A win at last!

A rather pleasant weekend for me as I had my first big trading profit since June, of course the term “big” is very subjective but in my case it means anything above 3 figures. In my first post I briefly touched on that since moving house the quantity of trading activity has decreased and unfortunately so as the quality. I’m sure a lot of it has been due to negative variance (or bad luck) on more than one occasion I’ve sat with small reds on one side and huge greens on the other which have had some intrinsic value but none of them have paid off. Although I think some of it has been due to poor decision making, whether that has been ring-rust, greed or simply misreading a situation I’m not sure, probably a combination of the 3.

Anyway, the trade was actually on football not tennis, and it was the over/under 6.5 goals market on the England/San Marino match. Why this market? Well I expected San Marino to start off stronger than some people in the media were suggesting but expected them to get a good stuffing nevertheless and as under 6.5 goals was closest to evens (£100 @ 1.9) at k/o I felt it presented the best trading opportunities. Well it so nearly went down the pan after 3 minutes when the keeper really should have been sent off and a penalty have been given. Still it didn’t and after 25 minutes and the game still goalless I moved all my liability onto the overs side at 1.3 and although the price dropped to the high 1.1xs two goals in 2 minutes a few minutes later saw the price move back out to near where it started. To be honest I was expecting more goals in the first half and it wasn’t until HT that I moved the money back onto the unders side at 1.44. Again less than 5 minutes before a goal expecting some subs shortly to mix things up I moved all my profit back to overs laying the unders at 1.07 and again 2 goals flew in within the space of 2 minutes. Again expecting more to fly in I let it run but England looked poor, just before Oxlade-Chamberlain’s 5^th I had tried to even the profit up but my bet was unmatched and before I could resubmit it he scored. This time I evened it up straight away across a variety of rapidly decreasing odds and took home just shy of £280 after commission. Looking back I have mixed emotions, I can’t decide whether this was a particularly great trading session or not. Firstly it was all conducted on my telephone (Google Nexus S)  which despite being top of the range 18 months ago is fairly sluggish now although I doubt Betfair’s mobile platforms are especially quick on any device. Secondly it is easy to rationalise something as the correct/wrong decision after the fact. Either way it doesn’t really matter it was nice to finally win.

This gave me a bit of confidence going into the Murray/Federer semi final yesterday. Ironically Cassini’s post earlier this morning is a précis of everything I wanted to say about the reasons why I ended up losing money on this match. He has described it far more eloquently than I could hope to so instead please take a read if you haven’t already.  In particular the line “It’s certainly far easier to make sound trading decisions on a game between two teams you care nothing about then it is on politics or ‘our’ football team.”  Roger Federer has always been my favourite player and a part of me still refuses to recognise that he isn’t the same player he once was. They say the frame is the most expensive part of the racket but surely Roger has enough money that he doesn’t need to get value for money so regularly. Enough said I didn’t watch the entire match turning off after Federer was broken in the second set. This was in part because I was all-red for about £40 and rather than make it any worse I just walked away, it was also because the Chinese crowd do my head in. Every year it is the same, they aren’t rude on a French scale but it is the volume of cheers through any rally that is longer than 5 strokes that really gets on my nerves.  A particular low-light for me was Roger Federer double-faulting 3 times in a row to give up a break. What happened to the Federer that aced Sampras 4 times to win a game? The first set was almost exactly the same as the first set in today’s final with both players serving like me.  Like yesterday the second set was much better with some far higher quality tennis on display. Robbie Koenig was doing his best to make up for the crowd too, a particular highlight being a characteristic scream of “Novak Djokovic, what are you doing? That was outrageous” after Djokovic followed up a great ‘tweener with a sublime dropshot.  The match is currently still in-play after Djokovic broke Murray back whilst serving for the match and has taken it to a third set

Tennis fans are very lucky because each year more and more games are screened live across the betting sites and the way the scheduling works means that you’ll never have to miss a match in which one of the big 4 are playing. Compared to football the amount of decent quality, live tennis is outstanding, however where tennis is let down is the amount of highlights that are available. I did however manage to find this video below, which was easily the highlight of yesterday's match and came 2 points after Federer had tried to get umpire Nili to pause the match for a little rain as he was clearly struggling. Even the crowd couldn’t ruin this point. 

