2011 Review

Apologies to all for the lack of blogging and trading activity over the past few weeks, but I am still waiting for my laptop to be returned to me in a usable condition. At present I am using my very old laptop, which can take up to 20 minutes to load a browser (no exaggeration), so surprisingly it is not the best laptop for trading on. The past couple of weeks have been slow but gradual. The £50 bank which I left myself to use over Christmas is now standing at £82.64, which means it has increased by around 65% in about 4 weeks. This has been with very conservative trading and also very limited, as I have only really been using my phone to trade on the odd occasion. If I had been using my normal bank of £450 I would have returned profits just under £300 with these figures; impressive, though not entirely true perhaps, as I'm sure I would act slightly differently with larger sums. The majority of this profit has been produced by using a new dutching method which I am experimenting with, where I trade a number of scorelines throughout the game in order to produce a decent green at the end. I will fiddle with it a bit further and give a bit more info if it is any good. I have been doing a bit of punting over the past few weeks as well, but no profits to really write home about as yet! I lost £10 on a Goals Galore coupon last week, but won £25 on a double over on Bet365.

There is still one betting day of this year still to go of course, but I can't see things drastically changing so from the 9th October 2011 (since my new leaf was overturned) my total profit is £495.02 (or £41.30 per week), a figure which I am extremely pleased with. My original target was £50 per week, something which I reached every week but one with my full bank, and had I not been slightly hampered this last month I'm sure my average would have been well above £50.

So I was thinking how I could review this year in concise and simple terms for you all, when I stumbled across this old but effective article called 'The 5 Stages to Betfair Trading' (http://www.geekstoy.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1589). I found it interesting to read as so many of the things it listed were things I saw in myself, particularly over this year. At the beginning of this year I had no real plans when it came to trading. I was mainly doing hopeful accumulators with no targets, no knowledge of how much I was spending and dabbling only occasionally on Betfair. I was following the tips from a paid service by a 'Professional Gambler' who you will have heard of but I won't name for embarrassment's sake, as he lost me a lot of money in January and February before I decided to stop following him (incidentally I still receive his tips and he is still doing poorly - something which brings a little joy to me). I was definitely on stage one at the turn of 2011. As the year progressed however, I moved on to stage 2: I really wanted to become a 'proper' trader, but I knew that I didn't yet know how, so I began to read and read about it. Towards the end of the English football season I began lumping drastically huge amounts of money on what I thought were 'dead certs' - (odds of around 1.2) and got lucky in that I wasn't burnt too bad, and made quite a lot of money from it (around £700 I think). I told myself it was trading because I was doing it on Betfair, but deep down I knew that I wasn't trading really, and that I was letting my trades run for maximum profit. Luckily for me, the season ended which meant my betting did, and I withdrew all of my profits.

As the summer went on I began to think about my betting activity before the season ended, and I think my actions scared myself a little as I was gambling away such gigantic sums of money, which I really couldn't afford to lose (though I had told myself I could). This led me to be more intent upon finding trading methods and systems and I stumbled across an opportunity in the U21 European Championships early in the summer. The system I came up with was all my own thinking, and I thought I had struck gold; I would soon find, however, that my inexperience would cost me dearly. Spain, England and the Czech Republic were the three favourites for the tournament, and, being only 2 groups, they were all in the same group. So looking at the odds I worked out that by dutching them all to win the tournament (as well as Uruguay, the other team in the group, at very long odds), I would be able to green up when one of the favourites went out and the odds of the other two shortened greatly. Simple? Not so much. What I hadn't accounted for was both England and the Czech Republic to play awfully in the group stage (with the Czechs sneaking through), whilst Switzerland in the other group breezed through their group becoming second favourites in the process. I still reckon that had England and Spain both breezed through the group then my idea would have been profitable, but given the chance I would definitely not do it again. I lost about £500 from that.

As I continued on with stage 2 I was desperate to find a 'winning system' when I bumped into arbitrage betting and I thought that I had finally found the thing which would I could master. I read a lot about it and then dived into a couple of arbitrage services which would produce arbs for me regularly to make a good profit. I ignored the advice about paper trading for a few months to get the hang of it, as I was sure I knew enough already to bother with all of that! I started using all of my bank for this because I knew that it was risk-free, so what could possibly go wrong?! I also decided that it was a waste of my time fussing around with 2 or 3% arbs, and that I would just wait for the big ones before pouncing (I was clever like that...). To be honest I am extremely glad that I was burnt when I was, because otherwise I would have wasted a lot more time, and invested a lot more money into something which I was not ready to do. My immaturity was highlighted immensely throughout this entirely process, and lucky I realised my errors soon after and took stock of myself. I ended up losing about £400 backing outcomes of a baseball game (something I had never done before, and have not done since). I did not and do not know the rules of baseball or how the betting works for it, and I am also not very familiar with the American betting format, so I really am not quite sure why I thought I could do it.

The collapse of the foolproof arbitrage adventure took me up to around July, and about the time that this blog started. The early stages of this blog saw me betting small amounts on the odd thing, slowly developing the idea of trading rather than gambling in my head, but I still didn't have any real target or limit and every now and then I would be known to blow a large portion of my bank on a stupid whim. It was at this point that I decided to purchase the ASP system. I'm not quite sure why I picked this one, particularly as it is such a pricey package compared to other, but it just happened to be the one I found and fell in love with. The sentence 'Every time you come upon a new tipster, software or trading guru you'll be ecstatic that this is the one that will make all the difference' from the article could not be more true when it came to the ASP, you only have to read my blog posts on it in August to see this. But on the other hand, I think it really helped me progress as a trader, even if it didn't turn out to be the most successful system for me. It taught me to handle liability, as well as learning the art of small profit gains which would build up over time. It also helped me to learn more about the Betfair market - how it all works and what I had been missing before.

October, I would say, was my stage 3 'eureka' moment. As I started a P+L on this blog, I also set myself a number of rules, targets and loss limits, as well as outlining a specific betting bank. I began to take charge of my betting and I found that it evolved quite naturally into trading, with a much more disciplined approach being the key. Before I was wanting to make hundreds in one go, but now I realised that that was highly unrealistic in the long run, and that a slowly slowly approach would be much more profitable. Over the past couple of months I have had excellent moments, as well as very poor moments, but I am proud that I have been able to exercise a large amount of control over everything; my emotions, my winnings/losses and my bank. I am still trialling systems and trying to find the thing which is right for me, so in a way I guess I still have elements of stage 2, but I have a larger understanding and maturity than I did before. When I look back to this time last year, or even this time 2 years ago (I have only been old enough to gamble for 2 years), I find my ignorance and immaturity laughable. At the same time however, I recognise that what has happened is a natural progression to where I am now, and that no one can automatically become a profitable trader overnight; it takes time and hard work. I'm not really sure how quickly I have progressed in terms of other traders, to me it seems like I have come an awful long way in a very short space of time, especially this year, but maybe this has happened with everyone?

I still have a long way to go before I reach stages 4 and 5 I feel, but if I continue with the same amount of ambition and discipline I should be able to progress to a good level over the next few years (hopefully). This year has certainly been a rollercoaster with many ups and downs and I am under no illusion that I am at a loss for the entire calender year. If the last three months are anything to go by though, the future looks pretty bright.


I would like to thank everyone who has helped me throughout the year, particularly the people who gave me support and advice through the low points. I would also like to thank you all for reading this blog, I never imagined (though I did hope) that I would be getting this many viewers per week, so I am very pleased that so many of you keep coming back to read my ramblings! 

I wish you all a very happy new year, let's hope that 2012 is the most profitable yet.

