blue4578

It's not easy this gambling lark sometimes. The stuff I've described above and in previous posts just came about due to a bit of trial and error on my part, and it's still not perfect. When I tried to lay to 105%-106% it didn't work and I broke even or made a small loss instead of making a profit most weeks. It could be that you need just to tweak one thing and then everything clicks. It probably isn't as simple as that but it was for me. Without blowing my own trumpet, everyone has a talent for something and mine is pricing up football matches. I have to work harder at other sports, but I can identify football probabilities with not that much effort. The only thing that annoys me is that it took me till about 2008 to realise that this was the way to do it. I was always pricing up all the games each week going back to about 2000, but always just did it on paper without being a layer on Betfair. In the early days on Betfair you could often lay 4/1 shots at Evens at 2:55pm on a Saturday in the lower leagues for decent sums. If I'd been a layer in the same way back then, I'd probably be sitting on a beach somewhere sipping cocktails right now. Always been a part-time gambler, I'm far too lazy to work too hard at it. Spend most of my time lazing about doing other stuff, and a few hours a week looking at odds, statistics and other stuff. Professional footballers spend less time at work than I do. I make enough to pay the bills and have enough left over to have the occasional week in Skegness in my deckchair.

You've been digging a long way back to find that post. I'll answer your queries as best I can, but obviously the method I describe is just what works for me. It doesn't make it "right", as there is no right or wrong way to do things. Everyone is different and has different ideas. It makes no difference to me how the Blackburn v Bolton market is priced up. I don't even look at that until I've decided my own prices. Often I'm putting my bets up very early when there is no other money in the market, apart from maybe the odd £2 here and there. If there is significant money already in the market, and I disagree completely with the market prices, it would be the case that I'd end up laying two outcomes and backing the other (effectively double stakes on the one outcome I'm backing). Usually though, with my profit margins, I'll end up doing one of two things for most matches; backing the favourite or laying the favourite and backing the draw. There is almost always value in backing the draw if the favourite is under-priced, and the draw is the absolute key part of my strategy with this. If the backs get matched and the lays don't, or vice versa, that's fine. What I'm not trying to do here is trade the markets so that I've got a small guaranteed profit before the game kicks off. Some people do do that, and I could do that successfully if I wanted to as it's usually pretty obvious which way the markets will move. I often trade a Premier League game that way for about 20-40 times my normal stake when it's obvious a price is going to move over a few days (it's not a good idea to sleep in on the day of the game in that case though!). I wouldn't do that for a minor league because there's not enough money being traded. Obviously every bet that does get matched using my described method that you've quoted is going to be a bet where I think the odds are in my favour. You can think of it like this: if you're backing and laying all 46 English games on a weekend, and you know what you're doing and you work out your odds carefully, then it's like tossing a coin maybe 25-30 times (there are some games where my odds pretty much agree with the market and my bets don't get matched or only for a very small amount) but you're getting odds of 11/10 for each toss. The chances of making a loss overall each weekend are quite slim if you know what you're doing. If you're assuming 25 bets at 11/10 where the chance of success for each one is 50%, it's not difficult to actually work out the probability of making a loss (I can't be bothered but mid-table might be along to do it if he's bored). If you think about it statistically, it just means that if you have a larger sample size then the variance in the results is much smaller. If you put all of your money on one bet every weekend, particularly if it's an accumulator, you're going to win big some weeks and lose your whole stake other weeks. Using this method, I tend to make a profit about 90% of weekends, but you're not going to have a weekend where you double your money. If I consider the total amount that I'm putting at risk, making a 10% profit on this total amount would be outstanding on any weekend, because typically only about 25%-35% of the total amount I'm risking will be matched. A lot of the markets where I do get bets matched, they are only partially matched. Most weeks I make a 5%-10% profit on the amount I'm putting at risk, and typically any very bad weeks show a smaller loss than the profit shown on a very good week. Regarding trying to trade a game before it starts with the aim of making a profit before it starts, if you back £1,000 at Evens and the price falls so that you can lay 1.8, then to make an identical profit either way, you need to lay 1000 x (2/1. = £1111.11 at 1.8. This means you'll make £111.11 minus commission either way. That's quite a big price move but the actual profit is fairly low. This is why I don't do this for every game, and if I do I do it for much larger stakes.

Sounds like a cunning plan.

Indeed, would make for an interesting year. Someone I know that gambles on tennis for a living was writing Federer off when I was with him at the French Open in 2008. I would enjoy more chances to remind him how wrong he has been (even though he bizarrely still claims he was right). He is blatantly guilty of all sorts of things. As usual with tennis though, they throw the book at some minor player, with very little publicity associated, while the main culprits continue to get away with murder. The world number four (for example, and not the current one) being convicted of being a disgraceful cheat wouldn't look good.

