A Quiet Return

Back on the laptop after my break, but struggled to find much of interest, with only the remnants of the tennis fixture list and one U21 game available by the time I arrived home this evening. I backed South Africa in the 20/20 at 1.1 to pick up a few quid, but then threw away my profit experimenting with a couple of horse racing lays. I’m not exactly back in the zone yet!

I’m gutted I didn’t back Rocket Rob in the 9.00 at Yarmouth, though I did lay The Scorching Wind, but then my next lay (Valbuena) won in the 9.15 at Newton Abbot. I may as well have sent a tenner to charity. I’ll try to arrive home earlier tomorrow and take things a little more seriously.

I’ll admit to being poor at record-keeping. I tend to have an idea in my head of what is working for me, and then review my P&L on a weekly or monthly basis to confirm whether my ideas match reality. The time spent this evening checking my current position turned up a major surprise. Since switching to ‘small-stakes’ part-time betting in March, I have placed 32 bets on cricket, and have a 32-0 record! I’ve made more on cricket than soccer. HTF did that happen?
Cricket has been a disaster for me over the past few years. So what’s changed? A lot of my early bets were done when chasing losses – I think the 2 team win or lose scenario of the sport made it an easy area to throw money at when in the ‘panic recovery mode’ most inexperienced gamblers go through on a regular basis. My results also mirrored the usual results of a panic recovery mentality.

My recent attempts have tended to be peripheral to my main soccer and tennis trades, but done when opportunities present themselves – my old ‘wait for the opportunities to come to you’ mantra. Most are small wagers where a loss would just result in a shrug of the shoulders, and the results show a bizarre change of fortune. I’m happy to let it remain peripheral for the time being.

During the drive up the A34 and M40 yesterday, I listened to the England v West Indies game on 5 live. I thought Paul Collingwood was very reserved in his analysis of the game, suggesting that the better side won. The overall impression I gained was that the Duckworth-Lewis system doesn’t seem to work well in such short contests. The West Indians were struggling badly during their innings, then hit two sixes in successive balls, and the remainder of the target was a cake-walk. For a couple of hits to make such a difference seems wrong. If 80 from 9 overs is to be seen as equal to 161 in 20, I would have thought the chasing team should have only had 7 wickets available. Just a thought.