A barren spell

Not too much to report this week as I am still without laptop. Last night was pretty successful though, as I managed to win about £50 through a number of different methods. I won a few quid on Chelsea to win in play - I was always confident they would in the end, and the red card just sped things up. In addition to this I had £20 on both teams to score at 1.62 so decent profit from that also. Lastly I won around £30 thanks to the guys at Bonus Bagging and the offer from bet365. They showed me a way to ensure the refund offer ensured profit so I made sure took full advantage of that.

Not much else to report on really, though I have been having a few thoughts about next season already. At the beginning of this season I said that I would like to trade the outright premier league winner market throughout the year, but that hasn't really materialised as I'd need quite a lot of capital and would have to not mind it being tied up for a while. Had I been trading however, I reckon I could have a decent amount of green on the top 3 teams by now due to the topsy turvy nature of this league. It has amazed me today to see how differently people are viewing the title race following Chelsea's win last night. To me it seemed highly unlikely that city would go unbeaten all year, and it is also the case that everyone has a bad patch, no matter how well they appear to be doing. After just 4 games united were 1.8 to win the league (now 3.4), and city were 1.7 going into last night (now 1.88). I am seriously considering my trading for next year to be solely focussed around the long game. Obviously the down side of this is that I won't get a payout until May, but as long as that doesn't bother me then it could be a good moneymaker. I shall think about it a bit more over the year, it'll probably depend how much I make with my regular weekly trading.

Anyway bloggers, no other news for now, time for some Christmas shopping. Good luck with anything you do or try.

Technology meltdown

Just a short post to say that I will probably be out of action for a little while, as my laptop had decided to break, despite being less than a year old. At the moment I'm desperately trying to get it fixed, but until that happens I will be neither blogging or trading. This also means a temporary suspension of the soccer betting hq trial, so sorry for any inconveniences.
Last week I had a successful weekend after a poor midweek (often the case) and I managed to recoup my losses and just about break even. I was pretty pleased with the trading as I found myself being very protective over my bank, and was at times furious to lose as little as £2, which was precisely what I wanted. Sometimes I think it is easy to lose the value of money when it is in your betfair account, so it is good to remind myself from time to time.

This week I have only had two trades as I've been using my phone and that can be quite difficult. Both trades were on the snooker and both were losses totalling about three quid, so not too bad. I also have a small amount on Judd trump to win it at 13s, so hopefully he will progress today and I can trade out. Although I normally say stick to football, snooker is probably the sport I know 2nd most about, so I will allow myself to trade it. From the small amount I've done this week I've noticed there could be a huge chance of large profits if it had a larger liquidity, so it is really frustrating it doesn't. Anyway, come on Judd.

Hopefully the laptop will be fixed soon and ill be back before you know it. Good luck with this weekends trading.

Here's to the freakin' weekend..

This week has been a bit quiet on the trading front as there weren't too many stand-out opportunities in my mind. Monday started off with a small loss in the Charlton game, but Tuesday was successful as my discipline was good and helped me to make really small sums at a time. Keeping stakes low in order to take little profits is exactly what I am looking to do at the moment, as it will certainly help me to keep my discipline when I return to bigger sums. Wednesday went the other way as my stake was a bit too large and the bet ended up being a loss, and it was not helped by my stop-loss method which was well too late in the game. I incurred a loss of £12 that night. Total for the week so far is -£13.75, though I have a £5.37 green resting on Martin O'Neill, so if he would just confirm the appointment that would be handy.

In addition to this my £2-£1m challenge (details can be seen here http://bet19.blogspot.com/2011/11/few-things-to-ponder.html) began in poor fashion and fell at the first hurdle first time around. I had a fourfold on over 1.5 goals but it only managed 3/4, Arsenal-City being the let-downs. I will try another go at it next week.

I have also been thinking about another experiment based around something which has always been a keen subject of mine: the draw. Those of you who are familiar with Pete Nordsted might have seen his blog on Goal.com last year, where he picked three draws out each week with the idea that only one needed to come in to cover stakes (and make a tiny profit). I followed this method for a while and it was certainly something which caught my eye, being particularly effective as the bookies rarely know how to price up the draw. I used to place £10 singles on each of his picks, along with a £1 treble on all three, and I think the treble came in about 3 times over the season, at odds of around 35/1. This week I have decided that I will run a small experiment, where I will back three draws in a treble each weekend for £1 only. Should a treble come in, I would then take the profit (probably around £30) and back 30 different draw trebles, in the hope of hitting two at least. Should this be successful, I would continue in the same fashion and back 60 trebles, etc etc. Should it be unsuccessful, I would start again. In addition to this I might also do a £1 trixie on three draw selections, but I'm still to decide on that. If you wish to follow my progress with this I will post my draw tips each week and let you know how I get on. This week my three draws are: Blackburn vs Swansea, Blackpool vs Reading and Cardiff vs Birmingham.

Also, days 11,12 and 13 of the Soccer Betting HQ review are now up and can be found here: http://laytheodds.com/tag/soccer-betting-hq/ And for those of you who are in the mood to read today, have a look at my other blog post concerning David De Gea: http://goalnineteen.blogspot.com/

Good luck for the weekend everyone.

Christmas Strains

One of the benefits of being a student trader is the large sum of capital which arrives in my bank at the beginning of each term. In October, I invested a small portion of it into my Betfair account and have used it to trade with since. As this has been my first 8 weeks or so at proper trading, and by that I mean trading with rules, strategies and proper targets, I am pleased that I have (with the small exception of last week) kept my discipline and not blown my entire bank. I can't remember whether I said before but if I was to blow my entire bank I wouldn't be able to start again (for financial reasons), so it is likely that my trading would come to a complete halt for a significant amount of time. In this time I have won myself over £400 in 6 weeks, an average of over £70 per week, which is pleasing given my £50 starting weekly target. Last week I had my first losing week, but given the previous week's profits it has not hurt me too much, as long as I draw from my mistakes to prevent such losses again I should be alright. I have also had many ideas for strategies and systems in this time, and some of these I am researching and perfecting as we speak, so hopefully they will prosper in the future.

The negative side to being a student however, is that it isn't strictly real life. Some weeks I will be more busy than others, I travel frequently to see friends/family/girlfriend and because of this I cannot always trade regularly. Due to the fact that I have no other form of income other than trading, money does tend to get tight towards the end of term (i.e. now). Not only this, but I have a very large family as well as a girlfriend and Christmas is definitely going to be a pricey one this year! Due to this, I have decided to temporarily downgrade the scale of my betting, as I am not in the business of betting my bottom dollar. I have withdrawn all my of Betfair bank but for £50, which I shall continue to trade with over the Christmas period. My hope is that I will preserve and build this £50 up so that come January, when I will return the money back to my betting bank, I will not need to invest as much. On top of this, I will be trying to win very small amounts with this money, so it will help me to re-establish the importance of small and gradual accumulation. If anyone thinks that I have copped out in any way, I am sorry but I genuinely am just skint! And I'm sure any of you would agree that your betting bank size should never be 100% of your actual bank size (which is almost was!)

Tonight I won't be doing anything, there isn't much on and I would just like to enjoy the Charlton-Huddersfield game to be honest. It's too tight to call for me and I am always wary of teams on long unbeaten streaks as it is too easy to get caught up in the hype of 'they will never lose'. I will have a look at the tasty Carling Cup ties tomorrow though. Why sky have scheduled Chelsea-Liverpool and Arsenal-City on at the same time is beyond me, a shame from a viewing perspective.

Lastly, I would just like to join the masses in sending my condolences to Gary Speed's family. I've always admired him as a player and manager and always thought he was one of football's good guys. Like anyone else, I really saw no clue that he was in anyway troubled which makes it sadder the thought that he was suffering in peace, whilst feeling as if he had to put on a brave face in public. It just goes to show how pathetic it is that we scrutinise and judge all of the players and others in the public eye, but really we know so little about their lives. It truly does make our everyday 'sufferings' (cold weather, work due in, a £100 loss) seem entirely pointless. R.I.P. Mr Speed.

