Gracias Carlos

There was just he one Cassini Value Selection this weekend, and an hour in, it wasn't looking good. Having taken an early (6') lead, Real Sociedad proceeded to let Celta de Vigo take a 3-1 lead. Fortunately, Mexico's Carlos Vela was in fine form for the home team, adding three more to his early goal, had another one disallowed for offside, and was the victim of Andreu Fontas' foul and second yellow card which saw Celta de Vigo reduced to 10 men. A little lucky perhaps, but I'll take it.

Also a little fortunate perhaps with the XX Draw selections, of which nine were in-play yesterday. Four ended as draws, but the lucky part was that two of the games (Everton v Liverpool and Eintracht Frankfurt v Schalke '04) ended 3-3. Not exactly the low-scoring affairs I was looking for.

I'll round up the football after the weekend is over, although I will say the Premier League table looks a lot brighter after yesterday's results.

I'm not hugely surprised that there was no request from the NBA Tips boys for me to point them in the direction of their many errors, and while their Quality Assurance department might have been expected to tighten up their process, that appears not to have been the case.

After reading and recording this selection on Friday, I was a little surprised to see an update of "WON" appended. (Strangely, last night's updates are not yet there).

I had identified the Indiana Pacers as value in this game, and thinking that Betfair may have erred in crediting my account with a win, and anxious to let them know of their mistake, I checked the results, and sure enough, here was the official result:

Now it takes some creative mathematical jiggling worthy of the George W Bush administration to make 82 + 4 > 97. Yes, they do the 2 units = 1 unit if it loses, or 1 unit = 1/2 unit if it looks poor value later, so one shouldn't be too surprised. Admittedly, it has been a while since I left school, and I have been known to make the rare error, but I'm pretty sure I'm correct on this one. Let me know if I am missing something. Incidentally, the term 'draw' has no place in the NBA.

I was thinking that NBA Tips may have specialised more in medicine than maths at school, but apparently not. Actually, I'm not sure they are out of school yet, because does any adult Tweet like this?

Followed by:

Oh dear, but again, perhaps full-time education is ongoing. Fortunately for us all they are quick learners, going from clueless to meniscus tear specialists in just a few minutes. Whoever said that you need 10,000 hours to master something was only off by 9,999 hours and 50 minutes.

Well that's the verdict then. Close to 6 months. Given their proven lack of attention to detail and accuracy, if I were Rose, I'd be mighty relieved. Although not a direct result of my brief professional sporting career, I have had to undergo a couple of meniscus tear surgeries myself, but even with first-hand experience I wouldn't want to presume to offer an opinion or speculate on someone else's injury or recovery time. Here's the actual P&L record for NBA Tips since the last update.

This may bear little resemblance to their own numbers, but I think I have given enough examples of where they have erred to explain those.