A Head Scratching Moment

Little for me to get too excited about on the tennis front upon my return from Scotland, so I decided to concentrate this week on my horse racing experiment. I’m not really a P&L flasher, but in this case I think I need to put my thoughts into context.

My strategy remains as per my post from a couple of weeks ago (here). Result - £182 profit in 4 evenings, generally starting around 6.30pm. I’d put that at about £16 per hour. Perplexing – I spent a long period losing money to the bookies whilst learning the nuances of tennis and soccer betting, the two sports I have always been interested in. Yet a fortnight into my racing experiment and I’ve made profits I’d be happy with from evening soccer betting during the winter. It’s way too early to know whether I’m just on a good run, but I’ll certainly be continuing with the strategy, particularly on evenings when soccer and tennis opportunities are sparse. I managed to go through the evening card unscathed on both Wednesday and Thursday – easy! I’m sure a fall is just around the corner.

My tennis result is not as bad as my Betfair P&L suggests – I had a £50 Bet365 bonus to use, so took a £44 hit on Betfair as an offset.

I did get sucked into a couple of soccer bets – there were a few mismatches in the European Champions League and Europa League qualifiers.

I’m not going to get too downbeat about a loss on a Rugby League game tonight – St Helens surprisingly going down at home to Wakefield. Whilst I’ve chastised myself in the past over bets on ‘secondary sports’ which have cost me money, my record over the past couple of months with occasional sundry punts is pretty good. You can’t win ‘em all. I did look for an opportunity to offset my potential loss as the game came to a climax, but the odds were swinging around wildly and, with no TV pictures, I hadn’t a clue what was going on. I now know that Saints missed a last kick penalty chance to tie ( I’d got zero on the tie ). Doh.

Interesting times ahead – I know it’s not effective to switch between tennis, soccer and racing during an evening session. My P&L in the coming days will determine where I concentrate my efforts.

I had a near calamity yesterday evening – my laptop expired shortly after racing had finished. As I rely on the machine for both work and leisure, an early morning trip to PC World was necessary. Fortunately, a quick clean and re-installation of the battery did the trick, I’m told it was probably a simple static electricity problem. It did make me seek out the Betfair Mobile installation for the I-phone. I’m fairly impressed. It’s a little unwieldy to use with multiple web pages open, but it’s certainly an extra tool to use – I can’t always resist a punt on tennis during working hours, and as a route to green up (or red up) it may be handy.