Good day.

A few things to ponder

I've been doing a spot of reading this week and have stumbled across a couple of interesting things. Firstly, I came across a £2 to £1million challenge blog (http://quizknight.typepad.com/bettingmillionaire/). I'm not normally that interested in this kind of thing but this one took my fancy, mainly due to the appealing betting plan (http://quizknight.typepad.com/bettingmillionaire/progress-table.html) - nothing too complex but you know how it goes; it looks like a piece of piss when it is set out in 19 easy steps. So I think I'm going to give it a whirl, see how it goes. It's very similar to the 86p challenge I did a while back and I enjoyed that immensely, so this one should be a bit of fun too. It's (horrendously) unlikely that I will succeed but I will only begin a new go at it once a week, meaning a maximum loss of £2 per week. Saying that though, I'm not in the business of chucking my money away, so I will be cheating (is it even cheating?) somewhat. I will look at trading my selections in order to be a bit safer, and I will also maybe go below the evens boundary, though I'll try and stick arouunndd the evens mark. I'll post my selections weekly before the games if I can so you know I'm not cheating, not that I would anyway; claiming to be a millionaire when I'm not would be not only sad but extremely depressing.

Secondly in my findings, I discovered an interesting idea on Sports Trading Life called 'The Mug' (http://sportstradinglife.com/2011/11/the-mugs-premier-league-tips-19th-november-2011/), some of you may have seen this before. Bascially what the guy is doing is betting on who he thinks will win every week, as well as which side of the 2.5 goal line it will be, in order to see how effective it is. In this case, however, he is hoping that the selections over time will produce negative returns, so that he can just lay the games he picks. I've always thought how often the market is wrong, and in future I might start doing a similar thing of just laying the market's opinion on certain games.

Lastly, a shameless plug for myself as I have restarted my old blog (http://goalnineteen.blogspot.com/). I'm going to try and update it at least once a week with general footi related stuff so give it a look, tell your friends yada yada yadaaaa. Any link exchanges will be appreciated to get the blog up and running.

This week's trading has been a bit of a nightmare and as a result I have temporarily suspended myself from it. Monday kicked it off as I traded the Spurs game and made a loss of about £28. Tuesday was the killer though, as I took my total loss for the week up to £98.43 - my worst ever, and my first losing week since I began. This all came about because I made a number of fundamental errors and chose to disobey my rules. Firstly, I bet on my team - Man United - and did so whilst watching them, two awful errors and all three of my trades on the game were losing ones. I made a number of losses on some other Champions League games too and I was betting far more than my usual amounts, hence the bigger losses. I'm not really sure what caused this loss of discipline but I think it was mainly due to my desperation for Tuesday to be a big night profitability wise. I will take the rest of the week off and re-evaluate my losses to try and prevent a repeat occurrence. The P+L sheet shows a £46 loss on the winner of Group A also, but this was from a long time ago but was only settled on Tuesday. I took a punt on City to win it before the competition started but they have strangely failed to impress in Europe. I'll let them off though as I still have a £300 green all-round on the Best of the Rest market thanks to them. Good luck to you all, hope you have a good weekend.

Goals Galore

Trading wise, this week has been an absolute disaster. Due to a huge and well-timed stroke of luck, however, I have more than scraped through. I'll talk about that in a bit but first we shall start with the trading:

The ASP system
This week has been the worst I have ever had when using the system. The total loss from this week is £86.20, leaving me with only £34.20 profit after using it on 59 games - an average of £0.58 per match. As I said last time, I made a huge mistake in the week which led to a 70-odd pound loss, and under normal circumstances the loss would only have been around £20, so this should be taken into account. But even so, the week has seen 13 losses and 13 profits, certainly the worst ratio since I started, and a lot of the losses have been big ones too. My match selection could be queried, I think maybe I got too cocky with the system and looked to take on tougher games and it has come around to bite me in the ass. I think what must be realised here is that it isn't really possible to try and achieve big profits in individual games, and that making an average of £3 or £4 per game is the best you can hope for. Because of this, I am beginning to question whether it is worth the large amount of time and care it consumes for each game.

Total Football Trading
Not a lot to say about the Paper Chaser this week, it was a bit of a non-event. Several games were chosen and they went different ways to accumulate a loss of -£0.87. Nothing else really to talk about on this one.

My own trading
This is a bit of a vague category (it is listed as 'other' on my P+L), but it mainly means things like laying the draw, trading goal markets and trying other different things which I think of along the way. It also includes the odd punt every now and then, but that is quite rare these days (and I will mention punting below). Due to the decline in the fortunes of the ASP and the very consistent nature of my own trading over the weeks, I think I might choose for this category to take more of a leading role in my trading. This week, this category (partially) helped to save the day as it accumulated profits of £60.33 which would have achieved my weekly target on its own.

Punting 
I said last time that I had won a £50 free bet from Betfred for 'guessing' the attendance at Wembley on Tuesday. I thought about attempting to do matched betting with it, and I would have but for the fact that it had to be used on a Goals Galore coupon, which allows for a minimum of three selections. I'm sure there is a way which I could have done it to secure profit from every angle, but I couldn't think of one (not that I put too much thought into it) and decided to have a big punt for a change. I picked three games, 2 of which were 12.45 kick offs on Saturday, so that if they came in I could lay the third game. It has to be said that I picked a good weekend to be using Goals Galore as there were so many games in which both teams scored. In keeping with the flukiness of how the bet was acquired, the bet came in and I took a total of £160. Before the third game, I chose to lay both teams to score for £40, meaning a loss of £33.60 but a total profit of £126.40. Not bad.

Overall
This week hasn't been great for trading, nor has it been a great week in general, and my mood has been rather sour. Throughout, I haven't really felt like trading and this could well have effected how it went. I'm not one for believing in good luck or bad luck, or that the universe evens itself out over time, but I do believe you make your own luck, so perhaps with my mind not entirely focussed on trading I have made some mistakes that I normally wouldn't have. As well as this, the internationals didn't help me (or anyone really, who even likes them!?), neither did the flurry of goals in yesterday's matches. Today I felt much better and recorded a profit of £20. Maybe something for me to consider in the future. Had I not had the free bet, my total for this week would have been -£25.87, which is really not too bad considering how bad it seemed at times. As it went, my total for this week was a profit of £107.19, strange old life ey?

I hope you all had a good and profitable weekend.

Results for week 5: Total - £107.19 (TFT - -£0.87  ASP - -86.20, Other - +£194.26)

0-0s, Mistakes and Goal Fests

What an odd couple of days I have had. Seeing as this week is painfully slow football-wise, I thought I would take advantage of Tuesday as it was the one day this midweek which had a good number of matches. I now kind of wish I hadn't. I say kind of, because although it turned out pretty crap, I have learnt a few things along the way which will help me in the future.

The day began pretty slowly, I was using the ASP on a few early afternoon games, mainly U21 qualifying and Asian World Cup, and the games were really struggling to find goals. It wasn't too much to worry about though, I made a few small losses but managed to win a bit back before the evening games. The main body blow though was the game between Slovenia and USA where I managed to lose myself a whopping £72.50. Now users of the system may be wondering how I managed to lose such a sum, but the answer is quite simple: I am an idiot. The actual loss was acquired when using the system, but wasn't it's fault at all really, had I acted normally the loss would have been about £20 maximum. What should be said here however, is prior to this game I thought I had pulled off a worldy of a steal, but all that happened was I ended up with a big loss. Basically I was looking at the 'To Score' market in the England Sweden match, and there was money on Welbeck to be layed (shortly after he was announced withdrawn from the squad). I quickly snapped it up and it would have meant a profit of around £50 (eating up around £300 of my bank in lays), only to later read the rules and find that should any player not play, the bets will be void. Too late. I thought I had a comfort blanket of £50 and with this is mind, I decided to play a risky game in the USA game and gamble my liability in the hope of coming off with a profit. It didn't come off and I lost it all.

