Friendly Tipster League And The Erskine Cup 2014-15

As promised, here is an update for the 2014-15 Friendly Tipster League. I posted some thoughts on the 2014-15 version of the FTL back in June, and my ideas were fortunately all favourably received.

The essential details are as follows:

Cost

The cost is £52.50 per entry, with £50 going into the pot, and £2.50 covering ‘administrative costs’. No objections to this proposal were received, au contraire, I was told I was selling my time too cheap. Well, just a little, but I do quite enjoy this kind of thing.

Division of Prize Money (Overview)

Approximately 75% of the pot money will go to the League competition, 15% to a Cup competition, and 10% will go to the monthly prizes. If we reach 32 entries, and we currently have 12 paid up, with interest from at least three more, the prizes will be £1,500, £300 and £200 – a total of £2,000.

Hang on a minute, I hear you mathematical whizzes say. 32 * £50 is only £1,600 - where is this huge total of £2,000 coming from. Well the good news I mentioned on Friday is that Ian Erskine, the FTS Income man, has come up with an extremely generous donation to the pot, which after his own entry fee and subscription to the Cassini Service are accounted for comes to a little over £400. I propose that the Cup will be named the Erskine Cup in recognition of this fine and very generous gesture.

If any other service provider would like to donate anything to the pot in return for the good publicity of frequent mentions, please don’t be shy. While Ian has set the bar very high, every little helps. Stewboss, aka Football Investor, has said he will chip in something, and perhaps other services such as Premier Betting or Skeeve would like to get their names out there all season for a few quid.

Graeme Dand (The Football Analyst) is repeating his offer from last year of a £25 per head bounty to anyone finishing ahead of his best entry, capped with a maximum liability of £500 and again, this is a very generous offer. Last year, five qualifying entries beat his ‘Barcelona in the Conference’. Perhaps Pinnacle Sports would be interested in chipping in a few hundred as their prices will be used and referenced each week?

Selection Requirements

The FTL will run from Friday 1st August 2014 to the final match of the Serie A season, which I believe will be Sunday 31st May 2015.

Qualifying Leagues

As I use the Pinnacle Sports quoted prices from the Football Data.co.uk web site to record the results, selections are restricted to the leagues they cover, which are in England (top 5 leagues), Scotland (top 4), the top two in France, Germany, Italy and Spain, plus the top league in the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, Turkey and Greece.

Unfortunately Cup and European games are not included and are therefore ineligible. Bets on correct scores are also not allowed as the prices are not recorded.

Entry Deadline

Because the prices recorded are taken on Friday afternoons for weekend matches, and Tuesday afternoons for midweek matches, entries will need to be received by midnight on those days. Obviously if you have a Friday evening or a Tuesday evening selection, you will need to submit it before kick-off time, but otherwise so long as the entry is in by midnight Friday (for weekend games) or midnight Tuesday (for midweek games) the prices shouldn’t have moved too much. Most activity is on the English games, so this will give you all Friday night to fine tune your selections.

This will also give me time to publish some of the selections ahead of time which will make the Cup weekends in particular rather more interesting to everyone. Out of respect for the paid services out there, or rather to their subscribers, those selections will have to remain private unless they say otherwise.

Selection Types

Single / Multiple Selections

All selections will be bet risking one point, whether a back or a lay. Unlike last season, accumulators will be accepted. However, a selection can only be included once. If an entry is for example a double of Team A and Team B, and a second entry is Team A and Team C, the second bet will be treated as a single on Team C.

Match Odds

Selections will be recorded against the Pinnacle Sports Match Odds prices. For back bets, this is self-explanatory. For lay selections, the price used will be Pinnacle’s +0.025 (for odds-on or evens selections) and +0.05 for others. Thus for example, a winning lay at 2.00 will be recorded as a profit of 0.98 points.

Under / Overs

The price used to determine Under / Over bets will be that of the 2.5 goal markets. If the selection is under 1.5, 3.5 or whatever, it will be considered a bet on Under 2.5, and same on the Overs. The prices used will be an average of Football Data’s Average (BbAv) and Maximum (BbMx) prices.

Draw No Bet (DNB) [Updated on 3.Aug.14]

Football Data do not record prices on these bets, but the prices will be calculated using the Match Odds that are published. The probability implied for the draw will be re-assigned proportionately to the Home and Away prices.

Handicap

Similarly, a bet on a team to win + goals (e.g. +0.5) will be treated as a lay of the opposing team. A bet of a team to win – goals (e.g. -0.5) will be a back of that team to win.

Entry Format

There is no set format required for entries. I tend to reformat them into a Word document and play with them there, so simple text is preferred, but I will let you know if anyone’s format is problematic.

League Details

League prize money will be divided among all the profitable entries in the ratio of the profits. Thus if four entries are in profit, e.g. by 6 points, 4 points, 3 points and 2 points, the pot will be split 6/15ths to the winner, 4/15ths to second and so on. This will ensure that anyone in profit will win something. As a reminder, this was how the league ended last season:

Seven entries would have shared the prize money, with the prize money being distributed from 30% to the Cassini Value Selections down to about 2% for the XX Draws (Under) entry.

Of course, with the bounty in place, it is quite possible to be in the red but win £25 if you beat The Football Analyst.

Entries must make at least 76 selections to be eligible for prizes, which should be no problem for the likes of Neil who submit that many each week. I exaggerate. Slightly.

Erskine Cup Competition Details

The Erskine Cup format will depend on the number of entries received. If we reach our target of 32 entries, there will be cup match-ups on the following weekends:

September 27th,
November 1st,
November 29th,
January 31st,
February 28th,
March 21st,
April 25th

The dates have been chosen because all the major leagues are in action on those weekends. The last weekend in October would have made it more symmetrical but the Conference National have no matches scheduled due to the Fourth Qualifying Round of some other cup competition, but it's nicely spread out as it is and misses the FA Cup's scheduled rounds.

If we have less than 32 entries, then some of the earlier 2014 dates will be skipped. For the Cup, there will be a public and open draw, and entries will be paired together. The Cup results will simply be the profit or loss for that weekend's matches and would also count in the FTL. You could lose 3 points, but advance if your 'opponent' loses 4 points, or you could be up 10 points and be eliminated if your 'opponent' makes 11 points. Cup winnings will be 50% for the winner, 25% for the runner-up and 12.5% each for the losing semi-finalists.

Monthly Winner

Eight monthly prizes will be awarded to the most profitable entry In each month. August and September will be combined into one month, as will April and May. If we reach 32 entries, this monthly prize will be at least £25.

Places will be awarded on a first come, first served basis as fees are received - PayPal to calciocassini @ aol.com and if anyone wants to top up the kitty with a sponsorship, and a mention each week, please feel free.

