Tennis and dogs

I've been doing some small peddling in tennis last couple of days.

Tomorrow I'll try to do a number of trades during the matches I watch and see if I can turn a profit.

By the first looks of it I can see myself doing well and hopefully I've found a new market to exploit.

I've finally managed to hook up BetAngel to Excel but boy is that hassle for people who don't use an English Vista. I will rant about this later. But as I try to always stay positive I'll also offer solutions after the rant but I'll tell you now that I'm not too impressed with BetAngel and their support on the forums at the moment. Their silence is telling me a lot as I'm sure they've read my problems on their forum.

I'm going to try to get some dog data out of it and see if I can find some golden rules. Somehow the fact that the dogs are always 6 in a race and the odds are more "connected" (if that makes sense) between dogs then they are between horse races where you have sometimes 15 selections give me the idea that patterns can be found.

Of course together with me numerous other people are trying to break the code so I'll probably will end up mumbling to myself years from now staring at millions of lines of Excel data but at least I'll be happy in my own special way :-)

If I'm completely barking up the wrong tree please let me know but I feel that the dogs odds are much more reactive to each other then the horses are. The big outsider in the dogs is always related to the shortness of the others. If you add up the odds you mostly get in the 34-40 range and with 40 you have a real outsider in the field. Otherwise it's mostly close to 36. With horse racing you sometimes have a horse that has a huge amount layed at 1000 odds begging for backers. The sum of all the horse odds are sometimes ridiculously high which makes you wonder what some of the horses are doing there, as apprantely everyone agrees that they can only win if every other horse breaks at least two legs. A horse can go up from 450 to 1000 without really affecting the other horses a lot odds wise. With the dogs if one dog goes up or down by a significant number you'll see the others move too to balance things out again.

My father is helping me with the Excel and statistical calculations. He's much better at that then I am and regardless if it bears fruits or not it's fun to be sussing things out together and if I learn from it that I'm chasing windmills that is good to know too so I can move on.

My tennis report and all about my big scare I'll post within a couple of days. Also a monthly wrap up but I'll tell you now some weird stuff will have to happen tomorrow for me to even come halfway my target I set at the beginning of the month!

Messing around

As you can see I've not been making progress bankroll wise. To be honest I've been messing around a bit. But in a constructive manner I like to tell myself :-)

My obsession with the greyhounds is still there and I got it into my head that I should try some creative Dutching. My theory was that since you have 6 dogs in a race, them having on average a 1 in 6 chance of winning you have to gather more then 36 odds to be sure of profit in the long run. This is assuming that the Betfair market is efficient and the odds on each dog reflect his true value.

Now with Dutching you'd simply back the whole book when it's under 100% giving you a guaranteed profit. You'd use different stakes for every dog to make sure that the profit is the same whatever dog wins. I've seen some Dutching opportunities as BetAngel makes it very easy to do it automated but it's only there for a splitsecond and I'm pretty sure there are quite some people out there trying to earn easy money that way thus closing the window of opportunity real quick.

So this is where I tried getting fancy.

My idea was to try and back every dog as high as possible and thus getting a total sum of odds over 36. My goal being at least 40.

If this is still abracadabra to you I'll give a quick example.

Dog 1 I back at 3,8, dog 2 at 4,7 and dog 3 at 8,7 I now have gathered a total of 3,8+4,7+8,7=17,2 and will need to back the last 3 for a total of approximately 23.

My thought here is that if I succeed in this I should make money, in the long run, on the straight bets in itself but if I can green up before the start I'll do that. I fired in $5,- bets. It went well the first couple of attempts and I greened up for around $1,- But to my detriment I had a red screen on one, which also happened to be only 36,9 odds in total as I didn't manage to back high enough, which I decided to let run true to the system.

I didn't realise that one dog was only backed for half a stake and of course he won. I would've lost a bit if the favorite won but this should've showed me a small profit instead of a $12,57 loss.

I'm on to something I believe but there's a good chance that I'm reinventing the wheel or making something real simple real difficult for myself. It did get kinda hectic with all the bets being matched and if you try to hedge the 6 dogs in one go all the bets getting fired in with some being matched and some not. I also tried to simply hedge the dogs that showed profit and wait for the others to improve until closer to the off but that was messy too. I wish I could have 6 ladders next to each other (within the same software), that would make my life so much easier with the dogs. I have 2 24' screens so the real estate isn't a problem.