Evening came and I began to claw back the money I was down. I acted slightly more aggressively than I would normally have done, so in hindsight I should probably have quit for the day after the big loss. Thankfully the evening went okay and I managed to make some big profits. The biggest coup came in the Portugal-Bosnia game where I took £35.19 using the ASP, my biggest ever by a long way. Before the game I expected the game to be a tight cagey affair, with hardly any goals. It finished 6-2 so I was spot on... Luckily I was watching the match and could see that Portugal were in a blistering mood and was able to turn around what could have been a large loss into a large win.

To finish my odd 24 hours, I awoke to find I had won a £50 free bet with Betfred for having the closest estimate to the England-Sweden attendance. I don't mean to brag but I knew I would win this after I spent hours and hours researching the average attendances for England in friendlies against second-rate teams, then cross-referenced it with attendances when England played an experimental side... Or maybe I just took a guess and got very lucky.

I had tried a bit of Paper Chaser during the day on Tuesday, but it came to nothing really and I think I just about broke even. I also trialled a new system I created, though I'm sure it has been thought of before as it is a version of laying the draw. You'll see in my P+L I used it in the Montenegro-Czech match, hence the large losses and wins. It worked quite well this time, but I think a bit more research is due before I go bigger. In total then, my current P+L is -£18.19 which is easily salvageable with a good weekend. Have a good weekend everyone.

Bored of the ignorant punter

I'm currently on a train to Nottingham to see the other half, so I thought what a lovely idea it'd be to update the world on my thoughts. Often the most ramble-y of posts are caused by me travelling to or from somewhere, so don't expect much.
What I wanna chat about though, is something that I'm sure all traders can sympathise with - the ignorance of non traders. I live with 4 other lads at uni, and they all like a Saturday punt, normally on accumulators. Fair enough. No harm in spicing up a boring fixture list with a bit of gambling, I used to love that once upon a time. But what bugs me is their insistence of making their multiples a 500/1 shot and then being angry when it doesn't come in. 'Can we go to a different bookies because this one hates me', 'I only missed it by 2 goals', 'a potential win £30 is shit and boring' - some of the things frequently heard at around 5 o'clock on Saturday afternoon. The last one really gets me, as if you would say no thanks if someone offered you £30 in the street. On the other hand, on the very rare occasion that their bet comes in, you have to handle their smug ecstatic selves as they collect a wad of cash. This might sound all patronising and condescending but it isn't really, at the end of the day its their money and they can do what they want with it, I'd just like them to be less greedy so they would win more often.
It also helped me realise the true differences between trading and punting: traders expect to win long term whereas punters hope to win long term, or in some cases they know they won't, but enjoy it anyway. The thrill factor is also eliminated from trading, its more like a job (it is a job to some people of course) whereas punting is purely for excitement. I still get a buzz from trading, I love doing it, but its more of a buzz from making money than the thrill of winning a bet.
This all might sound pretty obvious and simple to many of you, but I just thought it was fairly interesting, and I do love a bit of pyschology. I'm sure many of you will also have shared my painful experiences of trying to explain sports trading to those who don't know about it, as well as talking to the most painful of beings who claim 'its just a posh word for gambling'. Everyone seems to know someone 'who was addicted to gambling and lost everything', which also doesn't help matters, especially if they get wind of the size of your betting bank. If gambling has a bad rep, its only because of these morons who are creating it. It must be a lonely world for a professional trader, I'm not sure if I could be one. Stupid really, because if you told people you were a stock broker they'd love it. Only one word to sum up these people, and it comes from the unlikely source of Joey Barton: #helmets

I did say this week that I wouldn't trade due to being away at the weekend, work, and the boring (and of course unnecessary) international break, but I couldn't help myself when I saw the 2.14 on Spain to beat England at the weekend. In hindsight, maybe I jumped on it too quickly, as I lumped £200 on before they released their squad, but thankfully it went alright as they announced a full squad. I topped up another £240 at 1.98 after the squad news and let it get down to around 1.92 before I traded out for around £30 profit on all outcomes. In addition to this, the work I had to do took less time than I thought it would, so I played with the ASP on Tuesday night. The co-creator of the ASP, John Duncan, has started a Twitter account this week where he posts all of the games he is going to use and this is extremelyyyyy handy. @profmagnets is his name and he's open to any questions or queries you might have, kind of like a live help feature, certainly an excellent addition to the extensive service. ANYWAY, I traded with the games he selected and made a tidy little profit of around £25 (haven't got the exact figures due to being on the train). Not bad at all. This will be the last bit of trading I do this week though, honestly this time.

So have a good weekend people and stay green.

Week 4 success

For the fourth week in a row my £50 weekly target has been reached. After my last post on Thursday night I had a loss of -£28.06, but a big Friday night coupled with a solid Saturday resulted in a win of £81.40, meaning my weekly total is £53.34. As this is the fourth week in a row that I have successfully achieved the target I set, I will stick to my initial plans and raise the weekly target to £60 per week, it will be interesting to see whether this makes it slightly harder or not.

So Friday kicked things off as I took on a few ASP games and tried out something new as well. The ASP games didn't affect much however, as I won £5.27, before losing £6.50 shortly after. I then tried something a bit new which worked as well as I could have hoped to be honest, due to the ridiculous amount of goals scored in the Dutch leagues. As there was a full bill of Dutch 2nd league games, I picked 6 of these out and laid the AUQ correct scoreline before the game, hoping for early goals. As it was an experiment I only laid for stakes of £5, but after twenty minutes I was already out of three matches with a good profit. The amount of goals scored were pretty ridiculous and even I was shocked at how well it worked. By the end of the half I was out of all the trades, taking two £1 losses but securing a £14.81 profit in total. Whilst it worked very well, I'm not sure if I will be doing it again however, as it surely can't happen every week.

Today I took on a number of games and I am now beginning to use slightly bigger stakes with the ASP system, in order to maximise profit. After six successful games I won a total of £38.04, not without a bit of worry though! In the two Championship games I used, both of the correct score markets collapsed, despite having more than the required liquidity, and I had quite a lot of liability left in the pot. If either of the games had finished with an AUQ scoreline I would have lost £40, so I had a very nervous ten minutes as the scorelines were 3-0 and 3-1! Luckily they stayed like that. In addition to these games I took a further £28.55 by laying the over 3.5 and 4.5 goals market in the United-Sunderland game, laying the draw in the Newcastle game and backing the overs in the QPR-City game. Over on Paddypower I tried a couple of trixies on the anytime goalscorer market (Van Persie, Ba, Van Der Vaart - Unsettled), and the over 3.5 goals market (Wimbledon/Barnet, Villa/Norwich, Newcastle/Everton) which lost a measly £2. To cover these two I also had a successful over 1.5 treble, which left me with a loss of 23p if Van Der Vaart doesn't score tomorrow.

Overall another superb week and I'm very happy with how things have gone since I began my challenge. I knew that I had the ability to do it consistently but I did think that my discipline would let me down at times, but so far I can only think of one occasion (when I bet on the X factor). Due to a build up of work at uni and the fact I am going away next weekend, I will be taking a week off before moving onto my new target of £60.  My betting bank is now on £440 and the rest of the weeks profits were withdrawn.

Good luck to you all this weekend and in this coming week.

Results for week 4: Total - £53.34 (TFT - -£4.75  ASP - +£16.73, Other - +£41.96)

P.S. I know that Mainz was Friday but I forgot to put it down so I have only just done so.

