Spiders, Diamonds, Cubes - Miaow

No joy for the Monday night Cassini Value Selection of Osasuna to beat Malaga, but three winners from the total of five selections was enough for them to maintain their lead at the top of the FTL (sponsored by TFA) table adding 1.25 points although the ROI dropped from 35.02% to 34.31%.

Skeeve stays second despite a blank weekend, (down two points), and I should mention that although Skeeve has selections from the Conference South, these are excluded for his FTL entry as the prices are not available in the Football Data web site. It could one reason why I am finding his selections fairly solid this season, while others may not. The other variable is that I record his bets at one unit per bet rather than using the two, three, four even five points sometimes recommended.

The top six, and the contenders in profit this season, are unchanged from last week:

The XX Bundeslayga picked up 1.33 points, Fedslam was up 2.18 points and Webbo was up 0.54 points.

Seven more entries remain within one good week of being in profit, led by the XX Unders who moved up three places on the week making 3.5 points.

The XX Draws also moved up with a small gain, with the losers being Hofs Hackers, Jamie A and The Football Analyst who went 0 for 4. He has five midweek selections to try and reduce his bounty liability which increased to £175. Football Elite had a small loss.

As for the rest, here are the lower reaches of the table:

As with the top, not much movement at the bottom either. Rubicon lost 5.92 points and dropped three places. Punters' Friend Neil remains some way adrift, but to his credit is hanging in there and keeping the selections coming.

And while not part of the official table, whoever Jimmy G or Paul Finn or Jonny Benchmark is, he had a much better weekend this time out finding one winner from the six eligible SOT Draw selections and a loss of just 2.65 points. The ROI% improves to -79.06%.

He/they did select one draw from two additional selections in Russia, but with these prices not available on Football Data, they are of course ineligible.

Analytical Spider had some input on the SOT Draws:

SOT Draws are indeed the picks of a another twitter user who posts selections on his site.

He does offer some of his own in-play selections via the bet-on-target forum but they're not performing well, he's currently about 1.1% down after about 250 bets. Is still relatively early days and could be bad variance biting but being only 1.1% down is probably pretty surprising to those who've read his garbled 'essays', lack of attention to price and team strength, and his bizarre, cherry picked, interpretation of game state. Incidentally, though not aimed specifically at gambling, the work on gamestate and shot data by @jameswgrayson and statsbomb is significantly more useful and definitely worth checking out.

Anyway, potentially his losses should be bigger as not entirely convinced the prices he posts were actually always available. A couple of months back I checked 2 picks on SBO, who places his bets with, 30 seconds after his post and they were several ticks shorter. Could've been the price moved following his bets but given how much he likes a conspiracy I'm sure he'd be accusing you of faking prices if he'd experienced something similar. He'd certainly be ranting and abusing relentlessly anyone with a losing record after over 200 bets.

While it is early days yet, and the price on the fifteen losers haven't needed to be verified, the one winner was priced at 3.35 but was officially 3.26 with Pinnacle. Pretty close to be fair, with the draw price generally available at a good .10 or .15 higher elsewhere.

There was then this rather amusing 'Anonymous' comment from, well - we have no idea (or do we     ?)

I must be in a minority as I have found Jonny's work on game state very informative . He is the only one that I am aware of that keys shot creation to show the expected goals in games . I have followed Jonny with interst on the pre off and yes a small sample - 63 games but the ROI was a healthy 23% . In terms of integrity I have not heard anyone contest that before but I suppose you cannot please everyone . Jonny has posted all his pre off bets and in running bets and obviously in running prices move very quickly so you will not always get the in running price quoted but sometimes I have seen better prices available then quoted . I think it Is a shame to keep attacking Jonny as he obviously has many years of experience and I think we should encourage people to write about their thoughts and not keep trying to put people down . I would think there is room for more people to write about subjects like gamestate and we should not conclude one chap is better then another in an instant as that is slightly irrational .

I don't know Jonny personally but his site is interesting and I am sure that integrity is not an issue because he writes just as many articles highlighting his losing bets .