Tomic the Tank Engine

I'm probably infringing/destroying some copyright law with the title of the blog post but a quick google search showed me that it isn't as original as I first thought.

Just a brief post following on from my Wasted Youth post regarding Bernard Tomic's complete collapse the other day against Florian Mayer. On a tangent Mayer somehow busted a rib between exercising in the gym with Andy Murray (had to fit him in to this somehow) earlier in the day and going out on court. Anyway, back to Tomic who for a long time I have thought is wasting his talent by not trying hard enough. The other day he finally opened up about some of the reasons why he has been so mediocre this year. I think it is an interesting view into his and perhaps other younger player’s mindsets and whislt I don’t care much for his attitude, as a person I’m finding myself respecting him ever so slightly more. After declaring that he only gave "85% effort" he went on to say (paraphrased): 

Today I gave 100 per cent in the first set. I felt in the second set, my 100 per cent wasn't even close to where it should be. That's where I think mentally... the mental skill is one of my biggest problems.

It's been a long year. I played a lot of tournaments. I think I only rested one week after Roland Garros. I think it was the wrong sort of move that I made. I think it's costing me now, the last few months. My performance has not been as good. It's been a massive road this year. I didn't plan my schedule as I should have and it's cost me a lot of matches that I probably should have won.

I haven't had time to rest. I think it's costing me now the last few months. My performance has not been as good. Obviously I'm learning. It's all tough. There's a lot of things thrown at you. I feel last year was a different year. I wasn't expected to do good. That's where I came inside the top 40 at the age of 18. That's where I proved I can play. 'This year has been a little bit different. It's been defending points, defending stuff. I started feeling the pressure. I wasn't prone to pressure growing up. Now I think it's starting to hit me the last five, six months. It's costing me. It's been a massive road this year.

I still think that fatigue isn’t entirely to blame and that unless he can find the desire to win that the likes of Murray and Nadal possess then he’ll never be better than your average top 20 player and that will be a shame. The way he destroyed Potito Starace on Margaret Court Arena back in 2009 was simply breathtaking. 

Practice Makes Perfect

On the way into work this morning (during the talksport adverts) I turned the radio onto 5live where they were talking about the rise in tennis’ popularity in this country since Andy Murray won Olympic Gold and the US Open. It seems to be public sentiment that despite being a gifted footballer Wayne Rooney is seen as a bad role model for young children for being petulant, foul-mouthed and reckless. This got me thinking, despite his obvious talent, is Andy Murray really a good role model for today’s youth? When he’s winning comfortably his on-court demeanour is moody at best but when he’s not playing 100% he takes it to a whole new level, pained looks come across his face, the hand gestures and dramtic sighing intensify, he starts shouting at himself, he starts shouting at his box, he starts using the racket to physically abuse his feet and knuckles. If I had a child, whilst I’d be pleased they cared that much about what they were doing I certainly wouldn’t like them to think it is ok to act like a baby throwing their toys out the pram everytime they lose a point. Under Lendl‘s watchful eye it seemed like he had matured a little and that this nonsense had stopped but during the US Open final it all came flooding back. A particular favourite highlight, apart from the comical expletives, was the scream of “WE DIDN’T PRACTICE THAT” at Lendl after Djokovic ripped a cross-court forehand past him. I imagine he is the sort of person that smashes up playstation controllers every time he concedes a goal on FIFA. In summary, a fantastic player and whilst I enjoy seeing a good racket smash as much as the next guy it would be a shame if Britain produces a generation of players who think it is ok to scream abuse at their coaches and self-harm on the court every time they make a mistake or are outplayed in a point.