When you become successful and start staking reasonable sums, accumulators aren't an option anyway. I couldn't place an accumulator now even if I wanted to for even 2% of my normal stake.

14 minutes, what took you so long?

It's relatively simple for me. There are certain players that I won't bet on to win ever. I had bet on Davydenko to beat Vassallo Arguello that fateful day in 2007 before things started to look suspicious. If you think someone may not always be playing to win, you can profit on them losing when you back their opponent and won't lose out if they decide not to give 100% on a given day. Pretty much the same way I operate when it comes to the Pakistan cricket team too. All that said, I have now given up betting on tennis as I have nowhere to place my bets. Therefore my visits to this thread will become a lot less frequent next year.

Regarding the blacklist, I think at least some of the women on there are possibly being harshly treated. For example, Azarenka has a habit of retiring from matches at least five times every year, sometimes from winning positions when she is likely to be trading at short odds in-running. Is she doing this on purpose? Or just because she's not physically strong? Some of the others I am surprised to see on there too. As for the men (I bet on men's tennis pretty much every week but just dabble on the women's), in my opinion there is one surprising name there but the others have all been involved in several dubious matches. Most of them in fact far beyond dubious. As I was saying up the thread, the problem is mostly with Russians, Italians and Argentinians. All of the Italian male players who have had any decent success are named (no surprise). There are a couple of Russians missing, but for some reason players from Argentina seem to only get minor mentions in the form of Berlocq, Schwank and Dabul? There are a couple of others from Argentina I'd have very near the top of any blacklist. This list illustrates the fact that people know what is going on, but proving it beyond any doubt is another matter.

I know less about the drugs testing program than I do about the match fixing. However as far as I know (I haven't looked up the precise details) a player could miss drugs tests and this fact would never be made public. I believe even a positive test will not necessarily be made public, as I have seen claimed by a few people that certain players have served suspensions quietly, and just claimed publicly that they were injured. I have also noticed rumours in a few different places that a certain very highly ranked player alledgedly missed almost the whole of 2010 due to a failed drugs test that was covered up with a story about an injury. Obviously this may well be untrue, but given the way tennis handles drugs testing then anything is possible. If they were transparent, tested more often and more rigorously, then stories like that wouldn't appear. It also seems to me that players can easily talk themselves out of a suspension, or to a vastly reduced one. Anyway, it is what it is. It won't stop me or most other people watching tennis. I just happen to think that the governing bodies are extremely weak, although this is the case in many other sports as well.

Match fixing goes on in the grand slams and Masters 1000 events. There's obviously no money to be made fixing challenger matches. The guilty parties tend to be either Russian, Italian or Argentinian. There are at least eight players currently ranked in the top 100 that I am absolutely certain have fixed matches, with at least another four or five where I would be 90% sure. The problem was at its highest in 2007, but certainly still goes on now.

This is the key point. Like I said up the thread, the ATP clearly would rather avoid scandal so that the gravy train can keep chugging merrily along. If there was proper testing, we wouldn't even be having this discussion. If match fixing was properly investigated and the criminals pursued as they would be in other sports, that would be much less of an issue too. I could name at least ten male players that I would bet everything I own on having been involved in match fixing. The ATP and ITF are weak governing bodies. The integrity of sport is all important. When people start to have doubts about what they're seeing, then everyone suffers.

I don't think you can point the finger at specific players without hard evidence. You can ask questions, and things can look suspicious, but you can never be 100% sure. Personally, I would be very surprised if any less than 20 of the top 100 men's players have taken PED's at some point. Hopefully it'll all come out in the wash one day. She never went through with it though. Nicole Vaidisova did, giving up her tennis career in the process.

Two-year ban for a first offence, unless you can prove there were mitigating circumstances. Gasquet was caught having taken cocaine. He managed to talk himself out of a long ban by saying it came from kissing a woman in a nightclub. Martina Hingis got a two-year ban for testing positive for cocaine, and decided to retire (for the second time) instead of contesting it. Naturally she protested her innocence.