Finally, please remember this is a friendly competition. The rules are intended to make it as fair as possible to everyone, so if you don't like the entry deadlines, or have any other issues, don't enter.  I try to be as accurate as possible with the updates, but it the entrant's responsibility to check their results and let me know within a week if I have made an error. Contrary to rumour, I am not perfect. The final decision on any grievances will be made by the League Commissioner - which is me. I just voted myself in. Any questions on the above, please let me know.

The bottom line is that for just £52.50, you get season long (10 months) entertainment, and an opportunity to show your skill and win some decent prize money. The pot odds are already good. What's stopping you?

My offer of the spreadsheet containing the 2014-15 fixtures has been eagerly snapped up by a few FTL entrants and Cassini Service subscribers, and I am pleased to say that this will now include the Championship, League One, League Two and Conference National fixtures making a grand total of 4,034 matches. Still awaiting Italy to schedule Serie A but that should be done on Monday, so some time next week it should be ready to go.  

Fixtures, Schedules and Erskine Delivers

I’m putting together my spreadsheet with all the fixtures from the top leagues for 2014-15, and although the draw for the Serie A schedule isn’t until Monday, the differences between the leagues are always interesting to see.

The French are the first to start their season, kicking things off on Friday 8th August. Two midweek rounds are on the schedule, with a three week break at the half-way point over Xmas and the New Year sees the season finish on the weekend of May 23rd 2015.

The English Premier League starts a week later on the weekend of August 16th, and has three rounds of (non-holiday) midweek matches scheduled. No winter break for the EPL of course, in fact quite the contrary with two matches in three days over Boxing Day and the adjoining weekend. New Year’s Day (a Thursday) marks the start of the second half of the season, and there are a couple of blank league weekends for the FA Cup. Unlike other leagues, the history behind our primary cup competition means it still has a prominent place in the calendar.

The Germans have fewer matches to schedule, so they return to action full of World Cup pride a week later, on Friday August 22nd, take a six week long winter / half-term break, yet still conclude their activity on the weekend of May 23rd 2015. How very organized.

La Liga starts the same weekend as Germany, but they are happy with scheduling just 16 matches by the end of the year, and fitting 22 in after the New Year. The BBC site from where I pulled the fixtures may not be completely accurate on these games – they have Almeria ending the season with four consecutive home games which seemed a bit odd, and it looks like they have the matches versus Sevilla reversed.

Finally, Italy’s Serie A gets underway on August 31st, "a later start then usual because of the World Cup". It was a decision made last December, presumably by an optimist at the Legacalcio - or do a lot of Germans play in Serie A? The league will consequently wrap up a week after the other top leagues on May 31st 2015.

Once the Serie A fixtures are scheduled and incorporated into my spreadsheet, if any Cassini Service subscribers or FTL entrants would like a free copy, drop me a line. It took quite a bit of time, and will need to be updated as matches are rescheduled for various reasons, but the baseline rounds will all be there and it might save some of you several hours of work.

Finally, as mentioned earlier this week, I'll finalise the rules, terms, conditions etc. for the 2014-15 FTL, but I did hear from Ian Erskine (of FTS Income fame and fortune) and have some great news regarding his offer to sponsor this season's competition. Let's just say Ian's fortune is slightly less than it was!

Incidentally Ian, I did reply to you, but received an Undelivered Mail Returned To Sender message back.

<ian@ftsincome.co.uk>: host mail.ftsincome.co.uk[81.4.108.91] said: 554 5.7.1 Service unavailable; Client host [64.12.222.129] blocked using dnsbl.sorbs.net; Currently Sending Spam See:

If anyone else would like to sponsor the competition, please let me know. We also still have several places available at a cost of just £52.50 and after the news of Ian's donation, there might be a small stampede.

Ratings For Anoraks

I received a couple of comments on my recent post which compared my ratings with Statto's ratings. As I mentioned, I used Stattos' ratings as the starting point for my rather ambitious plan to track the lower English leagues down to the Conference in addition to the top five European leagues.

Fairfranco asked:

Out of interest do you know if Statto's ratings have been of any use over time?

Would be good to see historical results with ratings at the time alongside them to get a grasp on some accuracy.

Matthew T added:

I would also be interested Padrino if you had any experience regarding the validity of the Statto ratings. Once upon a time I used to paper trade a range of ratings system while betting my own but it became too time consuming. If I remember correctly I found the Statto ratings were very weighted to long term quality over short term form and I never could devise a method for incorporating their trend rating in to a betting system. They seem very similar in style to the Racing Football Outlook newspaper football ratings and both seem to have their origin in Elo. They seemed lackluster in the divisions where more complex models were rife e.g. EPL and better in the lower class European leagues. For top leagues a good free option remains Dectech for Poisson style goals for and against ratings.

The short answer is that I do not know if Statto's ratings have been of any use over time. They claim a pretty good record for them, writing:

The Science Behind Statto Index

The Index has been developed and tested over many years, starting in the 1980s before the World Wide Web era. Our testing uses around 25 years worth of results and approximately 10 years of bookmakers odds to test the accuracy and profitability of the system.

Naturally, no system is perfect and we continuously monitor its performance. For the mathematically minded, the correlation between our forecasts and actual results is just over 0.9, which means that approximately 90% of the final outcomes are explained by the prior forecasts.

Naturally, no system is perfect, but 90% isn't too shabby, although I think we need a more detailed explanation of what exactly "final outcomes explained by the prior forecasts means"!

Forecasts

The forecast odds on this site are produced by our Forecasting Engine using our unique Statto Index ratings. The Index currently covers 29 leagues together with all International teams - a total of over 750 teams. Our forecasted odds are based on a true 100% book and therefore do not take account of any commission or projected profit margin - this is left to you based on personal preference. Odds are forecasted for both match and outright markets.

I agree with Matthew that their ratings do appear to move rather slowly, and their focus appears to be more targeted at the anorak / weatherman types rather than someone looking to make money from them.

Having said that, I have to admit that I have a little of the 'anorak' in me myself.

A recent DNA analysis threw up some surprises in my ancestry - along with the alarmingly high Neanderthal percentage shown above, and the less surprising majority British and Irish percentage shown below, there was a small percentage of 'train-spotter' DNA detected. Where that came from is something of a mystery, although a great-great-granddad - in other words a "really fantastic" granddad - did work with the trains on Ryde Pier, Isle of Wight circa 1850.

Anyway, it's my excuse for finding the Historical Ratings from 1888 quite interesting.

