Saturday 21 March 2009

Guide rather than target

I am away for the weekend, with a Golden Wedding anniversary celebration dinner tonight in Yorkshire, so I'll leave Betfair alone until Monday evening.

I updated my '£2k challenge spreadsheet' to take out any target for the weekend. I'm currently £24 ahead of my projection, and have a new £2k date of 4th May.

These facts assume I've been looking at the right column, unlike John Dyson, the West Indies coach during yesterday's West Indies / England game (check out Cricinfo.com if you've missed the story).

Anyway, there have been numerous blog postings recently regarding the positives and negatives of setting targets, particularly since Alex's recent challenge demise at 'bettingblog.org'. I used a weekly target when betting full-time, and I often felt a pressure to over-bet, particularly following losses. There can develop a mindset that it is essential to recover losses quickly to maintain the target position. This obviously leads to increased risk.

I believe the answer is to treat any calculation only as a guide to monitor your successes and failures, and learn to accept that one bad day will take a number of days to recover, particularly if you tend to bet odds-on as I do. With my current challenge, I have so far managed to do this, despite a couple of bad days. If I can confirm to myself that a 23% per week 'guide' is feasible with part time betting, then a £2k bank should give me around a £1,000 per month income top-up, even allowing for a few cock-ups.

Whilst this may not be as exciting as an annual £100k challenge, and is a long way from Peter Webb/Adam Heathcote territory, I'm perfectly happy to enjoy my betting and also make a decent profit. And I'm sure a more relaxed mindset will help if I'm ever forced down the 'full-time' route again.

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