Red Socks

My old friend Steve (@Stevemor) took time off from losing AUD 10k to say:

Booo!   You made the Sultan quit you big bully.

Steve writes the entertaining Daily 25 blog which at times is almost as amusing as this one. As he is prone to do, Steve went on a little rant in his latest post, and Skeeve was the victim of this rather amusing piece:

One final rant and it’s once again for Skeeve, who has now made the decision not to bet on League 2 games. It seems eventually all he will have left to bet on is conference south games, played in the second half of the season only on Saturdays and only if the wind is blowing north at a rate of 4 knots and two players are wearing red socks. It’s fine to have a niche, but this is getting a bit ridiculous. I think it is to his detriment, as there will be fewer bets and this of course leads to much higher variance. I’ve said it for the last few months, he has repeatedly said, “don’t worry, this period is the best one and we will all make profit”. But what happens when variance kicks in and we dont? The season is still salvageable, but I’m not so sure about the long term success. A $1,700 loss for the week.

I am old enough to remember England winning the World Cup wearing red socks on a Saturday with a gentle breeze, so personally I have nothing against them, but Steve does have a good point. I've mentioned before that Skeeve does ignore midweek matches, for reasons unknown to me, but I'm sure he has his reasons.

The Football Analyst was also on the receiving end of a small tirade, as Steve wrote this:

TFA is now really starting to frustrate me, Even though the higher level systems are about break-even, I believe most of the subscribers would be using the combined systems as they are the ones that have historically produced the best results. I believe having so many systems is a bit of a cop-out at times and saw it with Formbet as well. With so many systems, one is always going to be winning and Formbet goes to great lengths to let people know of any one system that is ahead, but overall the system has a massive loss. TFA isn’t so blatant in regards to this but does let people know that it isn’t up to him if they win or lose. This is the beauty of these sort of systems for the tipster, they are always going to have a stream of players winning and letting others know how great they are, and the losers just leave.

I've written before that Graeme's multitude of systems is confusing, and from reading their amicable conversation on Twitter, I believe this will be the subject of blog post by Graeme. Hopefully comprising of less than the 5,200 words it took Graeme to sum up his January!

Back to the initial comment, and I very much doubt that unless the cap fits rather neatly, my comments on the Sultan's admitted employment by a Sporting Data-like company - in his words a "legitimate business that make their money from sports trading - just like the one I traded for a little over a year ago" had anything to do with his reported retirement from blogging. 

The question of how someone with such an edge was unable to build a bank for so long, but then, as if by magic, was suddenly able to, was never answered, and the revelation that the Sultan had traded for a company similar to Sporting Data at the time of the turnaround was always going to raise questions, or at least should have. I'm not sure it is fair to blame the messenger. The miracle of compounding means that the smallest of starting banks will soon grow large with an edge.

Discussions such as these are what blogging should be about, and it seems that the official line is that it is because such discussions aren't taking place that the Sultan is retiring from his blog:

I feel that the whole trading blogosphere is in a rut and has been for a while. When I think back to when I started, the first 1-2 years, sports trading blogs were thriving. There was a buzz about trading and far more blogs about. True, there were a whole lot more really poor quality "P&L" blogs but there was also far more decent ones around that enabled some genuinely interesting debate and a real sense of community. That is pretty much dead now. Almost all the blogs I used to read avidly have stopped or barely post anything of interest. I can't remember the last time a new, interesting, well-written blog started up. A couple of decent ones but none that have fascinated me. When you don't have that vibrant community to feed off, it's harder to come up with ideas for blog posts.

I have to agree with much of that, although I don't recall a time when there were ever that many quality sports betting / trading blogs around. It sometimes feels as if the only blog worth reading is this one... It'll be six years next month, which is really quite an achievement, if I do say so myself. Probably won't make another six, but I'm not quite done yet. Here's a comment on my first ever post:

It's nice to see a new blog out there.

I'll be interested to see if your writing style changes over the next 12 months as it's not as easy as it looks (at least to me anyway!)

He may be regretting those words of encouragement!