Saturday 31 October 2009

The Smell Of Burning Fingers

Any doubts I may have had about avoiding the WTA Championships in Doha were set aside by last night’s game between Victoria Azarenka and ‘second reserve’ Agnieszka Radwanska. Azarenka was favourite, having looked the form player during the week to date. She led 6-4, 4-1 and 5-2 ( trading at 1.01 ) before a classic WTA ‘bottle’, losing five successive games to lose the second set 5-7, including two successive double faults at 5-6 40-40. She then developed the regularly seen ‘post-crumble’ injury, and eventually packed it in at 1-4 third set with cramping.

I’ve come to accept that I’m not a natural tennis trader, I hate the flip-flop of odds, and I’m more comfortable with the ATP, where there is less of this ridiculous blowing up under pressure. As I’ve commented on before, I believe the only way to success with women’s tennis is by laying heavy favourites in-play. And I’m not good at that, so I’ll continue to avoid around half the players on the tour, simply because I don’t trust them to keep their head together under pressure.

Another good reason for keeping big money in your pocket at this time of year is injuries. We’ve already had two back-up players competing in Doha, some wag on the Betfair forum suggested they’d be calling for Kristina Barrois soon ( world number 71! ). This weeks ATP tournaments have been littered with retirements, and we’ve basically got a load of knackered players trying to squeeze out a few more rankings points before the season ends.

So who’s backing at 1.01 in WTA games? The whole point of Betfair is matching money, and a laying strategy seems so obvious, but the money’s there to match. Surely once you’ve been burned a couple of times, you wouldn’t back in similar situations again? I’ve no problem with money-buying at 1.01 in the right situation, but any top-level WTA game is not the right situation. Fact.

2 comments:

  1. When the price comes in on a fav does it tend to bounce up a couple of ticks before streamline down to 1.01? I'm not too familiar with tennis markets but a lay to back strategy of 1 tick offset would be a considerably low risk way to make 1% if the price does fluctuate slightly. I did successfuly experiemnt with this on the football and it worked pretty well. Giving the swinging nature of the tennis markets perhaps this might be a winning strategy. What do you think Rob? (I'm guessing you have much more market expericne in tennis then myself!)

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  2. I think you need to know the players involved. The value of a 1.01 can vary wildly, and there are plenty of 1.01-1.03 odds in WTA tennis that could be layed for a profitable strategy. You will see 1.03's go out to 1.07/1.08 on a daily basis.

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