The ASP System

The ASP system is something which I have been covering for a while now, and as my review of it has been pretty patchy, I thought I would set the record straight. As it happens, during the midweek I have used it on a number of games and it has thrown up some completely new things to say about it, such is the nature of this system. I have read a lot of reviews on it and they have all been mixed, some people love it, others hate it and the rest don't really understand it. The best review which I have been following is this: http://laytheodds.com/tag/assured-soccer-profits/ where the reviewer Richard outlines how the system is more of a core strategy, and each individual should adapt it and change it how they please. This is probably the most accurate description of it I can find, as this is exactly what I have done, by adding in a few techniques of my own, whilst ignoring a couple of the instructions laid out in the manual. To begin with I did try to follow the manual word by word, but even the creator says that it is not necessary to do this, and it certainly didn't suit me to do so. Interestingly, despite finding a way of using the system which seems to provide a regular profit, the reviewer Richard does not really like the product personally, as it is a huge time drain for a very small return. This is something I can sympathise with as, not only does it usually take the full 90 minutes to complete the trade, but it also uses a huge proportion of your bank during this as you do not receive your liabilities back until the end of the game.
Up until this week, regular readers may have noticed the upsurge in ASP profits, particularly last weekend, as I went on a 19 game run with no losses. In this time I had been trying something different but it would leave me highly exposed if the game ended up with no goals, something which I experienced midweek, where things turned for the worst. With 2 games finishing 0-0 and one finishing 1-0 after a late goal I recorded some big losses, with the addition of another big loss from a game which threatened to see too many goals. The latter of these I could not do too much about, although I could have recorded a smaller loss had I remembered an extra thing I should have done (too many games without a loss was the cause of this memory slip), but the first few games gave me an idea which I think should help reduce deficits in the rare case of a goalless game.
I shall persevere with the system as I am determined it can work, particularly as it is perfect for someone like me who is just looking to make small but regular amounts. It can be frustrating at times, very frustrating, and I wouldn't be altogether surprised if I knocked it on the head one day, but that certainly wouldn't be without trying! It certainly has a good theory and the manual is very extensive so I would recommend it, but be warned it isn't for everyone!
As for this weeks trading, it has been another poor midweek but tonight's shift certainly helped matters slightly. I am currently sitting on -£28.06 and am slowly clawing it back as the weekend gets closer. The majority of this was caused by the ASP system, though the Paper chaser hasn't been bringing in great profits either. Tonight was a better night as my new strategy on the ASP took two large wins and a small loss. I will look towards the weekend as I did last week to recoup my losses and hopefully make a profit. Below is my P+L for this week's trading as well as my P+L sheet for the ASP results.

I hope everyone is well.

Topsy Turvy week

This week certainly started abysmally as I was left with a whopping (for my budget) £41 loss going into the weekend, meaning I would have to clear almost £100 in a couple of days if I was to reach my weekly target. No chance, I thought. Midweek was pretty bad due to bad fortune and a few mistakes on my part which shall hopefully not be happening again. I am confident that from now on if the pre match trading routine takes a turn for the worst, I will be able to reduce my liabilities to a manageable amount. The £17 loss from the punt was a bit of a killer also, but with punting it tends to be swings and roundabouts, precisely why I'm not that keen on it. And also on reflection maybe it was a bit of a desperation bet, so maybe I should have just waited for the weekend instead.
As the weekend came I decided I needed to pull out all of the stops to reduce the deficit and hopefully make a little money. As I said last time, Saturday went very well and I experienced no losing trades. Sunday followed suit and was even more profitable, as I only lost one trade all day. After I had won a certain amount of money I was determined to reach the weekly £50 target and I am proud to say I did, after a mixture of general trading and ASP trading took us happily over the line. The ASP I used successfully on four games, particularly pleasing was the last game where I recorded my highest ever profit using the system, £10.07, albeit using higher stakes. For the Spurs game I traded the overs markets as well as laying the draw. The one loss came when I layed the 3-1 scoreline towards the end of the match, before trading out around the 86th minute for a small loss.
This means in total my weekly profit is £53.23, meaning I have secured my weekly target for a 3rd week in a row. In accordance with my new rules, 80% (rounded - £40) has been withdrawn, and 20% (£10) has been added to the bank, which now stands at £430. Also, this weeks results from the SBHQ are now up, you can find them here: http://laytheodds.com/tag/soccer-betting-hq/.

I hope you all enjoyed a profitable weekend and I wish you good luck for the coming week.

Results for week 3: Total - £53.23 (TFT - -£23.06 ASP - +£43.62 Other - +£27.87 )

Golden day

Everything I touched today turned to gold and I did not lose one trade all day. Proceedings began in the early kick off with Chelsea and Arsenal where I traded the 3.5 goals market for a bit, but decided to get out quickly as the game was too open for my liking, this turned out to be quite wise in the end! The three O'clock kick offs continued very well as I used the ASP on three games of Norwich, Sunderland and Nottingham Forest, taking a profit in all three. They were all fairly straightforward, except the Nottingham Forest game which lacked the depth in the market, which was strange considering it had a lot of liquidity. Nevertheless I chose to back out of the market very early in the game to seal a profit on all but one extremely unlikely event. In addition to this I traded the unders markets in the Wigan-Fulham game, which was always destined to be a bore fest, as well as laying the draw in the Swansea-Bolton game and the Southampton-Middlesbrough game - neither disappointed. The only other action was my decision to lay Exeter at half time (2-1 up at Sheff Utd), a trade which would have eventually won, but I bottled it as the liquidity in the market wasn't good enough and I had a chance to get out at a good price and broke even.

In the late kick off between WBA and Liverpool I had a small scare with the ASP system as Liverpool took an early lead, but their flair soon petered out as per usual so I took a small profit. In my one speculation bet of the day further success ensued as I took a small amount from an over 1.5 treble. Overall I took a profit of £54.11 which is a fantastic sum given the awful midweek I had. This means that I am no longer at a loss and am even in profit of £12.34. I'm not sure how much trading I will get to do tomorrow as I have a bit of work to do at uni for Monday, but I will be trading a few games on the ASP system.

It was also a successful day for the SBHQ systems and I will be updating on Laytheodds soon. Below are the P+Ls for the day, you might notice a couple of half time score losses, but that was part of my ASP system, so as a whole they were all wins.

I received quite a few votes of confidence this week as I began to experience my first real down point of this blog, and I am very thankful to those who sent kind words. Good luck to everyone tomorrow and enjoy your weekend.

Tough weekend to come

I have had a miserable week so far and have left myself with a mountain to climb this weekend. In my last post I reported a £17.74 loss and the week hasn't picked up since. The paper chaser has continued to disappoint after it's very successful first week, and I'm not really sure what has caused the change in fortunes. It recorded a £6.96 loss on Wednesday, as well as a small £3.28 profit, and today it recorded a further £2.86 loss. Although the losses are fairly small still, it is frustrating because we saw last week how profitable it can be per trade when it goes in the right direction. The £6.96 loss was another mistake on my behalf, as I thought the kick off time was later than it actually was, so that is another lesson learnt. I may email the creator of TFT over the weekend to see if there is any advice he can give me regarding the paper chaser. I want to see if I am doing anything wrong or if I am just simply not catching the right games.
The real killer of the week though was an over 1.5 goals double on a couple of games midweek. You know things are going wrong when not one but both games let you down. This was one to forget but it meant a £17.49 loss. This means the total for the week is now a miserable -£41.77, leaving me with a big job for the weekend. I'll be trying to make back the deficit with a number of ASP games, trading various goal markets and a couple of speculation bets. I'm not sure how well I will fair but it will certainly test out my trading abilities. I'll also be continuing my review of SBHQ.

Good luck with your weekend trading everyone, I hope it's greener than green.