The blog is in danger of becoming a little Murray-centric. Today’s post was originally going to be about churn. In not at all the same way that churn is a blight on the insurance industry whilst simultaneously being the lifeblood of financial advisors, it is both a powerful asset to my gambling and an unwelcome guest of my blogging.  Of course high-volume, low percentage betting and having a limited blog readership are two completely different concepts. Fortunately, it doesn’t take an analyst as expensive as me to figure out that a lack of interesting material and advertising are the main drivers of the relatively low regular readership of my blog. The blog is about to reach 1,000 page views according to the blogger stats so I’d like to take this opportunity to thank the 13 or so regular readers for their continued viewing and hopefully my blogging will have improved, and there will be a few more of you by the time the next milestone rolls around.

Number 1

So Roger Federer thinks Andy Murray can become number one. The majority of the headline writers seem to have gone a little overboard ,running with Roger’s  (because we’re best mates) speculative "maybe this year" comment, but a little sensationalism never hurts. Murray has distanced himself from the notion of ending the year on top but is he right to?

Yes. As it currently stands in the race Djokovic has 10,410 points, Roger 8,895 and Murray 6,910. The gap between Murray and Djokovic is therefore 3,500 points and by my reckoning there are 4000 points available to Murray (3500 to Djokovic) which essentially means Murray needs to win in Shanghai, Basel, Paris and each one of his matches at the ATP Tour Finals (which I couldn’t be any more excited about after getting tickets for 4 sessions). At the same time Djokovic would realistically need to lose all 3 tour final matches and be knocked out no later than the QF in the two masters series tournaments.  Of course if the ATP take on board my suggestion and dock Djokovic a point for every £ I’ve lost on him over the last 2 years then Murray has a much stronger chance. All he’d need to do is close the (just shy of) 2,000 point gap to Roger.  As it happens, if I were a betting man I’d rather have money on Roger finishing number 1 than Murray number 2 this year.

Murray’s detractor’s seem to have seized the opportunity to pointlessly attack him. One of my favourite comments (somewhere on the BBC site) went along the lines of “so what? Even if he does become number 1 it’ll only be because Federer’s too old, Djokovic’s knees have gone and Nadal’s so injured he should just retire”. Beyond the fact that, unless I have missed something, Djokovic’s knees are far from gone, it is pathetic reasoning. When Roger is old and grey he will likely be remembered as the greatest competitor in the history of the sport. Nadal will probably be remembered as one of the top 3 or 4 and Djokovic will be a worthy footnote as a fantastic player. Being 4^th in an era that contains all 3 should bring no shame whatsoever.  If he has a good October and January then there is a strong chance he will be number 1 at some point either then or before Wimbledon. No doubt if he does there will be more of the same type of criticism levelled at him but then the same people would probably argue that Lleyton Hewitt didn’t deserve to be number 1 either.    

Revisited Youth

Remember the days before Facebook/Twitter/Mobile Internet\Sky Sports News\Football First etc, when it was very easy to avoid finding out the football scores. Essentially all you had to do was avoid watching the news, which when I was a kid definitely wasn't hard. Reminiscing those old days, I decided that I would turn my phone off on Saturday and wait for MOTD to tell me the scores. The weather was lovely which definitely helped distract my constant need to know what the scores were, if anyone had texted me, how many emails I had, whether anyone wrote on my facebook wall. We went out for a meal Saturday evening, and I desperately tried not to eavesdrop any conversations lest they be regarding the football. Slowly but surely 10:30 crawled around and I sat down with a lager feeling like a kid at Christmas. This was going to be awesome. First set back of the night was discovering Shearer was back on but even he couldn't ruin Chelsea's fantastic performance (not for a lack of trying mind you). Cue the montage of games coming up, game after game went by without Everton appearing and I started to think that as usual Everton would be on last. Of course, everyone thinks their team is always last, although I'm fairly sure Everton actually are! As it turned out it would have been better had we been on last because just like I was 6 again, I stormed up to bed after watching yet another diabolical refereeing performance. Until I got to work today I didn't even realise Reading somehow got a point.