I've tried to connect BetAngel to Excel to gain better insight in the dogs but seeing as I have Dutch Vista and Dutch office it doesn't work. I think BetAngel can only deal with the English language package which sucks bigtime! Hopefully this will be fixed, I did notice that there were no replies from BetAngel staff in my thread so there's always a chance there stonewalling it. In that case I'll have to nag them all day when I finally get the money together for the course! :-)

So the dogs have been a losing discipline once again but I am enjoying thinking up strategies and giving it a go.

The $15,- I dropped was due to a thread on www.racingtraders.com/forum where someone pointed out that Bari was getting odds as a huge underdog while they were 1st in the Italian serie B and playing the number 18. I first backed them at 10 for $5,- and the draw at 19 for $5,-. Then just before the off I saw that Bari was up to 32! So I just had to stick another $5,- in. This match was attracting 4 times more the liquidity then any other match in the serie B was and it was all due to a LOAD of mony being layed on Bari winning and the draw so obviously someone knew something I didn't.

I was working and thought I'd just try to trade it out for a green screen early in the match. The draw had already come down to 10 and I was thinking of laying that but decided to wait for a couple of minutes as it was coming down so quick.

Well Bari scored real quick! So I quickly popped up the Betfair website to green up for a huge amount and was already composing a raving blogpost in my mind about what a great opportunist I was and how betting is all about finding edges and exploiting them when I found out that this match didn't go in running on betfair...

And not so surprisingly Bari lost 3-2, figures.

But I must say that it gave me a lot of entertainment and at least I could think of myself as really smart for almost a full hour before it went all pear shaped. I did decide though that with the start of the new season I'll be also betting as much football as I possible can is it gives me a lot more pleasure watching the game at the same time then the horses and dogs do where mostly I have no live pictures and I really don't get too excited over seeing them running.

I made some money back with the US horses which I haven't been trading seriously this month really up till tonight. I sat down and focused and get an easy $27,- proft and I thought that a lot of races weren't optimal tonight. So although I'll abandon my target of $400,- this month I will try to sit down for a couple of more nights and do some bankroll building with the US horses. Mainly so I can blow it on other sports again! But I'm sure all this practicing, number crunching and coming up with out of the box strategies will pay itself of in the long run. Besides it's fun!

Still here, still busy

Just a quick not to let you all know I'm still around. I'm really busy in my business at the moment but hope to post something somewhat meaningfull somewhere this weekend.

Bankrollwise I'm having a terrible time but not due to bad running but due to a lot of experimenting. I'm quite confident that this will repay itself infinitely in the future and I'm severely enjoying doing it. Learning a lot!

More soon.

Sorry for the wall of text below

I put in alinea's but somehow they get taken out when I publish.

Maybe to long a post?

Time flies

Wow where did that month go? Have hardly been able to trade and it's almost half over!

Guess I'll have to step it up a bit to get to my target. Although the target is just there for fun. I'm not going to trade more then I can do whilst being concentraded as I'll otherwise just be setting myself up for losing.

Although I don't have a lot to show for this month up till now I am having fun. I'm trying some new tactics and some new markets and it's fun trying to get my head around them with minimum stakes.

Basically I'm learning more about the mechanics. Also if you play with small stakes you have the luxury to not have to compete with the big dogs. I read a lot on forums that people have been trading for x time but still never win. I'd say they'd have to go find their niche like I do instead of trading the favorite UK horse 3 minutes before the off. That's when all the heavy hitters are scalping the market and it's no place for the lesser gods to be as long as there are greener pastures elsewhere. That's my tip for the day. Look at different horses and longer before the off if you haven't been able to turn a profit. Watch the market carefully and see how money gets matched. Then think long and hard how you can exploit it.

One weird thing I saw was a $1000,- lay at 1000 odds giving this guy a liability of 1 million!