Locked out

The inevitable downturn in luck has finally struck after my decent run of form, and I have started this week with a fairly large loss. It all started on Sunday night where a mix between poor decisions and bad luck contributed towards a £15 loss. Despite Sunday technically being last 'trading week', I have decided to take the loss onto this weeks total, in order to try and win it back. Basically, I was watching the odds during the X Factor results show (please don't judge me) and I was noticing a movement in the markets and I tried to jump on it before it was too late. Before I knew it, the market had been suspended as the votes were in and I wasn't fortunate enough that the person I had money on was voted out, so I lost the full £15. Bad start, but it has taught me to only stick to markets I am familiar with - football, football and FOOTBALL.
Monday didn't improve matters however, with the 'Paper Chaser' producing it's first significant loss of £12.80. It could have been significantly less, probably around £4 or £5, but for a big mistake on my part. I had carelessly forgotten at what odds I had entered the market and would have traded out earlier but for the mistaken odds in my mind. Like the previous example however, I shan't be making the same mistake twice.
So as Tuesday came I was harbouring a £27.80 loss, meaning I'd have to significantly step it up in order to reach my weekly target. During the day the Paper Chaser took another loss, this time a much smaller £1.32 on the Southampton game, as the odds didn't go the way I had wanted. For the evening, I prepared a couple of speculation bets and lined up three ASP games as well as a few goals market trades from the League One and Two fixtures, only for Murphy's Law to stick it's nose in... About half an hour before the kick offs my house mates at uni and I decided to nip to the shop to get some provisions for the coming evening, as you do, only to soon realise that we had all forgotten our keys, as you also do (if you are retarded). To cut a long story short we ended up smashing a back window to get in, and I missed all the opportunities I had laid out to trade. As annoying as it was, especially as it was a goal filled evening, it happens and I found it more funny than annoying to be honest. I did manage to place and land both of my speculation bets though, an over 1.5 goals treble and a single on Arsenal to go over 2.5, which brought in a £8.98 to slightly reduce the losses. Below are the results for the last few days. You will notice a few half time score wins/losses, these were from the ASP games which I had been intending on using but didn't get round to trading. My weekly total so far is -£17.74. Things definitely need to pick up so I can pay the broken window bill...

On a slightly more cheerful note, I have been running this blog for around 4 months now and on Sunday, for the first time ever, I hit over 100 page views for the day. This may not sound like too many but the amount of viewers have been rapidly increasing over the last few weeks and I am very thankful to everyone who has read my blog. At the moment I thoroughly enjoy both trading and writing about it, and as long as people are willing to read it, I will continue to write, so please continue to spread the word! The amount of comments and emails I have received recently has also increased, and I am more than happy to reply to any queries or advice wanted, so please keep them coming. The next landmark is 2000 all time views and it is quickly approaching, so I will keep you posted! Happy trading everyone, enjoy your week.

Strange times

A rather bitter-sweet weekend overall after today's disaster at Old Trafford, but maybe the less said about that the better. On a trading front the week was sealed before the 3 o'clock kick offs, as I was able to take advantage of the Wolves-Swansea game which I was sure would produce goals. I placed a big bet friday night on the goals markets hoping that people would wake up and I could lay it off for a profit. It didn't happen and it actually went the other way, leaving me with a couple of losses adding up to around £10. I debated not trading out before the game, but leaving a bet of over £200 on would have broken my rules severely, so I took the loss and traded with smaller stakes. Whilst this may not seem like a big deal to a professional, I was pretty pleased with myself for resisting the huge temptation of continuing with the large stakes, as I could have potentially blown my bank. After taking the losses I started again with smaller stakes and managed to make a good profit from the goals market and from laying Swansea at low odds. I also traded it with the ASP system and it once again proved profitable, though it would have been a much bigger win had I not made a big mistake whilst trying to get used to the Geek's Toy software... my bad. I'm sure whoever took my 0-0 correct score bet when it was 1-0 Swansea was feeling very pleased indeed.

As I had already well exceeded my target of £50 by accumulating a total of £64.52 for the week, I took the rest of Saturday afternoon to watch the football and continue my trial of Soccer Betting HQ, results of which can be seen here: http://laytheodds.com/latest-review-posts/2011/10/22/soccer-betting-hq-day-5/. Today I also took part in no trading. I look forward to the coming week as I will look to continue the good run shown by the Total Football Trading package, and with my increased bank size guaranteed to help big in bigger profits, I believe it is feasible to reach my weekly target before the weekend.

Results for week 2: Total - £64.52 (TFT - £41.09, ASP - £3.53, Other £19.91) 

Situation facing the weekend

I have had an excellent week in the pre-match markets. The 'Paper Chaser' method from the Total Football Trading package has continued to bring in the goods, with three successful trades during midweek. The total accumulated from wednesday, thursday and today is £29.04 taking the weekly total to £47.44 already. If it continues to do so well in midweek I may be tempted to raise my weekly total more than the proposed £10 after 4 weeks, but I'll wait a couple more weeks before deciding this. Whilst I'm on the subject of changing my rules I have also decided to increase my bank to £420 and I will be withdrawing 80% of my weekly profits, not 90%, in order to get my bank up a bit.
Due to having almost reached my target, I will be using the ASP system on a couple of three o'clock kick offs tomorrow as well as trading the goals market in the Wolves-Swansea game at 12.45. I think that the market has slightly underestimated the goals potential in this match and I should be able to make a few quid off of it. Should I make a loss tomorrow I will think of a contingency plan for sunday but at the moment I am in a very comfortable position.
I will do a weekly round-up on sunday evening. Good luck with any weekend trading.

Pre match trading

After a good first week I will be looking to carry it on into the coming month (naturally) #genericbettingtalk. As I have mentioned before, I have always been interested in pre match trading, mainly because anything can happen during a game so it would appear to be a much safer form of betting. This weekend I got my hands on the Total Football Trading package which I have heard so many good things about recently. The package is quite expensive at $77, but for your money you get a large range of systems, both in play and pre game. I have only been able to read through one of the chapters so far as I have been pretty busy, but I am extremely impressed with what I have seen. Section one details three pre match techniques, entitled the 'paper chaser', 'day trader' and 'power hour', some of which more experienced traders may have heard of before as I believe they're reasonably well known, but its the first time I have read in detail about them. Out of the three, I'd say paper chaser seems to be the most effective and yesterday I used it on the Bilbao match, securing a 9 tick profit of £17. Whilst I had to stake a lot (£300) to achieve such an amount, I don't consider it breaking my staking rules as that amount is never really at stake. Discipline is quite important for this one, as it always is, because if the trade moves 4 or 5 ticks in the wrong direction, you need to be prepared to trade out for the loss - something I had to do today. Today was a far less successful day as I didn't really stick to the rules laid out by the handbook. I was so desperate to enter the market that I entered too late and just had to take the losses in the end, luckily they were only small though.
On top of yesterday's pre match win I had a small double on Inter Turku vs Haka to go over 1.5 goals and Malmo vs Syrianska to go under 3.5, which brought in a decent £6.36. This means after two days my weekly total is £18.40, leaving me well on my way towards my weekly target.
I have decided to take Bonus Bagging results out of my weekly total. Last week a large proportion of the £50 won was made through the Bonus Bagging service, and I don't think I can really include this in my trading profits. I will still update you on how much I win from it however, it will just be in a separate total from the rest. Today I cashed out a very nice £113, leaving my total profits from the service at £136.26.
Tonight I had no bets or trades on, so nothing to report apart from the small losses I achieved from the pre match trading (shown below). Sunday's results from the SBHQ can be seen here: http://laytheodds.com/latest-review-posts/2011/10/18/soccer-betting-hq-day-3/
As a completely unrelated side note, last night I went to see Steven Merchant (those of you thinking 'who?' should hang your heads in shame) on his stand up tour 'Hello Ladies' in Birmingham. I am only mentioning this as it was probably one of the funniest two hours of my life (and I have been to many stand up gigs) and I fully recommend it to anyone who can get a ticket.
On that note, goodnight and have a good midweek.