The best (highest rated) English team of all-time is Chelsea (2006) who reached 995 points, just 35 points ahead of Aston Villa's historic best, which unfortunately for them was not last season, but came in 1897. Just two League clubs reached a new high in 2014 - Manchester City (960) and Burton Albion (706). At 958, City are in with a good chance of setting a new high this season - they don't face Crystal Palace until December - but whether it is possible to make money from such ratings seems unlikely.

Matthew mentioned Dectech as a good free option, but I remember questioning their sanity when I saw they had Norwich City predicted to finish fifth in the EPL last season with 68 points. They got 33, and were relegated of course.

Admittedly I had Norwich City avoiding relegation at the start of last season too, but didn't go so far as a top half finish, never mind chasing a Champions League spot. Perhaps Dectech reacted too much to Norwich's meaningless last day 3-2 win at Manchester City the previous season?

I mentioned earlier that I agreed with Matthew's observation that Statto's ratings move too slowly, at least from a betting perspective, but the other side of the coin is to be careful not to overreact to a result such as the one just mentioned. Norwich were never contenders for a European spot of any type based on league performance.

Thanks to all of you who have renewed or subscribed for the first time to the Cassini Service. The early-bird special offer of £129 (or £99 for renewals) is good through the end of this month. PayPal to calciocassini @ aol.com

I'll re-focus on the Friendly Tipster League this weekend, and see if we get some prizes / bonuses from the likes of Ian Erskine. Watch this space.

Emotional Discipline

Thanks to those of you who offered suggestions and ideas on obtaining closing prices on football matches, specifically Jamie A, Sheva Wigwam (quite possibly not his real name) and Marco Mattes. 

Steve, of Daily25 fame and fortune, wrote in a comment on following certain tipsters, specifically when to drop them:

But also it is a psychological issue too, once we decide to invest real money (and in my case, big money), into something, our brains then tell us that we must have made the right decision. To then go back on this and admit you were wrong and therefore stupid is a hard thing to do. There is a saying in the start-up world which goes "Hire slowly, fire quickly". It may be a mantra I need to follow in regards to tipsters too.

This is very similar to the error that many traders make, of emotionally attaching themselves to a selection, and being unwilling to admit that they were wrong and cut their losses quickly enough. As I have written before, cutting winners short and letting losers run too long, is probably the biggest trading mistake. 

The reason a trade is entered, or a tipster service is subscribed to, is because you are looking to make a profit, so it is human nature that this is the part you are most focused on. However, neither trading nor following tipsters is ever going to be all smooth sailing, and you need to have a plan in place in the not unlikely event that things don't go perfectly. 

Most traders don’t want to acknowledge that a trade could turn against them. They enter the market assuming they’ll be successful, refusing to look in the rearview mirror. It’s also common for emerging traders to use a calculator to predict how much they’ll make and how they’ll spend the unrealized profits!

Losses are part of the game but especially beginners have difficulties in accepting this. A loss creates frustration and you become “upset” on the market. You have the feeling that “the market” took something which you feel belongs to you: your money. You are determined to get your money back and you put on a position three times your normal position size in order to make the loss back. You do not stick to your trading plan, you are upset and want to take revenge for the previous loss. These kinds of trades are called “revenge trades” and can lead to huge draw-down’s as you can easily imagine.

Another mention for the fact that finding value doesn't mean that all decisions are profitable. Trading is about making money overall, not every time, and the lesson that profitable betting is about finding value, not winners, continues to elude some people.

Betfair Forum member Zazu who, after three years should have learned, responded recently to the wisdom that "When betting you try to find value, not pick winners" with:

Losing bets don't pay any bills

Needing to win bets to pay bills, or staking too high, leads to emotionally driven, less than optimal decisions. Bet (staking 'sensibly'), with money you don't need, and your trading / betting will be all the better for the removal of the emotional element. 

Books And Ratings Compared EPL 2014-15

I have spent most of this weekend building a new spreadsheet (although model sounds better) for the lower leagues in England. It may well prove to be too much work to maintain this, but others have success in the lower leagues, and I thought I would give it a try. The initial ratings are based on those on the Statto.com website, but mine will soon diverge and take their own shape as the results start coming in.

The close season is always disruptive to ratings but after a handful of games they correct themselves. Unless your club rating is based on individual player ratings, there is no objective way of incorporating dramatic changes at clubs. In the EPL, the activity at some of the top clubs this summer has impacted last season's closing ratings.

Liverpool finished 2013-14 in second place, not only in the EPL, but also in the Cassini Ratings, and were joint second in Statto's ratings too. Currently, based on Pinnacle Sports and Betfair's prices, they are rated fifth, behind favourites Chelsea and followed by Manchester City, Manchester United and Arsenal, and my current rating of second is likely to soon be adjusted down.

Southampton are another club where significant changes have taken place. Currently rated 7th by Cassin and 8th by Statto, they are ranked 11th on Betfair.

Assessing new (promoted) teams is also problematic. For their initial Cassini ratings, I use the performance of promoted teams over the last ten seasons as a guide. The last 30 teams promoted to the EPL have averaged a finishing place the following season of 15.2, and in 9 of the last 10 seasons, at least one promoted side has been relegated.

One odd fact is that the promoted Champions actually fare worse on average than the runners-up and play-off winners. Five Champions have been immediately relegated, including the last two of Reading and Cardiff City, while only two runners-up have suffered the same fate, and none since 2007. Five play-off winners have also dropped immediately, but the last three all finished highest of the promoted teams in the following season.

So it's a little surprising that the sportsbooks have the three promoted teams to fill all three relegation places. Here are the predicted finishing positions based on the bookies, along with the Statto and Cassini ratings.

Statto's rating of Leicester City in 10th place seems a little high to me, and both our ratings for Newcastle United are probably a little low. They certainly ended the season in poor form, but then they had nothing to realistically play for over the last few games. I seem to be a little high on West Bromwich Albion where the expectation seems to be of just about avoiding relegation.

Sharp Move

For a bookmaker, Pinnacle Sports publish some pretty darn good betting articles, and if you have a spare week or two, and have already read everything in this blog, you could do worse with your time than take a look at some of them.

One article from November 2012 titled Why Odds Movement is Vital contained a couple of statements that are somewhat related to yesterday's post:

The most accurate way to distinguish winning and losing players is to look at the odds a player received when they made their bet, and compare it with the Pinnacle Sports closing line on the game. If a player consistently beats the closing odds at Pinnacle Sports, they are likely to be a long-term winner.

Interestingly, Pinnacle Sports have found that this test is more reflective of a player’s future winning potential than their historical win/loss record with the company.