For what it's worth, I think that Nadal has a lot of question marks hanging over him. If you read this article with an open mind and think about what was going on at the times it refers to, it certainly raises questions: http://tennishasasteroidproblem.blogspot.com/2011/02/curious-case-of-rafael-nadal.html In my opinion, the ATP has two big problems: match fixing and performance enhancing drugs Regarding match fixing, I have previously spoken for over an hour about this with Andrew "Bert" Black, the founder of Betfair, when he was still pretty much running the company. It was just after the Davydenko v Vassallo Arguello match in the summer of 2007. Betfair, as it has with many other sporting bodies, has a memorandum of understanding with the ATP, which allows them to share information regarding suspicious betting patterns. I strongly got the impression that the ATP would rather gambling went away and rather than dealing with the problem properly, they are happy to sweep it under the carpet. Over the years there have been serious instances of match fixing that have gone unpunished. The only people banned for gambling related offenses have been low-ranking Italian players betting 5 Euros on matches not involving them. These players were stupid enough to use online accounts under their own name, but the real guilty parties who should have been banned for life and imprisoned, have always got away with it. The ATP take a similar attitude to PED's. It would seem that they think "why have a big scandal when we don't need to?" They are happy to maintain the status quo while the problem bubbles along under the surface. One day, there is going to be a big scandal that the ATP can't suppress, and people will quite rightly ask why the problem wasn't dealt with properly before. If you look at baseball now (search "MLB steroid era" for more information), that is what could happen to tennis. Great players from the 1990's are being hauled before courts because of allegedly lying about taking PED's. Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds are the two biggest names caught up in it, and both have recently faced the possibility of going to jail. Why is there a problem? Baseball had lax drug testing for many years and certain drugs were not banned. The players union tried to stop the problem being investigated, but eventually gave in. The Mitchell Report blew the whole thing wide open, and got it all out into the public domain. I don't think anyone knows the true extend of the drugs problem in tennis. However if you look at the amount of money that even someone ranked 50 or 60 can make from tennis, it is obvious that there must be a serious temptation there to look for any advantage possible to advance your career. The drug testing program in tennis is woefully inadequate, so it would appear almost certain that some players are cheating and getting away with. A couple have been caught and banned, but that is probably only the tip of the iceberg in my opinion. Food for thought anyway.

It was a very good win in Shanghai, but before we get too carried away, let's not forget that his draw was: Bye / Walkover / Wawrinka / Ebden / Nishikori / Ferrer. Tokyo was a stiffer test in terms of opponents: Baghdatis / Bogomolov / Nalbandian / Ferrer / Nadal, while in Bangkok it was Berrer / Dimitrov / Simon / Young. Ferrer in my opinion was awful in Shanghai and needed a miracle to survive against Ferrero. The courts and balls also do not suit Ferrer. Therefore the only win of any note was against Nadal in Tokyo. Simon may be ranked 12th, but his game is the perfect match for Murray to play against, which Murray has won their last eight matches. We've had the debate many times before about Murray in grand slam finals, but it's not purely a mental issue, far from it. His first final, at the 2008 US Open against Federer, Murray was extremely confident of winning after winning the two previous matches against Federer. I thought he had a good shot at it as well as I remember betting on Murray to win at odds of 7/4. Then he got absolutely crushed, and realised that Federer in grand slams is 10% better than Federer in the smaller tournaments because he peaks for those events. The second final, against Federer at the Australian Open in 2010, Murray just didn't play at all well having played well in the tournament. The third set he missed two incredibly easy volleys to win it, so you could say that match got away from him due to lack of belief and / or being overcome by nerves. The third final against Djokovic, it didn't matter what Murray had done, nothing he could do was going to beat Djokovic that day. Most people didn't know it at the time, but it was clear that Djokovic had improved his level massively and was the best player.

I have a massive amount of respect for Andy Murray's achievements and his ability as a tennis player, but the fact remains that Federer and Nadal in particular know exactly how to peak at the right time. Murray's best form tends to come in the hard court Masters 1000 events (eight wins from nine finals is fantastic). It's difficult to read too much into form at this time of year as certain players are not fully fit, like Federer and Djokovic, and other players lack motivation once the US Open has finished. Even so, winning any Masters 1000 event is a massive achievement for anyone but that doesn't mean much heading into the Australian Open in January. We should just be pleased at how good Murray is and support him as he attempts to win a grand slam. My own personal opinion, which I have held for a few years, is that Murray is less than 50% likely to ever win one, but we shall see. Nadal beat Murray in the semi finals of the French Open, Wimbledon and the US Open this year, with Murray coming nowhere remotely close to winning any of the three matches, winning only two sets. Indeed he has played Nadal in grand slams eight times (2-6), whereas he has only met Djokovic once and Federer twice. Murray didn't win a set in those meetings with Federer and Djokovic, but is that worse than losing to Nadal six times out of eight? Depends on your perspective.

Sometimes you see bets available to back in-play on football, often on Asian Handicaps, where the price is too good to be true. When you try to take it, it disappears. Then quite often it reappears afterwards. Strange goings on, but the layer is probably linked to Betfair in that case. Every once in a while, someone does make a massive mistake, but it's about being in the right place at the right time to take advantage.