Point of this post? There isn't one really, except that I've learned that waiting for MOTD is a waste of time.

As a follow up to my last post for those interested here are two graphs representing the same, Top 50 data but for the WTA tour

Wasted Youth

In a previous post I mentioned I wanted to write about the career progress of a couple of previously highly talked about juniors, Bernard Tomic and Grigor Dimitrov, I was also going to through Ricardas Berankis in too as liek the other two he is also a previous junior US Open winner (and unlike Tomic was a junior number 1). The inspiration for the post came from Tomic’s Davis Cup captain and former world number 1 (for 1 week) Pat Rafter who publicly lambasted Tomic for his “disgraceful” performance. Rafter was right, as I suspect was John McEnroe who accused him of tanking. A part of me hopes he was genuinely just woeful on the day because if you can’t muster up the enthusiasm to win at a Slam then what will you care about? The idea was then backed up after watching Dimitrov playing Tsung-Hua Yang in Bangkok and seeing that despite being 21 he still occasionally struggles to know what shot to play. One point in particular at 1 set all and 0-30 down exemplified this when Yang hit a cross court backhand to Dimitrov and after initially running around it for the inside-out forehand at the very last second he changed his mind, stumbled with his footwork and hit a tame backhand. As it turned out he won the point and the match even winning a point whilst lying down at one point.

Anyway, that was the post I was initially going to write and probably still will at some point but for now I’d like to briefly showcase the lack of any decent juniors breaking through on tour recently. The aforementioned Tomic is the only teenager in the top 100 and by the end of the month he will be 20. Incidentally there is only one 20 year old too and that is Ryan Harrison at 54. For a while now I’ve been thinking/noticing that there is a lack of youth making its way up the rankings so I decided to look at the ages of the top 50 players at end of each year since 2002. I usually use the end of the year for looking at rankings as it is a constant date but really it is a little arbitrary. Below is a graph that shows the average age in years for each season for the top 10, 20 and 50. For 2012 I’ve taken the current rankings (not race).

As you can see up until 2008, on New Year ’s Eve, the average age of the top 50 player hovered around 25 years 6 month. Since 2008 though this number has gradually crept upwards to the point where this year if the rankings were to stay the same, the average age of the top 50 will be 27 years and 6 months. The top 50 should in theory always have a mix of youngsters making their way up the ladder, the “better than average journeymen”, the older “decent” players and maybe a few old greats on their way down. What has happened over the last few years though is that in the absence of decent youngsters pushing the herd of mid 20-somethings, the herd has slowly grown older. The graph shows this quite clearly. In 2008 the average age of the top 10 was 24 years 6 months, in 2012 it will be 27 years 8 months. The table below shows the respective rankings of the current top 20 since 2008. In 2011 6 players retained their top 10 status and this year 8 out of 10 have with last year’s number 10 Nicolas Almagro being replaced by last year’s number 11, Juan Martin Del Potro. It would be easy to argue that 9 players would be keeping their place had Mardy Fish not missed the entire European clay court season. Similarly 15 of the top 20 have also retained their place.

Rankings in red are outside top 50,

rankings in green signify injury hit seasons

Anyway, these are the “facts”, as the race currently stands Almagro is sitting at number 10 and that would make 9 players retaining top 10 status. Once the season is over I hope to write a follow up piece including my thoughts as to why this has actually happened and why I think, despite the lack of youth in the current top 50, it will soon be 21/22 year olds rocketing up the rankings like Nadal in 2005 rather than 26 year olds like in the case of Tipsarevic. I’ll also try and amalgamate the reasons why the opportunity has passed Dimtrov by and will probably pass by Tomic too.