For example, if Pinnacle Sports’ closing odds on the Steelers was 1.960, and a customer played 2.050 earlier in the week – that was a sharp bet. When a player can anticipate the line movement, and does this consistently over a series of 100 bets or more, that player is conclusively sharp, and will be up over time.

This is another area where I need to focus some attention this season, but if anyone knows where I can find closing lines on last season's football, I'd be interested. As I have mentioned before, the odds published by the Football Data web site are not closing lines, but prices collected on Friday afternoons for weekend games, and on Tuesday afternoons for midweek games.

Kelly In Action

Prompted by a Cassini subscriber who wants to look at the 2013-14 Cassini Value Selections in more detail, I went through all my old emails and recorded the edges in a spreadsheet which is something I should have done all along. I expunged four matches from the records (three winners and one loser) because they were from the early days and were lays or draw no bet selections which left me with 117 pure selections and profit of 23.69 points. A small sample, but it was interesting that when sorted by edge percentage, the top five, and six of the top seven, were losers. There seems to be some truth in the saying that if something appears too good to be true, then it probably is. Selections with a supposed edge in excess of 30% all lost:

My calculated price is in column E with Pinnacle's official price in F and the edge in G.

At the other end of the range, there were 19 selections which, at the time the email was sent, had an edge of over 10%, but were less than that in the recorded Pinnacle prices. Those 19 selections were still profitable, generating 5.05 points.

One embarrassing and, in hindsight, avoidable loss was the selection of Bayern Munich to win at Augsburg in April. A price of 1.4 at the time the list was compiled looked good enough, with a 20.4% edge, to justify inclusion, although I did caution in my email that:

One comment is that Bayern Munich have clinched the league and their motivation may not be what it was.

In the event, Bayern fielded "an experimental side" and models don't work too well with "experimental sides". The motivation factor also cost me a few points at the end of last season. Once April was over, the results were poor:

One of the benefits of having a precise number for your edge is that if you are confident in that number, you can maximise your returns by using the mathematically proven and optical  Kelly Criterion.

I think the subscriber who prompted this review may be thinking in terms of this, and using a £1,000 bank, full Kelly would have ended the season with the bank at £2,837.58 (using the prices at email time) or £2,782.37 using the recorded Pinnacle prices.

The more conservative half-Kelly results would have been £2,524.34 and £2,490.85 respectively, and the quarter-Kelly  numbers are £1,750.52 and £1,736.14. Interestingly the maximum bet here would have been around £248 on the aforementioned Bayern Munich loss.

One other statistic I looked at was the price at email time versus the Pinnacle recorded price. (Worth mentioning that the Pinnacle recorded price is not necessarily the closing (kick-off) price but is the price recorded by Football Data on a Friday afternoon).

Anyway, of the small sample of 117 matches, 60 shortened in price, 20 remained unchanged, and 37 drifted.

The 60 that shortened by a total of 2.27 points made an official profit of 13.13 points. The unchanged made a 2.85 points profit, while the drifters added 7.71 points despite drifting by a total of 1.07 points. What was interesting was that the bigger drifters (those of 0.03 points or more) were net losers, while those selections shortening by 0.03 points or more were net winners. Follow the market.

Some lessons to be learned as the new season fast approaches - less than a month away in fact.

Cassini Selections 2014-15

Cassini is back after spending the last few weeks in the hot California and Nevadan sunshine watching World Cup matches with his wife, daughter and daughter's beau, and losing money on the Craps tables of Las Vegas. Fun bets only though, so it was all good, but back to normal now and with the EPL fixtures out for next season, it's time to look forward to 2014-15, with the small matter of wrapping up the World Cup this weekend.

Despite a disappointing 2013-14 season for the Draws, several of you have asked for my plans for them and the Cassini Value Selections next season. I'm assuming that this interest isn't merely curiosity, but reflects an understanding that although the draws were in the red for the first time, there was an underlying reason, and other redeeming factors were:

• that the draws backed  unders were (very slightly) in the green
• the Bundeslayga selections were profitable
• and last but not least, the FTL champion Cassini Value Selections were very profitable

All this means that after much pondering, deliberation, cogitation, mulling, rumination, thought, consideration and prodding, I have decided that I will continue the service next season.

While the Draws part of the service was obviously disappointing, the reason is clear, and I have no reason to suppose that the decline in draws is part of a long-term trend, although the World Cup group stage results didn't do draw backers any favours. At least they returned in the knock-out phase with a vengeance with 50% of matches ending as draws. Now a season like that in Europe would be very nice.

I have updated the Prospectus for next season, as some of you have already noticed and acted upon, but the highlights are that for new subscribers, the cost will be the same as last year, a very reasonable £149 considering the total selections will likely be around 700.

For former subscribers, the cost will be £99, and for anyone who is an entrant in the 2014-15 Friendly Tipster League, the price will be reduced to £124.

For anyone signing up before the World Cup Final, there will be an early-bird special price of just £129. As I picked July 13th as the deadline a while back, and then never posted it, I'll actually switch the digits around and extend the early-bird price through the end of July.

Back to the World Cup and it's been 36 years since a UEFA member failed to finish third, with only one CONMEBOL country even featuring in the last 8 matches (Uruguay in 2010). There have been 17 third place matches, with just one needing extra-time. As has been commented on all over the place, Overs are traditional with just three finishing Under 2.5, and none since 1974. A care-free approach makes this a tricky game to predict. Host nations have featured in four matches, winning three, and Brazil have won two of their three appearances, while the Netherlands lost their one appearance in 1998 - to Croatia. On form, Brazil look rather short at their current 2.14 but the team line-ups may well be changed significantly from those seen in the meaningful games preceding this one. 

Every Second Counts

In regard to my suggestion that the practice of court-siding was the main reason for Betfair's introduction of the Premium Charge, Steve comments:

Think I'd agree with you on that one, the PC was basically Betfair's annoyance that people were making plenty of money off them with relatively little efforts. Mainly down to flaws within their system they just couldn't plug as easily as the old tricks like getting in front of the queue when you could bypass Betfair's odds ladder input a hidden 0.0001 on your own odds or the trick of beating the in-play delays that were well known amongst quite a few.

I'm sure there are plenty of books in the wings waiting to come out about the 'scams' in those early days and the fortunes won through loopholes rather than skill. But whilst there's still loopholes there and money to be made I doubt we'll see the likes of the legendary racetech guy's books just yet. I'm guessing Brad Hutchins is now too well known on the circuit to earn so a book is pretty much his only option for now.

Indeed Brad Hutchins is now retired from court-siding. It appears that since 2011, the year when Danish company Enetpulse were awarded the exclusive worldwide distribution rights for ATP and WTA live scoring data, the tennis authorities are being more assertive in protecting those rights.

