty of drama still to come with a tiebreaker game tonight between the Tampa Bay Rays and the Texas Rangers. After that, there are wild-card games on Tuesday and Wednesday before the play-off series begin on Thursday (American League) and Friday (National League). Liquidity has been rather poor of late, well, all season really, but it is a good trading sport when there is some money around. Plenty of pauses and win probabilities for every game state based on well over a hundred years of data.

Finally, I mentioned BIRGing a few days ago, something we all do to some extent or another, but an odd choice of words from Ian Holloway after Crystal Palace's latest defeat shows that perhaps he is attempting to do quite the opposite:

"We need to dig in and find ourselves. I won't keep them [Palace] up if we keep making mistakes. We need to be more clinical and stop making errors."

Them!