Laying Horses

Hello,

June is nearly over and I had another profitable month.

 
It is a little annoying that I could not produce a nice profit in the horses, but following Nose Ahead and HCE Bet did not work for me. I was not able to match all their bets, so mostly I missed some nice winners. It is not their fault, it is mine.

Here is an overview of my own lay selections on the horses:

I started the month with a 100EUR bank and now the bank stands at 114.40EUR. A nice profit 14.40% with only risking 4% of the bank on each single selection.

There is much liquidity on the market, so I will publish my selections pre race here on the blog. If you are interested you can join the selections and place bets too. I will publish my selections every day at noon.

The blog entry will look like this:

Today’s selection(s):

2009-06-30    19:00    Thirsk    MAIDEN STAKES    CALL TO ARMS

NB. Only lay the given selection(s), if the odds are less or equal 5.0. If the price is greater than 5.0 it is not a bet. I recommend to take the early odds and a maximum liability of 5% of your bank roll on each given selection.

Cheers, Loocie

There will be days without a selection and it is also possible to have days within 2 or 3 selections. I recommend to take the odds as early as you can, because mostly they will drift to the start of the race and sometimes they drift to greater than 5.0 and I would not lay these selections at greater than 5.0.

Please note: Laying horses to lose, as with all forms of gambling involves risk, and although using this selections has proven profitable in the past, past results can only be used as a guide. Only ever use money you can afford to lose.

The Pre Race Horse Racing Analyzer is well in progress. I have already identified a possible trading strategy, but I need to collect more data to determine the best way to take a stop loss or to take a profit. If I have identified these situations I will start to implement the bet placing. The next weeks will be really exciting.

Stats so far:
Total profit this month: +EUR31.92

Cheers, Loocie

Betfair API Software

Hello,

during the last two weeks I worked on the Betfair API software, which I mentioned in a blog entry earlier.

Here is a screenshot of the user interface:

 
At the moment the software captures the data of every horse during the live show ten minutes before the off. If the race goes in play the software switches to the next race, which is selected on the left market table.

For every market the software creates a comma-separated values file, which is easy to use in Excel.

At the moment I am adding possible indicators to the *.csv file, which should help me to identify patterns of the odds movement.

That’s it for now.

Cheers, Loocie

Wimbledon preview

There are some parallels between the men and women’s events at this year’s Wimbledon. Both feature a five-time winner, a great modern rivalry and three strong favourites who are hard to look past in picking a winner.

However, this does not mean the latter stages are easy to predict – certainly not to the extent they would have been at the close of the 2008 championships. At that point it would have been a surprise if the respective 2009 finals were not again between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal and the Williams sisters, such was there collective dominance last year.

Much has changed since then. A third serious contender has emerged in both events: Andy Murray and Dinara Safina have had stellar tour years but are yet to win their first Grand Slam. Safina has got closest, but her continued struggles under pressure make Murray the more likely player to reward punters looking for a first-time winner.

Venus Williams has made no impression in the latter stages of recent Grand Slams, enhancing her reputation as a Wimbledon specialist. She is rightly second favourite behind her sister, who won at the US and Australian opens and is certainly the player to beat.

Maria Sharapova has made an encouraging return to fitness and as 24th seed will be dangerous. Svetlana Kuznetsova, Sam Stosur and Victoria Azarenka were impressive at Roland Garros but will struggle to transfer their form to grass to the extent which will worry the Williams sisters.

The women’s draw is nonetheless more open than the men’s. It would be a major surprise if a player outside the top three claimed the title, even taking Nadal’s knee problems into account.

Federer has regained his strut and will be hard to beat; the suspicion remains that Murray and Nadal are the only players equipped to beat him, despite the recent strides made by Robin Soderling, Juan Martin del Potro and Gael Monfils. Andy Roddick is the next biggest threat and should be backed to reach the last four.

Value in Baseball

Hello,

today I will give an overview of the baseball betting so far. Baseball is a sport with lots of data and statistics, so it is possible to create a system based on this statistics. There are also many games during a season, so on the long term value betting will pay off during a season.

The idea of the baseball system came from the trader I interviewed on February this year. The goal is to find value in baseball matches. So we created an excel sheet were we enter the actual Betfair odds and the sheet will tell us the matches to bet on.