Enetpulse has reached an agreement with the ATP/WTA/Challenger Tours to become the Exclusive Worldwide Distributor of Tennis Live Data to the Gambling Industry. This means that Enetpulse holds the exclusive data rights by the ATP and WTA to deliver real-time scores directly from the tennis courts via their central scoring system. The ATP and WTA official live scoring is to licensed bookmakers interested in live data opportunities globally. Our official live tennis solution is unrivalled in the market both in terms of speed and coverage. It is the ideal solution for bookmakers looking for the live betting edge on Tennis.

Many of the buyers are sports-gambling websites that provide the scores for in-play betting — wagering on the match after play has begun. One site that reportedly buys the scores, Betfair, is a betting exchange that, like a stock exchange, pairs buyers and sellers for transactions when they are willing to agree to the same terms.

Except that the buyers and sellers are not agreeing to the same terms, on account of one party having information not yet available to the other. In sports betting, every second counts.

As for the "legendary racetech guy", I have no idea who that is or what makes him legendary. I'd like to know more. If he is exploiting a loophole, as the court-siders are, in my opinion Betfair should close that loophole, not tax the beneficiaries in a way that penalises others as well.

I'm pretty sure the Betfair founder's didn't envision a world where former employees were pooling resources and flying 'consultants' around the world to take advantage of inadequate countdown delays on their markets.

Inside The World of Drinking And Women

I finished reading "Game Set Cash - Inside The Secret World Of International Tennis Trading" by Brad Hutchins, and I have to say it wasn't too interesting for anyone interested in court-siding. As someone else had said, it was more a series of tales about epic drinking sessions, hot chicks (two activities which really are better experienced first hand than read about), and the ejections by security. All three were repeated a number of times with changes in venues, names and language / approach taken by security, but I suppose something had to pad out 272 pages. To be fair, some of the stories were mildly amusing, and Mr Hutchins isn't a bad writer at all, but what I was interested in was an insight into "the secret world of international tennis trading" which we didn't get.

There were some occasional details given, and one of the things that jumped out was the sheer scale of court-siding operations, with sometimes as many as twenty traders present for a match. It was also not clear what the court-sider was technically doing - at times he refers to his activity as transmitting scores and at others as trading. Perhaps not surprisingly, the book doesn't mention the victims who are paying for his drinks, hotels and air fares around the world other than in very vague terms. It does seem that as with High-Frequency Trading, much of the competition is other traders employing the same strategy, but new money is coming from somewhere.

One other observation is that this practice has been going on for some time. One tale tells of a guy who made one million euros circa 2006 "sitting on the baseline with laptops" and my guess is that activities like this were the driving force behind Betfair's Premium Charge which was first introduced in September 2008.

"While many online gamblers know court-siding exists, most simply don't have the means, imagination or drive to join the party. So, while it's not a completely secret vocations, those of us who do it have been able to operate with a relatively limited amount of competition and exposure. On the whole, the practice remains largely undiscovered by the general public, and we traders do all we can to keep it that way".

The important role of Betfair is made clear also, in this passage after one of their outages:

"The bottom line is if Betfair didn't exist, online sports trading wouldn't exist, and we wouldn't be sat on court crossing our fingers for their server to come back up. I learn there and then that Betfair is our lifeblood and without it our industry would not exist".

When the Gambling Commission looked into in-play betting in May 2008, they sought Betfair's input. Click on the link and read the answers provided. It may be just me, but given the data Betfair clearly had at that time, some of the answers appear to be less than forthcoming.

I may have other observations from the Game Set Cash book in future posts, and speaking of posts, this one should see the hit count for this blog reach two-thirds of a million. I probably won't be in a fit state to blog tomorrow. England matches give me a free-pass for epic drinking sessions, hot chicks not included though.

One-third of a million hits was reached in December 2011 after 3 years and 8 months, so the pace has picked up slowly as we close in on a million.    

Walters, Matthews And World Cup

Scott sent me a link to this story about Billy Walters, a name that regular readers of this blog will recognise. He was featured in the book "The Smart Money" by Michael Konik, who changed Walters' name to Rick Matthews, but there was never a serious attempt to conceal his true identity.

Since I read that book and wrote my posts on it, I attended a wedding in the same city that Billy Walters has a multi-million dollar home, and made a mutual acquaintance who knows Billy from the golf club where Mickelson also plays. It would be very interesting to sit in on his operation one Sunday during NFL season, and if it happens, I'll be sure to write about it.

Incidentally, the insider-trading case against Mickelson was always specious, and should never have been made public.

A superb graphic and article from The Economist about the World Cup so far - written before the Brazil v Mexico 0:0 just now completed.

Premier League fixtures out tomorrow: Opening Game Sunderland v Crystal Palace is my bet :)

Birthday Paradox At The World Cup

Many of you will be familiar with the Birthday Paradox and perhaps seen this article already, but the BBC recently used the 23 player World Cup squads as an excuse to look at it again.

Basically the birthday puzzle or paradox is that if we ignore February 29th, a group of 23 people has a greater than 50% chance of containing at least two people who share a birthday (month and day).

The BBC article also looks at the birth months of the squads, with some not totally surprising observations (in 1997, FIFA made 1 January the age cut-off for international soccer competitions):

For the 2014 World Cup players, the four months with the most birthdays are January (71), February (77), March (68) and May (72). These are all above the 61 birthdays a month you'd expect if they were evenly distributed.

And the months with the fewest birthdays all come in the second half of the year: August (57), October (46), November (49) and December (51).

An interesting read if you like your stats, and who doesn't?

Insulting Consulting

The fallout from my post that was intended merely to express my opinion that a lot of mainstream financial articles are filler articles rather than in-depth articles with any value, and that investing in (cheap) index funds is a better long-term investment strategy than (expensive) managed funds continues. Prabhat writes:

By 'bad' I simply meant your reference to the fact that most hedge-funds under-perform the passive investing alternative.

I never mentioned the performance of hedge funds. I was talking, quite clearly for once, about managed funds in comparison with index tracking funds.

Hedge funds aren't intended for the likes of me, as they: 

are most often set up as private investment partnerships that are open to a limited number of investors and require a very large initial minimum investment. Investments in hedge funds are illiquid as they often require investors keep their money in the fund for at least one year.

Prabhat continues:

As far as better analysis is concerned, what I mean is that some people will be better at analyzing data at the end-of the day than others. True, some financial data will reach big players before others and thus be 'old', but unless those big players are analyzing it perfectly, the fact that they get data in advance isn't going to result in the market automatically 'digesting it'. 

I think the probability of the big players somehow all missing or misinterpreting some key data is small. It's also not 'some' financial data will reach the big players before others, it is 'almost all' and none is going to reach me first. That is the reality of it.