This is on a UK horse 14 hours before the off. Just to give you an idea where I'm roaming around looking for an edge ;-)

Now this looked too good to be true, there was still $696,- open. I was racking my brain wondering why the hell someone would do this. Worst thing is, it's a 6 horse race!! So I'd say any horse that's at the start should have some sort of a chance. Really don't get why anyone would do that but seeing as he has at least a million $$ in his Betfair account I'd say there's a good chance he knows what he's doing. So I've backed it for $10,- just to see. I'm hoping to lay it back a lot lower.

I posted it on the http://www.racingtraders.com/ forum to see if someone else had a clue why this was happening and went to check http://www.racingpost.com/ to have a look at the race and the prognoses. Something I should've started with of course! But still learning.

Turns out that this is probably the worst horse in history. Wouldn't be surprised if it has 3 legs. No chance at all of winning. Terrible record, terrible trainer, terrible jockey.

This is what they had to say about the horse:

Dancing Wave
Guaranteed sixth place prize money if she completes but major surprise if this 6f AW claiming winner is not well tailed off.

So the person putting the lay bet it probably perceives it as a free $1000,-

Still if you have a look here:

http://www.racingpost.com/horses/horse_home.sd?horse_id=702205

Out of 34 starts the horse won 2, got in 2nd 8 times and 3d 4 times. I have much too little knowledge of horse racing to compare tracks, conditions and competition but I'd still say that you'll have to be pretty sure about yourself to stick a million on this one and say that even if you'd do this race a 1000 times it would never win.

I'm off to bed and will see how things look tomorrow. It would be great if I can lay it back at 500 or so. Then I can green up for the full $10,- stake. Although I'm also contemplating going for $5,- on the other 5 horses and have a $5000,- freeroll on this one. The fact that it's only 6 horses is making me nervous, it just seems to me that the chance of this one winning is much higher then 1000-1 The racingpost has her at 500-1, that's where I pulled my lay price from I'm aiming for. I'm not putting it in yet as I don't want to wake up tomorrow and find it at 150 -1 selling myself short for a nice sum.

I bit of redemption

Seeing as I've been withdrawing money and am aiming for different monthly goals greyhound and horse wise I'll be posting my P&L up till now in May from now on.



Looks good huh!

I was trading a US horse and I noticed that the back side was much much higher then the layside, we're talking more then 50 points higher here, but some of it was eaten regardless. Jammed $5,- in there thinking I could do a nice little green up if it got eaten.

Only $ 1,36 got eaten and of course I can't lay that back as it's below minimum bet, and seeing as I was the lowest backer I couldn't green up either. Layside was still being matched quickly so I decided to wait until the suspension. If at least $ 4,- gets matched I'll lay it and green up. If the $ 1,36 stays I'll consider it a loss and let it ride.

The horse won! Earning me a nice $ 87,93 after comission. Best thing is I had livevideo too and saw it happen!

Now if I would've been able to green up I would have done that for sure, but I think that the odds I was offered were so good (especially as the layside was getting matched for quite some money a lot lower thus to me reflecting the probable real value) and my stake in it was minimal versus my bankroll so it wasn't worth redding that up.

So my Betfair bankroll is up to $ 424,69 now and that's after the $ 25,- withdrawal. So new all time high and back on track again.

As for the greyhounds. My idea of sticking to $ 5,- stakes until I make $ 100,- and then going up to $ 10,- until I hit $ 200,- etc etc seems like a good idea and I'm $ 0,11 cents closer to that hundred then when I started this month :-)

I realise that the letting it ride stories are close to each other and you might get the idea that I'm turning to the dark side but don't worry I'm not looking to gamble. When put in this exact same situation again I'll do the same though. As far as I see it the market thought this horse was going to win 1 in 40 races and I was getting over 90 to 1 on my $ 1,35 and no opportunity to green up. I think I made the correct decision, that the horse won the first race and I didn't have to make this decision 40 times to see a return is very very lucky though.

April P&L

Here's my monthly P&L:

Considering I blew $ 158,- on that lay bet that suspended before I could back it I had a pretty good month.

So what to do with May?

I think I'm going to go bold and say that I want at least $400,- out of this month. In other words I'm going to try to more then double my bankroll this month.

And just to complicate matters I've had to take out $ 25,- to cover the attheraces.com subscription which I've been using way too little up till now.