Successful Saturday

Today was an almost perfect day as everything came in for me. The main selection of the day Frankel and Gamba over 1.5 came in with ease, rewarding me with an easy £23.64 profit. The second smaller treble also came in winning me £3.51 profit, though after two results had come in and the third selection had a goal in its game already, I decided to lay over 1.5 goals (just to be sure) which took £0.85 off the total, but still took me over the £25 limit. Sticking to my rules, I didn't activate the back-up games I had planned and continue to bet, which was good as it allowed me a chance to have to test out the Soccer Betting HQ on the Premier League games. I'll update on laytheodds soon and you can see how it went following the link on the right.

I didn't get to withdraw as much from Bonus Bagging as I thought I would today as a lot of the bets take a few goes before I am allowed to withdraw it, but it will come. So today the only withdrawal was a £13.33 bet from Getwin. I have said this before but the system is so easy to use and I fully recommend it to anyone. Yesterday I was told that I have used up all the free bets which Mike supports, a fear I had when beginning the service, but he told me that it doesn't end here and that now I will move on to spread betting and casino bonuses. I'm not very familiar with spread betting but if it is as easy as everything else has been it should be no problem. Only thing is I apparently need about £500 to do it so it requires much more capital than normal.

Before today my weekly total was £29, so taking into account today's winnings I am now up to £55.30 for the week, meaning my involvement should stop for the week. Because of this I will not be doing any speculation betting tomorrow, and will probably stick to testing the SBHQ systems further.

Hope you all had a good Saturday and enjoyed Frankel's win.

Weekend ahead

Tomorrow I have an interesting day of betting with speculation being my main form of potential income. The United-Liverpool game is on early so any trading I do won't begin until the three o'clock kick offs as I can't watch United and trade at the same time, especially when playing Liverpool! My biggest bet of the day will be reserved for the unstoppable Frankel, mentioned before his last race, as he takes on the Queen Elizabeth II stakes at Ascot. Due to the unattractive odds of 1.35 I will be doubling him up with an early KO of 08.00 in the J-league between Nagoya and Gamba Osaka - to go over 1.5 goals. This will give me around £23 profit from my £40 stake. This is just under the £25 target for weekend days so I'll have another over 1.5 accumulator on of: C-Osaka vs Kofu (J League 05.00), Exeter vs Huddersfield (Eng Lge One 15.00) and Lillestrom vs Stabaek (Tipplegaen 17.00) at odds 1.7. I will have £5 on this, in order to win £3.51.

Obviously I am accounting for if these two bets are to be successful, but in the case that they aren't I have a couple of other games to use. I will use the ASP system to trade Evian TG and St Etienne at 18.00, as well as Catania vs Inter at 17.00 and possibly a few more yet, I am still researching those. As for the three o'clock kick offs I will probably leave them to trade with the Soccer Betting HQ instead for the first time over a weekend. You can keep updated on this by following my review on lay the odds. One last ditch money making attempt would be to trade the goal markets in the Ceara vs Flamengo match at 22.00. Should my double and treble come in, however, I will not use the ASP or the Brazilian match. Although it would seem like I have a lot to lose for tomorrow, I have a number of Bonus Bagging stakes to be returned so I should be in for a big day tomorrow regardless.

That's all for tonight. Have a good weekend everyone and be profitable.

A new review

There is not much to say today in terms of trading activity. Like I said before there isn't a great choice of games on this week so I haven't been up to much. I traded the Malmo-Hacken game to make a small £2.77 but not much else has been available and I don't want to force bets. What I have been doing however, is utilising the Bonus Bagging service. At present I have about 7 bets in the cyber world waiting to be settled so I can cash out, but with the lack of fixtures it's hard to match up bets quickly. So far I have cashed out £17.43 from one bet with a lot more to come.
In other news my review of Soccer Betting HQ is up and running and you can view it here: http://laytheodds.com/introduction/2011/10/13/soccer-betting-hq-introduction/ Any trading I do with it, whether it be profitable or not, I will not include in my weekly totals as it will probably break the rules I set out before and I will also be using a separate bank for this anyway. After the trial period I will decide whether or not to add it to my portfolio.
That's about it for now, can't wait for the weekend.
Good luck all.

11th October International dullness

Thankfully the international break is now over, though it has actually treated me pretty well today. The ASP system works a treat when the less interesting teams get together to see what they can do, which is normally nothing. I missed out big time when I got home too late to enter the Greece match, as it would have panned out perfectly for me, but as it happens it didn't matter too much. I used the Slovenia-Serbia and Bulgaria-Wales matches and was saved by a 45th minute goal in each game to turn decent profit of £9.97 and £4.54. It's good to savour these moments because I'm sure I'll be wishing for that last minute goal plenty of times when it won't come. Incidentally, I started a new P+L sheet from Sunday for the ASP as this is kind of a new start, and the old sheet was on -£1 anyway, so practically even.
Aside from this, I made a few quid here and there doing a bit of scalping, as well as some pre-match trading which I have mentioned before I am very interested in. I'm going to look into developing this as the season goes on. The Betfair P+L sheet below is distorted somewhat as it shows £66.10, this is because of the large wins on the Georgia and Poland games which were part of the matched betting from Bonus Bagging, so it isn't all profit. The actual profit amount for tonight is a more modest £16.80, but it is at least well over the £10 per night target for weekdays.
On the subject of Bonus Bagging, it has so far been going well though I am yet to lock in profit, due to the games being selected for me being ages away! Yesterday, due to a mistake from the owner on an outdated bet, I lost £8 (which will be subtracted from the weekly total) but I am sure I will make that back soon. The system itself could not be more straightforward, with 'Mike' laying everything out on a plate for you to do, and the only real ball-ache is registering with loads of new bookies - but for £10+ a pop, this really isn't much of a big deal. My only concern to date (apart from the out-of-date bet) is the obscurity of the bookmakers which are being thrown up, but I shall trust Mike's opinion that these are all secure and good enough.
That's it for now, my review on laytheodds.com should be up and running soon as I have had a look through the manual and have written the introduction to the system, which I can now reveal as being Soccer Betting HQ (http://www.soccerbettinghq.com/). I wasn't blown away by the manual but it does have some interesting techniques and I will look forward to reviewing them nevertheless.
From Monday 11th October my weekly total is £8.80. My overall total is £26.18. Can't see that I'll be doing much midweek trading with the non-existent fixture list available, but this weekend should bring good things. Have a good midweek all.

Zero to Hero

Just a little update for today as I began my trading for the year. Due to the lack of top-flight fixtures today I chose to use the ASP system only as I felt that it was best suited for a day like today. I traded three games and as you can see from the *all new* P&L watch in the top right hand corner, I made £17.38. Although my target for weekends is £25 per day, I decided to stop after this as I have been busy setting up my new review of another system - soon to begin - and also working with the Bonus Bagging guys. The limit for requesting bets on Bonus Bagging is three per day, so I have utilised that today but all the bonuses have been used on games on tuesday so I will wait until they payout before updating. I must say though that so far it seems like a brilliant and very profitable service, I look forward to using it further.
Although each ASP game today looks brilliant (by its standards) on the P&L sheet, this is far from how the story went. 2 of the games went like clockwork and locked me in a great profit, but the Albinoleffe-Livorno game was quite the opposite. The game finished 4-0 and after Livorno went 2 up inside 15 minutes I was beginning to worry. They saw out the half at the same score but it was necessary for me to keep going into the second half on this one. After an early second half 3rd goal for Livorno and a large loss on the cards for myself, I was preparing to write a scathing review of the system and drop it completely. Due to fortunate circumstances, however, and shrewd moves from myself, I was able to grab the 2.34 price on Any Unquoted on the 55th minute (?!?!?!?! crazy odds I thought) and luckily saw a goal go in a minute after, putting me firmly in the green. This hasn't made me completely forgive the system though, I still think that it can be very time consuming for little amounts, and I don't really like the amounts risked per game, but I will continue to use it wherever I see fit.