In sporting terms, it's like a tennis layer wins a set with an overhead smash. For the man at home to benefit from that point, it needs not just one court-sider to make a mistake, but for all the others present to make the same mistake (from what I am reading many matches have several court-siders trading the same match). Possible in theory, but really rather unlikely in practice, at least in frequently traded companies / major ATP/WTA events.

Prabhat finishes with something we can both agree on:

As for high-frequency trading, that can't really be called analysis in any sense, and while it highly complicates, if not kills, day-trading, I don't understand why someone with a longer time-frame and good analysis skills would be incapable of doing well.

There is a 'Tennis Trader Glossary' of terms at the start of Game Set Ca$h which includes this entry for a court-sider:

A consultant who transmits live scores from the court-side to their back end or a computerised gambling system to take advantage of the time delays experienced by the rest of the online gambling community.

Having worked as a 'real' consultant myself for many years, the use of the word in this context is problematic to me. The dictionary definition of a consultant is:

a person who provides expert advice professionally.

I'm not sure updating scores by pressing buttons fits into this category.

Innocents To The Slaughter

Prabhat had a few more comments on my market index post and follow-up, but continues to read too much into my thoughts.

I agree that I over-extrapolated from your post, apologies for that.

That said, I didn't speak of 'beating the market' either, in fact I don't believe in comparing performances to indexes either. Nonetheless, your approach has a huge embedded assumption that what has been historically true will continue. There's little guarantee of that, and plenty of reason to be suspicious of such reasoning.

Not actually true, for Prabhat did speak of 'beating the market', even if it was in the form of a quote:

Sorry for the rant, but I detest this defeatist, mediocre nonsense about financial markets being efficient and 'no one can beat the market, don't even try'.

He continues:

I don't at all contend that most hedge funds are poor, but as a saying goes, '90% of everything is crap'. I am not at all surprised that the average fund is bad, a) because they are average, and rarely will the average anything have an exceptional record and b) because due to the volumes they manage (2% really adds up), they all adopt very similar, risk-averse styles which will make the owners rich even if not the investors to the fund.

No one, certainly not me, said that most hedge funds were poor, nor did I say that the average fund is bad.  

I am still not sure why you are so skeptical that some people analyze things better than others, and that whether it be sports-betting or not, some of the better analysts are not working for big companies. Surely you don't think quality of analysis is solely dependent on quantity of investment in said analysis? I am not even going into the group-think, social dynamics, career considerations etc that ensure that funds don't make optimal decisions.

Again, I'm not sure where this comment comes from. Of course some people analyze things better than others. The point I was trying to make, apparently not too clearly, was that when it comes to the financial markets, that 'better analyst' is not going to be me. It could be Prabhat, but I doubt it. The fact is that the data you need for financial analysis is old by the time it reaches most of us. The market has already digested it.

Sports analysis offers much more hope. Not only do games take place in front of our eyes, live (or close to live), but the resources an individual is up against are far fewer and more modest, although still formidable. Being consistently profitable from betting is not easy, at least not for me, but it is doable with a combination of knowing your sport, knowing the markets and plenty of patience.

I've started reading the "Game Set and Ca$h" book which arrived last week, although there's a football tournament that is taking up much of my free time. I'll probably have a few things to say about it in the next few days, but what is apparent early on is the resources that in-play tennis traders are up against. With the sums of money being taken out of these markets, there are either some deep pockets around or an endless supply of innocents on their way to the slaughter.

Funny how the decline in draws I wrote about in the top leagues last season seems to have continued into the World Cup. Just the one so far, which is very unusual in the opening round of group matches, but a result of the high number of goals we've seen - 44 so far, an average per game of 3.14.

By comparison, in the four previous World Cups (since 1998) with the same format as this one, the opening group games averaged 2.3 goals per game, and 28.1% of matches ended as draws. If the pattern of previous World Cups continues, the second round will see even more goals, with yet more in the third round before defences tighten for the single-elimination part of the tournament. 

The Lucky Chump

Prabhat had a few words to say on my last post, although he read an awful lot more into a general, sweeping post than I intended. He writes:

You clearly believe in the somewhat ludicrous efficient market hypothesis. A couple of reasons to think it's absurd.

1. There's enough statistical evidence that most retail traders consistently lose amounts of money (far exceeding transaction costs), implying obviously, that doing the opposite of what they did would yield a profit.

2. There are many traders who have very long track records of success. I am familiar with the "thousand monkeys hypothesis", but really it's a non-falsifiable claim that anyone who is a winner is lucky. Would you really lay even money on George Soros having a winning year?

3. You say "unless of course they have some kind of an edge, which would be illegal". Only insider information is an illegal edge, and even that doesn't apply to futures and commodities, forex and the like. Superior analysis is an edge that people can have.

I could replicate all of your arguments and apply them to sports-betting too, are you just a lucky chump, no matter that you've been a winner over sample sizes greater than 10/20,000 games?

Sorry for the rant, but I detest this defeatist, mediocre nonsense about financial markets being efficient and 'no one can beat the market, don't even try'.

If you are so sure markets are efficient, why invest in index funds? That's an implicitly bullish bet as well? How can the market be efficient if it's more likely to go up then down?

Marty responded:

Because systematic risk justifies a return for that risk

A couple of clarifications - I never said, clearly or otherwise, that the financial markets were efficient. I don’t believe the word ‘efficient’ appeared anywhere in that post, not even in a quote, so be careful what you assume.

The point I was making, or was trying to make, is that Joe Bloggs, sitting at his desk in suburbia, will always know less about the value of a stock than people whose full-time jobs are to trade in that stock. I’m talking about individuals like myself – not hedge funds which pay lobbyists five figure sums each month for tips on upcoming legislation and whose “investments in information” buy them an advantage over many participants. I’m talking about my old friend the chemist, who gave up his job to make a living day-trading, an experiment that didn’t last too long once the market took a tumble. Superior analysis is an edge that people can have – yes, but big players in the markets, not individuals like myself.

In my opinion, it’s not defeatist, mediocre nonsense at all – it’s called being a realist. If Prabhat likes to think he has an edge in the financial markets, then good luck to him. I accept that I don’t, that I never will have, and I make the best of it. As an individual, I don’t care about ‘beating the market’. This isn't a zero-sum game. I'm not competing with anyone else, I'm not beholden to shareholders to maximise returns and I’m not a fund manager looking to impress prospective investors - I’m an individual interested in my own money. If my returns are the market average, then I’m beating half the people (or money) in the market anyway, and expecting more than this long-term isn’t realistic for Mr Chump.