The only reason that Murray is suddenly playing in the Davis Cup is that he needs to if he wants to play in the Olympics. The Davis Cup I think is causing a lot of the problems. If it disappeared, the schedule wouldn't look too bad, although you may want to play the Australian Open a bit later. The Davis Cup final finishes on December 4th this year, which gives any players playing in it about three weeks off before they have to go to Australia, perhaps via Doha or Chennai. I don't see much changing, perhaps the number of mandatory 500 events will be reduced to three but I can't see much more than that.

I remember that quote, which seems to have been removed from the article ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/tennis/14977449.stm this is the one I think), which quoted him as saying players "had to play in 250 events" or something along those lines, but which went onto say it was basically because of appearance money. Perhaps someone publishing something he didn't say and correcting it later on.

No one has to play in any 250 events, that is up to the individual. Eight of the nine Masters events, Monte Carlo being the odd one out, are mandatory. You also have to play four 500 events, with at least one after the US Open. The Davis Cup can count as one of these 500 events depending on the circumstances. I don't think anyone would be missing a grand slam out of choice, so that is 16 tournaments, plus the World Tour Finals that the top players should play. The only penalty for not doing so is having zero points for an event that you miss, which stays on your ranking for a year. Not something a player in the top four, who are currently way ahead of the rest, would need to worry about too much. Everyone else ranked in the top 100 has at least 20 tournaments in the past year (except Blake and Ferrero who have had an injury or two) and most are closer to 30 than 20. It's difficult not to make the Masters events mandatory for the top players, as they're investing big money in their tournaments, which would be seriously devalued if the top players didn't show up. The main issue here is probably the schedule and the fact it's not organised very well and that the Davis Cup gets in the way. All of the top players are suddenly interested in playing the Davis Cup at the moment. Strange that, considering you have to play at least two ties in the year before the Olympics in order to qualify to play at the Olympics. Playing the Davis Cup a week after the grand slams is fine, unless of course you happen to make the semi finals or final (note what happened to Djokovic against del Potro on Sunday). Even worse if the final is delayed. In an ideal world, you'd probably play the Australian Open at least 6 weeks later, with the Asian tournaments that happen over the next few weeks before or after the Australian Open. Wimbledon and the French Open would have another week between them, Queen's should probably be a Masters event with at least two of the other Masters events ceasing to be so. The number of mandatory 500 events should probably be three not four as well. You could also play the Davis Cup in a two year cycle, and could consider making it best of three sets. The problem is that all of the tournaments are individually owned, so you can't just close down a tournament, you'd have to buy it from the owners first. Hamburg was stripped of its Masters status and fought a costly (losing) battle against the ATP in court to get the decision reversed. The ATP and the ITF are separate and don't like each other, plus the grand slams are all individual events and act independently of each other. I don't see anything changing any time soon as everyone has vested interests, and it will require agreement from a lot of people to make changes happen. T_S_A_R makes a fair point I think. If the top players think they are playing too much, why do so many exhibitions and why play in the odd 250 event for a massive appearance fee if you want to be resting?

Difference being that traditional high street bookmakers tend to offer European handicaps, with three outcomes and huge margins, while most bookmakers offer Asian Handicaps with two outcomes and small margins. If you back a team -1 on an Asian Handicap and they win by exactly one goal, then your stake is refunded. On a European handicap, where a draw on the handicap is possible, then you would lose. Therefore -1 on this sort of handicap is the equivalent to -1.5 on an Asian Handicap, and you'll likely always get better odds with the Asian variety.

No. Seventh player in the Open Era to do so.

He isn't but that doesn't mean the best player always wins. Murray played great to get to break points this set and then missed easy backhands on the break points. However it just looks like both players already know who is going win. Murray was like this against Haase but two sets down against Nadal is being in a much deeper hole. Needs to somehow get back into this set.

Body language is poor. Stop chuntering at your box and get your head down and play. Never plays his best when moaning and groaning like this.

As in favourite sport to bet on? If so, then no it's not. I have at least four other sports that I prefer to bet on, which take less effort to make money from. I do put a lot of effort into the four tennis grand slams though, I was watching 14 hours of tennis per day for the first week of this tournament. The top four hard court players currently is quite easy, and a lot of people would agree with: 1. Djokovic 2. Nadal 3. Federer 4. Murray The fifth isn't quite so easy, but based on recent result you'd have to say Mardy Fish. If del Potro can get back to what he was two years ago, he would be easily best of the rest and possibly challenging for one of the top spots, but he is miles away from that right now.