Have a look at the data so far:

Number of total matches: 417
Number of selections: 71
Number of back selections: 46
Number of lay selections: 25

Number of bets won: 44
Number of bets lost: 27
Strike Rate: 62%

Number of back bets won: 29
Number of back bets lost: 17
Strike Rate back bets: 63%

Number of lay bets won: 15
Number of lay bets lost: 10
Strike Rate lay bets: 60%

Fixed Unit Staking
Total Profit/Loss: +13.65 points
Total Profit/Loss back bets: +5.76 points
Total Profit/Loss lay bets: +7.89 points

Weighted Staking
Total Profit/Loss: +23.95 points
Total Profit/Loss back bets: +10.02 points
Total Profit/Loss lay bets: +13.93  points

Average winning back odds (back bets): 1.78
Average winning lay odds (lay bets): 1.84

The weighted stake is calculated by the estimated value per bet, that means the more value the bet has, the higher the stake size will be.

I know we have not yet enough data entries, but the system has performed well so far. The profit grows steady without a big volatility.

At the moment we just enter the odds and data manually into the excel sheet which costs 30 minutes per day. If the system is still in profit over a longer period I will create an application which will do all the work for us, inclusive placing bets on Betfair on the suggested matches.

I will keep you up-to-date.

Cheers, Loocie

Computer-Aided Betting

Hello,

again a long time since the last blog entry. These days are really busy and I am working on various things at the same time.

The baseball system is well underway, but I stopped betting on it, because I am not yet sure how to make the biggest profit out of it. There are a few variables which let the system perform differently and I will wait to have 100 data entries to see a trend.

The horse laying system is well underway, too. I had my longest winning streak with 8 correct selections in a row. I started betting on my selections at the end of may and with a bank of 100EUR I made 14.86EUR so far (with only 4% (EUR4) liability on every single selection), which is a great result. Here is an overview of the selections I bet on so far:
 
Formula 1 produced the biggest profit of the month so far: It is a shame they do not race every week. It is so easy to make money on this for me.

I have many ideas I want to try out, so my over all profit this month is not that big. I spend some small money on testing various things.

At the moment I am working on two things:

The first one is an excel sheet which will create some in play value odds for tennis matches based on historical data of the players.

The other one is a Betfair API software, which will track the odds movement on the horses to find pattern and possibilities to make profit.

I could not believe that I did not think about computer-aided betting or trading so far, but there is a lot of potential on this.

I will keep you updated.

Total profit this month so far: EUR17.71

Cheers, Loocie

Concentrate on the bet, not potential winnings

My betting interest in the French Open is over. The player who I strongly fancied to win the women’s tournament is still going strong, but thanks to a bit of old-fashioned greed, she will not earn me any money if she does lift the title.

Instead of backing Svetlana Kuznetsova in a straight bet in her own right, I paired her with Rafael Nadal in the winning double. I figured that this was an opportunity to simply lengthen Kuznetsova’s winning odds. Nadal couldn’t possibly lose, could he?

A stunning performance by Robin Soderling proved that he could and although few can have backed the four-time reigning champion to crash out in the fourth round, I should have reminded myself that there are no guarantees in sport.

The sound logic I used in selecting Kuznetsova – she has an excellent Roland Garros record and appeared likely to beat the major seed in her quarter, Serena Williams, who had not won a clay court match all season going into the event – should have been enough.

She is on the verge of reaching the final, which would have been a decent bet at the outset, but instead chose to pinch some odds by blindly back Nadal as well. I chose to ignore the warning sign of his Madrid Open defeat by Roger Federer and believed he was infallible on clay when it really matters.

My other Roland Garros bet was for Victoria Azarenka to win her quarter. This was quite a brave bet considering it also included the in-form top seed Dinara Safina and reigning champion Ana Ivanovic, but after Azarenka’s fourth round win over the latter and her 6-1 opening set win in the quarters against Safina, my prospects looked good.

I should really have laid my bet at this point, but such was Azarenka’s dominance that I elected to try and maximise my earnings rather than securing a guaranteed pay-out by following Safina at a set down. The inevitable comeback gave me another lesson about the need to let commonsense rather than greed rule my betting.