September - Stumbled

Back in the red after August’s successes, although my outgoing feeling is that I’ve been tripped up by events, rather than regressed in concentration or mood.

Two issues dominated my betting month. Firstly, my inability to find time to spend in front of the Betfair screen ( mentioned previously here ). Secondly, the first major month of the football season was tough. From reading a few blogs, I think I’m not alone in finding results going against me. As Talkbet pointed out here, September may be too early for the season’s form to settle down. I hope so.

With regard to the English Championship, before yesterday I was beginning to believe that it may have been early June before results settled down. It looked like a pinsticker league to me. QPR are in hot form, and I like the look of Burnley and Cardiff. The rest looked fairly evenly matched. Having sat through my own team’s embarrassing collapse at home to Preston during midweek, I had decided that the Championship was a no-go area for the coming weeks at least. Looking at yesterday’s results there seems to be more sense of form lines developing, but I still think it’s a league to be wary of.

Most successful sport of the month? Greyhound racing!! Whilst looking for ways to inflate my P&L within the limited evening hours available to me, I’ve been testing a couple of simple systems ( one horse racing, one greyhounds ) which rely on information from websites, cross referenced to the odds available approaching post-time. Nothing too clever, and staking to win a fiver or so each time. Both are currently profitable, but it’s way too early to determine their likely medium-term success. Both systems are odds-on based so could easily be wrecked by the inevitable losing run. And like all systems, they have little likelihood of long-term success ( IMO ) simply because the market corrects itself.

Any optimism I have moving forwards is based upon a belief that I can start to pick up steady profit from football. Unfortunately, this probably means plenty of evenings with the hard slog of trading correct score and result positions. Not my preferred punting method, but probably the safest way of accumulating profit. If I can eke out further profit from the racing and greyhounds, great. But my expectations are low. And Tennis? Off my radar at present as the tournaments head to the far east. With results like Nadal’s failure against Garcia-Lopez yesterday, that may not be a negative outcome for my P&L.