Hold that "I don't know Jonny personally' comment in your minds for a moment, while you take a look at Analytical Spider's follow up:

Well, this is amusing if a little awkward. The last post from anonymous defending Jonny is quite clearly from Mr Grossmark himself. His writing style and stock phrases are pretty easy to spot anyway but his quirky take on punctuation, namely leaving a space before full stops and question marks is what makes it even more obvious. He does it on all his tweets and comments on here, can't recall seeing any other bloggers/tweeters do that.

It's what he also does on his previous anonymous comment above where he assumes that because Cassini previously had a profile pic with an Asian woman that he's probably got an internet bride. Nice. He made the same comment during one of his twitter meltdowns a few days back. Well done Jonny, a racist ad hom. Stay classy, fella.

Indeed, the space before the full-stop is quite distinctive, and thanks to Mr Spider for pointing this out. He [Jonny] left a comment on my carefully named post "Its Not Right", writing "should the title to this post not be "It's not right" ?"

My witty reply, complete with space before the full-stops was this:

Well the title was a joke - a play on the word 'its' being 'not right' but I guess a sense of humour is not your strong suit .

By the way , I know you said you wouldn't be reading my blog any more , but someone from your IP address continues to:

Returning Visits: 525

I thought you should know so that you can report this to the police . There may be a burglar living under your bed .

And for the record, Cassini has never had a profile picture of himself with an Asian woman. My wife is now demanding to know who this 'woman' is! Mrs C is all-American, with a dollop of Cherokee, and it's this dollop that could be seen as Asian. Well, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

I am not yet familiar with the Football Investor, but operator Stewboss is interested in the FTL for next season:

I think it's time Football Investor came to the party next season. I'd be happy to put up a prize maybe shared with TFA?

Excellent news. The more the merrier and the more sponsors willing to line the pot, even better.

One final comment which I have been slow to respond to was this excellent and amusing one from Matthew, which also rather neatly indirectly references Spiders (the S&P500 index's trading symbol is SPDR).  Diamonds and Cubes refers to the Dow Jones (DIA) and the NASDAQ (QQQ) indexes in case you were wondering:

Dear Signor Cassini,

I must say I feel I have reached a near euphoric state over the delicious levels of cattiness on display in the betting blog world. It seems that the steady decline in etiquette in the modern world is being accelerated at an alarming rate by the depravity of social media. At this rate it will not be long before you are known as the Perez Hilton of betting blogs as you highlight grudges and stir the pot of others.

On a separate note I notice that Berkshire Hathaway has posted their results beating the previous year to much fanfare. Unfortunately some cowardly wags have dared to suggest that Mr Buffett still has yet to outperform the S&P 500 for the past five years, oh the temerity of some people. I am a big fan of simplistic drip feeding investing in large index trackers with there most agreeably low management feeds as I believe are you. Surely you can concoct a blog post about the dangers of stock picking for long term returns and hopefully relate it to the betting world.

The example that sprung to my mind was the lovely Graeme over at TFA. I am constantly haranguing him about providing a breakdown of simply backing each team he highlights once and to level stakes (a broad based index approach?). This would be in contrast to the leveraged backing of teams the more they appear on the various systems (individual stock picking?).

I look forward to hearing more of your excellent well formed thoughts.

Comparing selections, backed once, risking one unit on each is exactly what the FTL does, and in my opinion it offers a simple way to compare like with like and remove the vagaries of multiples and varying the stakes. I do this with my own Value Selections, but I don't see others give their selections along with the price they have for it. It's all very well tipping me Sheffield United, accompanied perhaps by a price, but often that price is unattainable. Should I forget it, or is it still value a few ticks lower?

 

If you give the 'true' price, then it's up to the subscriber to make their own decision on how much to stake or whether to bet at all. Incidentally, with the edge averaging around 17%, the ROI percentage mentioned earlier is clearly surpassing expectations.

As for the blog post idea, I shall give that some thought. I am indeed a big fan of drip feeding into index tracking funds, and of Warren Buffett for that matter, so thanks Matthew for the idea, and please continue to appreciate the 'delicious levels of cattiness' at the World's Number One Sports Trading Blog (that should get a few comments coming...).