Why invest in index funds? Historically the best long term investment for keeping ahead of inflation has been stocks.

Why index funds rather than managed funds? Because the fact is that most investors are better off investing in index funds than managed funds.

Why? Because — due to the high costs of active management — the majority of actively managed funds fail to outperform their respective indexes. In fact, according to a study done by Standard and Poors, for the five-year period ending 12/31/11:

§ Less than 39% of U.S. stock funds managed to outperform their respective indexes,

§ Less than 22% of international stock funds managed to outperform their respective indexes, and

§ Less than 25% of government bond funds and less than 23% of investment grade bond funds managed to outperform their respective indexes.

Now, lest you think that this particular period was an anomaly, let me assure you: It wasn’t. Standard and Poors has been doing this study since 2002, and each of the studies has shown very similar results. On average, actively managed funds have failed in both up markets and down markets. They’ve failed in both domestic markets and international markets. And they’ve failed in both stock markets and bond markets.

Sports betting markets have many similarities to the financial markets, but there are also huge differences, not least of which is that liquidity in the former is relatively minute.

Also, sports take place before our eyes, and all we should need is our skill in updating probabilities as events unfold, but events impacting stock prices are unlikely to reach my living room before the market finds out about it. Unfortunately these days, as I may have mentioned before, events in sports are being seen before they reach my living room, so the lucky chump may have to settle for average here too. Except that in a zero-sum game, average doesn't cut it of course. And worst news is that the title for my memoir has been taken!

Lean To The Index

As repeat visitors to this blog will know, I like to keep an eye on the more traditional financial markets as well as the sports markets, and although I long ago realised that I had no edge in stocks, options, futures or commodities markets, stashing money away “every pay day in a few diverse index funds and forget about it” is as solid investment advice as most of us ever need, and I only wish I had heeded that advice in my twenties rather than my thirties. The “forget about it part” isn’t that easy though.

Although it’s completely pointless, I am in the habit of checking in on the markets at least daily, on good days perhaps several times. However, as stock prices fall on roughly 50% of days, this means that half the time you are likely to feel bad. The general upward trend of the market means that by checking less frequently, you get bad news less often – about 38% of the time if you check on a monthly basis, and 28% if you check annually.

I say it’s a pointless exercise to check daily, but even more than that, it can distract you from making smart long-term decisions. By the time you hear about important news, it’s not news.

I do like to look at some of the finance pages though, taking much of the content with a grain of salt. Lots of articles with dramatic headlines, and lots with question marks in them.

On a typical day, (yesterday), there were links to articles with the titles “Are Stocks Getting Into Dangerous Territory?”, “How Long Can Stocks Maintain All-Time Highs?”, “Cramer - Prepare For Stock Declines”, and “Is a Stock Market Correction Overdue?” – all very bearish in tone, if lacking any real substance, and then a ray of sunshine with an article titled “These are the most obvious signs the market is heading higher”. Peter Nordsted himself couldn’t do a better job of hedging his bets.

The fact is that no one knows. By definition, some managed funds will beat the average one year, and some of those will beat it a second year. Fewer still will beat the average in years three and on, unless of course they have some kind of an edge, which would be illegal, and no one does anything illegal.

One of the authors of Freakonomics, Stephen Dubner, says:

“No one is really good at predicting the future. Investors tend to get overconfident about the market, but no one is really good at predicting the future—including the experts. We tend to believe more in ourselves than we should," he said. "We all think that we can do better than average and that can be a trap. You gotta play it smart, you gotta lean to the index when you feel you need to and then depend on really smart guys … if they are indeed much smarter."

I don’t agree that we do all think we can do better than average when it comes to traditional financial investments. That seems a little unrealistic, and really smart guys tend to be really average guys who had a really luck spell.

It's not the first time Dubner has warned about stock-picking advice. Last month he said:

"If you look at stock-picking advice, you find that the experts … are generally about as good as monkey with a dartboard."

FTL 2014-15 Proposal

Now that the final prize money from 2013-14's FTL season has been distributed, (congratulations Skeeve), it's time to look forward to next season, and there appears to me more than enough interest in a second FTL season for 2014-15, so here are some thoughts.

The bad news is that I am thinking of raising the entry fee to, a still very reasonable, £52.50 and capping the entries at a maximum of 32. For a bit of fun that keeps you interested for nine months of the year, I think that price is fair enough. In order to justify the hours spent on this to the boss, (and it does take several hours each week), I'm going to use £2.50 as an 'administration fee' with the pot receiving £50. I hope no one objects to this small token fee.

The good news is that this will mean bigger rewards, and on the topic of maintaining interest, I have a couple of ideas. Of the 22 entries last season, 18 made it through to the end with entries in either April or May, and the earliest 'retirements' were in January

With this in mind, I had the rather brilliant idea of allocating a percentage of the pot to a single-elimination competition, i.e. a Cup. Assuming we get more than 16 entries, there will (if necessary) be a Preliminary Round to reduce the number to 16, and then knock-out rounds on specified dates. I'm thinking of using the weekends after the FA Cup rounds take place to guarantee that there is a full schedule of matches for people to choose from. Cup games themselves are not eligible for the FTL due to their absence from Football Data's results.

The Cup results would simply be the profit or loss for that weekend's matches and would also count in the FTL - this would just be a side event on maybe five weekends of the season. You could lose 3 points, but advance if your 'opponent' loses 4 points, or you could be up 10 points and be eliminated if your 'opponent' makes 11 points.

Otherwise the basic structure will remain the same as last year. I'm also thinking of adding a small prize for each monthly winner, i.e. most profitable entry for the eight months of the season counting August and September as one, and combining April and May also.

In summary then, my proposal is that 75% of the pot money will go to the League competition, 15% to the Cup and 10% to the monthly prizes.

If we fill up with 32 entries, there will be £1,200 prize money for the league, £240 for the 'Cup' and £160 for the eight monthly prizes.

Unless there are objections, the Cup winnings will be 50% for the winner, 25% for the runner-up and 12.5% each for the losing semi-finalists, while the League prize money will be divided among the profitable entries in the ratio of the profits. Thus if four entries are in profit, e.g 6 points, 4 points, 3 points and 2 points, the pot will be split 6/15ths to the winner, 4/15ths to second etc.

Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions?

Slots will be awarded (and are filling up fast) on a first come, first served basis as fees are received - PayPal to calciocassini @ aol.com and if anyone wants to top up the kitty with a sponsorship, and a mention each week, please feel free. Graeme, aka The Football Analyst, has already offered to match his offer of £25 to anyone beating him next season up to a £400 (I think) total liability. Last season cost him £125 but I'm sure the publicity on here made that a worthy investment.

