Dusting Off Cobwebs

My last post seems but a distant memory. It’s been a while. I can only blame work, although the warm weather may also be relevant. Any blog-obsessed nutters out there would have noted that most of my posts are made around midnight. That’s been well after my bedtime for the last couple of weeks.

The time I have spent on the laptop has been fairly normal. My recurring themes go on – start the month with aimless bets and carelessness, make things worse with frustrated chasing, have a head-clearing break, come back with a disciplined and structured recovery mission. End month back at square one. I’m currently in the red for May, but a couple more decent days should put me back where I started from.

I’ve dabbled a little with the French Open with no success. My previous tennis profits were founded upon a base of knowledge gained from closely following tournaments throughout the year. Without that, it feels like stepping out into heavy traffic. Worse still, I still have opinions on players that are probably nine months out of date. I’ve been limited to placing bets for each day’s play on the evening beforehand, and then monitoring with my I-phone, with iBetmate used to close out bets. It’s a little cumbersome, but I’m aware of the limitations when I place the bets. More limiting is my lack of confidence. I’ve scratched a number of winning selections during play (Rochus, Beck, Zeballos) and haven’t improved my mood by taking all-greens on the winners (Melzer, Giraldo, Lacko), whilst leaving open first set winners who went on to lose (Querrey, Kvitova). Bah.

Maybe this is the main issue I have to resolve – is this a hobby to make money from, or an interest in punting that I hope to keep self-funding? The stats say that my tennis bets have simply reduced my monthly P&L by £100, and I’d be better off leaving the sport alone. Yet it’s my number one sport to follow, and I enjoy the challenge of finding winners. Certainly the market has moved against my style of tennis betting in the last couple of years. A favourite who I’d have backed at 1.15 three years ago is generally priced around 1.09 now, and I’ve moved to looking at higher risk opportunities above 1.4. Logically, I should be laying at 1.09, but it’s a big shift in mindset. Ever the optimist, I’ll compromise by writing off the clay court season, and try to put some time into researching form for the grass court and American hard court seasons ahead.

In the meantime I'll console myself that I've developed a fairly unique betting blog. Many blogs come and go when the task of winning is found to be harder than planned. Other blogs are written by the habitually successful. I've developed a fairly longstanding blog, yet have made bugger all for many months! The stubbornness of the Yorkshireman I suppose.