That's all for now though, hopefully this week will be greener than grass.

Bonus Bagging

This one is plain and simple: the creator helps you bag the bonuses. It is very similar to matched betting, it even is matched betting in some cases, as well as finding casino bonuses and others. Now you may ask why this sounds appealing to buy when anyone can do matched betting for free? Well basically, it is almost effortless for those of us with not enough time. It comes at a very cheap £27 (plus an extortionate £5.40 VAT charge) and offers almost constant support to its subscribers. The creator Mike claims to be able to find you unlimited amounts of new bookmaker offers, reloads and bonuses, no matter how many bookmakers accounts you already hold (which in my case is quite a lot). I am thoroughly intrigued in this system if it does what it says it can do. Further analysis will follow and I will keep you updated on how this one works out.
As for the other system I will be reviewing, I had received the manual I just need to read it and start using it before I can update, but I'll keep you posted.
Stay Green.

A new start

At long long last I am up and ready to go with my plans for this season and I cannot wait. Today I will just run through what I have in store and preview a couple of the things, I haven't yet begun any proper trading due to the internationzzzzzzzzzzzzzal break.

Right, so to start things off I have my rules for general trading. My starting bank is going to be £300 and my profit target is going to be £50 profit per week. 10% of which I will add to my betting bank, with the remaining 90% being withdrawn. £50 will be my starting target and if I am successful 4 weeks in a row, I will then increase my target by £10. If I continually make consistent profits I might look into raising my target to larger amounts, but let's not get ahead of ourselves too quickly now! The key to this is patience and discipline, and both are going to be extremely difficult to control. In an attempt to curb any temptations or bad habits, I have written out a number of guidelines to help me through. The idea is that being relatively young (20) time is on my side and if I can kick the bad habits short term I can profit big time long term. So here goes:

When trading generally (i.e. not using systems)...

• Champions League betting is prohibited due to volatility, lack of stats and form, and vast differences between domestic and European form. Domestic cups are also excluded.
• As stakes will be low, do not be tempted to bet on stupid things, or attempt to chase losses.
• Maximum loss per day is £50, if this is reached betting for the day is over. Also means max bet is £50.
• A list of teams to stay away from will be compiled over time. Already on list: Arsenal, Wigan, Swansea, Norwich, QPR, Inter Milan, Barcelona and Real Madrid.
• With weekly target at £50, the daily target for weekdays is £10 and £25 on Sat/Sun. If this amount is reached betting for that day should end. This is to prevent getting carried away.
• If any of these rules are broken, even if it results in a winning trade, I am to take a day off from betting completely. It is important to be extremely strict.

I will look to make the targets by using a number of trading methods. I will be using my own methods, along with general betting, as well as a number of purchased systems. I will continue my review of the ASP system, and hopefully will be able to give it a proper go this time. In addition to this I will be reviewing another system on an external site, most likely on laytheodds.com. I have just registered to be a reviewer and they are setting me up a system as we speak, so when it is in motion over there I will provide links to my report. For those of you who prefer standard straightforward tipping, I will be providing a number of tips each week also on an external site called bettingexpert.com. Due to the stipulations in the terms and connies I am *annoyingly* not allowed to replicate my tips on my blog, but, again, I will provide a link to my tips each week. You can view my profile here: http://www.bettingexpert.com/users/Betnineteen I have been tipping for a short while and started poorly but I am now back in form. As a side note, I highly recommend this site to anyone involved in tipping. It adds a bit of interest to be in monthly competitions against other tipsters, and you can win prizes if you are any good. It also forces you to have a lot of basis and analysis for your bets as there is a minimum limit of 100 words. (Though to be fair I think that anyone can make any bet sound appealing by manipulating the right statistics, but that is another issue!) 

Lastly, I have purchased the popular service Bonus Bagging, something which I have read an awful lot of good things about. I will keep you updated on how this goes also, as well as producing daily and weekly P+Ls and trying to update you with as many bets as I can handle. Some days you might have to excuse me as I may have work on meaning I cannot update, but I shall endeavour to be as regular as possible. I may also add Total Football Trading to my portfolio at some point, as I have heard it covers pre-match betting, something I am very interested in, but I will see how this lot goes before I jump into that.

Furthermore, I will be attempting to operate in a number of long term markets over the season, primarily the Premier League Winners market. The league is such a roller coaster and odds of United at 1.8 to win the league are preposterous for this time of year. My aim is to have United, Chelsea and City in green of around £1000 by the end of the season. Currently I am at -£96 United, +£89 City, +153 Chelsea, +£64 Arsenal, -£32 everyone else. The price of 1.26 on Bayern Munich in the Bundesliga also looks outrageous. Admittedly they look a class ahead at this moment in time, but I cannot see how they will not hit a patch of bad form. They did draw 0-0 at the weekend... who knows.

Anyway though, I think that may well be everything for now. I will be doing more detailed reviews of Bonus Bagging and the review I get for laytheodds in the future, but this has just been an intro to my plans. Not sure if I will be trading much over the next few days due to the volatility in the international market with many teams already qualified. I will be beginning to use Bonus Bagging though so I will keep you updated.

Til then though, good luck with anything you're up to. And good luck me too.

Psychology of sport

I have always been interested in psychology and would have loved to do it at degree level. As it went, my school did not offer it at A level standard and not fancying diving into it at university blindly, I opted for history instead. C'est la vie. Even so, it has always been a topic which has attracted me, especially when it comes to sport. I have always thought that, if one was to discover certain psychological trends on the pitch (rather than in the markets) then they could create a betting system surrounding it. This may seem a bit wishy-washy at present - probably because I have nothing to back it up with yet, and I am sitting on a train rambling my thoughts - but I intend to delve into my thesis over the year. Doubtless someone has already researched such ideas, and if they have I'd love to hear from them, anything at all.
I have been considering this in my head for years really, but it was pushed to the front of my brain after djokovic came from 2 down to beat Fed in the US open semi final. What I would like to investigate is; how often is it that a player gets a set back after being 2-0 down and goes on to win driven by their adrenaline? And does it happen enough to warrant betting on it?
Other things I would like to look into: the mentality of the underdog, particularly in cups, seeing how many times they avoid defeat at long odds, and how many times they win after taking the lead; the difference between the performances of smaller teams vs bigger teams in comparison to when they play other small teams; the impact of the crowd/being at home; how often strikers go on runs of form after scoring a goal; football results midweek. The latter is something which has been pressing on my mind for some time now, as I have restricted myself from betting match odds in the week due to the volatility in matches. Now this *may* well be something I have created in my mind and actually holds no weight, but I think that evening kick offs might be more volatile than the standard 3 o'clocks. Monday saw sunderland lose again, having lost most (can't remember the actual stat) of their Monday matches over the last few years. Normally stats like this I would dismiss, for instance we do not know who they played in these games, whether they were home or away, whether Roy keane was their manager (cos he was awful), but at the same time I can't help wonder if it is a pattern with true meaning. I remember (this is the last anecdote I promise) a few years back when Old 'Arry was gaffer at pompey and they faced united at old trafford in the FA cup (the year they went on to win it). 'Arry said in the pre match interview that he was offered a KO time and he picked 12.45 to try and ruffle the United feathers, not wanting to have a 5.15 as the evening atmosphere at OT would be too intimidating. United battered them but were destined not to win it seems with carrick missing a sitter and Rio having to go in goal after 2 keepers had been injured and sent off. Pompey won one nil with a pen. I will certainly be looking at how different teams perform at different times and I will keep you all posted on anything I discover.
Moving on, I still have no internet at my new uni accommodation so I cannot begin the ventures outlined in previous posts, but it should be up and running by Monday with any luck. All my plans are now pretty much sorted and I am raring to go. Enjoy your weekend and watch this space.