Bottom line - it's good fun and an opportunity to show your skill and win some decent prize money.

Who's In Continent?

I won't embarrass the author of the screenshot (left) by naming them, but unless there is a late relocation of this World Cup to North America, or a major seismic shift occurs, Mexico will most definitely not be competing on their home continent later this month.
Mexico is a country in North America.

Brazil is the largest country in South America. 

I should know - I have, not one, but two, Geography 'O' Levels! At one time, the 'Americas' were treated as one continent, but not for about 70 years in most of the world, and FIFA has six continental federations.

Mexico qualified (just*) from the CONCACAF (Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football) Federation, while Brazil compete in the South American federation CONMEBOL.

For those who like this sort of trivia, there are three South American countries who are actually members in CONCACAF, although one is not a member of FIFA and thus ineligible for the World Cup. Not a lot of people know that.

* Had the United states not scored 92' and 93' goals to beat Panama 3:2 in the final qualifying round, Mexico would have been eliminated. (Panama had a player sent off in the 90', so he probably feels quite bad). 

Mexico may have scraped into a play-off with New Zealand (unbeaten in the 2010 World Cup) but they had no trouble making the finals with 5:1 and 4:2 wins.     

Anyway, there's a stronger argument to say that Europe is part of the continent of Eurasia than Mexico is in South America, but that would mess up a few World Cup models. The topic of home advantage, and home continent advantage, is covered in a rather (ahem) excellent piece over at Betting Expert.

A second, equally excellent (ahem - I seem to be developing a nasty cough today) piece on the World Cup is this one on goals and penalties - something not to be missed (get it?)

On the topic of the World Cup, I have to give a  shout out to Brian at Betting Tools - he has a couple of excellent spreadsheets available for free, one for the World Cup and one for general bet tracking, and both have some nice features. These spreadsheets take a long while to put together, (at least mine do), so it is very generous of Brian to offer them for free.

Promoting Capital Formation

It would be interesting to know what percentage of in-running trading activity on Betfair is court-sider driven, but until the Gambling Commission have the same powers as the Securities and Exchange Commission do in the US, we’re unlikely to find out.

The latter commission announced yesterday a set of measures designed to “help the market operate openly, fairly and efficiently to benefit investors and promote capital formation”. This is in response to concerns about high-speed trading that have been to the fore in recent weeks with the publication of Michael Lewis’s “Flash Boys”.

In the zero-sum world of sports trading, unfortunately not everyone will be an investor 'promoting their capital formation' (which is fancy a way of saying 'making money' as I think I have seen), but the first part about operating openly, fairly and efficiently is pertinent.

One proposal “is a rule that would require high-frequency traders to register with regulators as broker dealers” – in our world, Betfair already know the court-sider driven accounts, and any new ones would be easily identifiable.

The problem is that rather than make changes to ensure the markets operate fairly, Betfair have so far chosen to allow the practice to continue while making sure to take a huge cut of the profits themselves. This is a very short-sighted strategy in my opinion, an approach that not only risks intervention from the Gambling Commission (motto: keeping gambling fair and safe for all) as they act to protect the unaware, the unintelligent or the unwise, but also resulting in an inevitable decline in liquidity.

I understand that new money will always be coming in to the markets where court-siders are operating, but even the most optimistic of gamblers will at some point realise that the odds are literally against them, and that they are throwing their money away. When you are watching an event and ‘seeing’ what happened on the exchanges long (i.e. more than the delay) before the action unfolds on your TV, why would any sane person get involved? Bet before the game if you identify value, turn the computer off and enjoy the sporting spectacle or go to bed, get some sleep, and check on your capital formation in the morning.

As more and more is written about the practice, (and I await the arrival of “Game, Set and Ca$h” with less anticipation than previously, after reading reviews that it is basically crap – a diary of “woke up with a hangover, avoided security, pressed a few buttons, went out and got hammered” and repeat), fewer and fewer people are going to involve themselves with in-running betting, which would be a shame because the founding fathers Bert and Eddie’s original idea of individuals pitting their wits against each other was a great one.

What they didn’t intend, hence the n-second delay on new bets, was that the markets would come to be owned by an elite group of individuals benefiting, not from their sharp minds, but from the pressing of a button, or perhaps the twisting of a knob, sewn into someone’s underpants. When you think about it, it's perhaps not surprising that Daniel Dobson was arrested - the surprise being in the nature of the charges that were filed against him.

It is of course quite understandable that operatives have taken advantage of the opportunity that the current configuration has allowed, but as I have said before, it is very strange that Betfair have not closed the loophole.

Some of you may recall the ‘beat the clock’ loophole that a real sharp mind came up with a few years ago. What used to happen was that a bet would be entered, the clock would countdown, and then be placed after ensuring (after the delay had elapsed) that the funds were available. At least one enterprising individual took advantage of this design flaw, by tying up most of the funds in his account on an unmatched, and unmatchable, bet – something like Brazil to win the World Cup at 1000-1.

I believe his sport of choice was cricket, but the principle is the same whatever it was. He would then enter a bet as the bowler ran up, which he would want to be matched only if a wicket fell. If the wicket didn’t fall, then the bet would be rejected by the system due to “Insufficient Funds”, but on occasions when the wicket did fall, he would immediately cancel his bet on Brazil, freeing up his funds, as his cricket bet hit zero, and that bet would then be matched (effectively) instantaneously.

Once that loophole was revealed, Betfair acted fast to perform their ‘credit check’ up front. Why they didn’t leave it open and charge him, and any others using the same strategy, up to 60%, I’m not sure. 

Perhaps he wasn’t a former employee?

What The L?

While the attention of the word is on proper football, you know, that game where the ball spends most of its time in close contact with the foot, another game called football is in the news to a lesser degree. The tradition of the NFL numbering their Super Bowls with Roman numerals will come to an end after February 2015's Super Bowl XLIX. Actually, it's a one year leave of absence rather than an end, because 2017 will see its return with Super Bowl LI. The NFL has decided that a designation of  'L' 'is not pleasing to the eye'.

"When we developed the Super Bowl XL logo, that was the first time we looked at the letter L," [League Vice President Jaime] Weston said. "Up until that point, we had only worked with X's, V's and I's.

Well, that's not exactly true - Super Bowl's 40 to 49 all had the L in their designations - and does Super Bowl LI really look any better than Super Bowl L anyway? Anyone saying yes is a LIer. 

All a bit strange really. As an investor, I can understand a dislike for the L, since it's use is typically to represent a loss, but if you're playing with Roman numerals, it seems to me to be something you should learn to LIV with. 

Is it coincidence that no team starting with an L has ever won the World Cup or Premier League? Leicester City could become the first next season :)