Skeeve Achieves

I'm fairly sure no one did, but if you had taken my advice from Saturday morning and backed League Two away teams, you'd have added another 2.42 points to your bank from the 12 matches played taking the total to 26.15 on the season after 392 matches.

Exeter City's 90th minute equaliser v Blackpool cost us 2.48 points, but this was more than compensated for by Crawley Town's late winner at Wycombe Wanderers.

Returns are calculated against Pinnacle's Closing prices. 

A few days ago I mentioned how the daily hit count varies wildly, for no apparent reason, but then I stumble across a thread on the Betfair Forum which helps to explain the source of these sudden surges in interest. 

This post from nathanrh on February 1st was good to see, for a couple of reasons:

As for tipsters, well the only 2 I've seen that I 'suspect' might be long term profitable are Skeeve & Sportspunter (although that's had an absolute shocking 2016). Those guys post up honest selections and prices and you can beat most of the prices by a few extra ticks, ROI's run at a very low long term percentage; in short no-one is going to give you a nice winning consistent system because anyone who has one is sitting very tight ;-).

Anyone else with outrageous ROI's just isn't realistic, or isn't going to be around very long, there will be a few big priced winners and then they will mean-revert to losers after sucking you in.

Over at the Green All Over Blog Cassini occasionally posts up useful nuggets of systems that you might be able to derive positive expectation from. His posts are also worth a read as he generally debunks those who claim to be long term profitable with just their 'feelings' or 'PDF systems' or 'what time of the month they bet'.

The message on tipsters might be getting through. A prescient mention of Skeeve, given that he just won the Secret Betting Club's "outstanding contribution to tipping" award, which is a "lifetime achievement honour chosen by the SBC team" (along with being voted the third best sports tipster in 2016 by the SBC members).

The SBC ‘Lifetime Achievement’ honour is designed to recognize those who have provided outstanding services to punters through tipping and is chosen by the Secret Betting Club team.

This year’s very worthy award recipient is the football tipster, Skeeve, who since 2006 has been posting his lower-league football tips to great acclaim. Making a profit over the course of 1 football season is difficult enough but to do it over 10 consecutive seasons as Skeeve has done is a phenomenal achievement.

Over the lifetime of his service, Skeeve has posted just under 1500 tips and made 674 points profit at 12.2% Return on Investment. It is not just his profit but the quality of customer service and his odds-settlement policy that also deserves merit as Skeeve has always played extremely fair by his members, ensuring that you can often match, if not beat the advised profits he records on his website – a huge deal when you consider today’s betting markets and how they react to sharp money.

Skeeve is well on course to enjoy his 11th consecutive profitable season and we can’t think of a worthier recipient for this honour. Here is to another decade of profit!

Well deserved. I've mentioned Skeeve many times on this blog, and I am please to see that he has won this prestigious award. To mark the occasion, Skeeve has a special offer:

you can now join the Skeeve Picks service for the remainder of the season (March, April and May) for only 200 EUR instead of the usual 250 EUR. If you're reading this, you're eligible for the special discount. If you're interested, please send an e-mail to skeevepicks at gmail dot com.

Nathanrh seems pretty clued in on other things too, notably on that same thread with some thoughts that should be of interest to anyone silly enough to be thinking of moving into the horse racing markets:

Oh dear!, to trade pre-race horse racing markets you really need to have some realistic idea of what the real price should be, guys that study specific tracks / runners / stables etc. are literally MILES ahead of you, add in the crooked nature of horse racing and you are onto a losing proposition for sure. As for traders that simply push prices pre-race, well that's another losing trading ecosystem if ever I've heard of one ;-).

For horse racing, you need something most of the others do not have, inside info., local track knowledge, stable info., and even if you do have that 'edge' it will be hard to snap up significant pre-market value without letting everyone know.

Horse racing was the least profitable enterprise I ever found just doing the raw data analysis, any significant edges short term were eroded in the long term and lost to commission. I came to the conclusion you would need either 20 years of knowledge or someone on the inside feeding you info ;-).

Good advice.