Edit: I need to get better at organising my thoughts. Completely missed that I think there is more behind the trend than simply players getting fitter allowing them to compete at the highest level for longer. Same goes for the younger players not being physically strong enough. Also, for those interested below is a box and whiskers plot of the dataset used in the original chart.

For any who are interested, my first experience at the races wasn't as awful as I had imagined despite losing money on every race. However I won't be going back in a hurry, despite paying £20 to get in and stand on the finish line I barely got to see any of the action and the wait inbetween races was far too long.

Procrastination

The inspiration for this short entry comes from a post over at Centre Court Trading and in particular the phrase: “I lose focus every now and then and I still find it tough to shut out distractions when I’m in need of a new stimulus”.

The majority of people will, every once in a while, be asked to review their strengths and weaknesses. Perhaps this will be in a job interview or a team ‘bonding’ session and for the most part it tends not to be taken too seriously. “I work too hard”, “I care too much”, “I’m too dedicated to my work”, “I’m happy to work overtime for free” etc etc. I’m guilty of it too although in my personal time I do like to do some self-reflection, most commonly in the form of a modified AAR. What have I achieved? What have I learned? What could I have done better? And what am I going to do differently next time? Well, seemingly like the Sultan, I definitely get distracted too easily and often find myself trying to focus on multiple things at once. Being a man, I don’t do this very well. However by far my biggest weakness is procrastination, and indeed I am an expert at it. In fact under “what am I strong at?” first on the list would be procrastinating. If I have to do it, I’ll probably find something (likely more arduous) else to do instead. Its a disease. Right now, I’m only writing this because I don’t want to dust and hoover before the football.

Its probably the biggest limit on my gambling profits. As I mentioned in the very first line of my first post I love watching and gambling on tennis but so often, as soon as I feel like I should be gambling on tennis I immediately find something else to do instead, read forums, watch tv, do house work, go for a run, you name it. I don’t try and fight it anymore because there’s no point in gambling whilst distracted. This is the reason the whole “should I gamble full-time?” debate largely passes me by. The fact that I probably couldn’t earn enough doing it is a secondary issue.

Tomorrow I’m off to the races for the first time in my life. I hate horse-racing but it is what my company passes off for team bonding and at least there is free car parking. If anyone is at Salisbury races tomorrow I’ll be the guy not drinking, not gambling and not having fun.

Anyway, in order to avoid continuing to blog I’m going to go do some dishes.

Wretched Weekend

They say bad things come in threes. Well over the last 5 days I've managed to contract a sever case of 'man-flu' and also the waste water from the en-suite shower decided to take a detour on its way outside via the living room. I dread to think what is coming next, probably some gambling related disaster. Those previously mentioned items caused me to avoid pretty much all gambling and general sport watching activities. I mentioned before that I don't like to give up but after spending all day Friday and most of Saturday trying in vein to fix the shower all the while battling a cold, I've conceded defeat and I shall have to get a plumber round Wednesday or Thursday to give me a quote. Hopefully it won't be too bad or else I shall be spending all next weekend trying to fix it too. The good news in all this was that unlike the shower my Betfair balance didn't leak any further.

Anyway just a short post to explain my absence, I had hoped to post at least a couple of thoughts over the weekend including my thoughts on the respective progress of 3 previous Junior US Open winners, Ricardas Bernakis, Grigor Dimitrov and Bernard Tomic after watching Dimitrov beat Tsung-Hua Yang the other day (himself a former junior #1). That will have to wait for another day though. I've also decided I wouldn't be a good newspaper headline writer as I really struggled to come up with something for this one.

Willy Beacher?

No. Not 54 times in a row anyway. I hate searching for things on Google only for it to throw up rubbish results. With that in mind and seeing as how a reasonable proportion of people arriving at this blog are doing so because they think I have some advice on beating Stick Tennis’ most annoying of characters I thought I should briefly share how I finally did it. With anything there is usually more than one formula for success and this is simply how I achieved it.

Before I begin it is important to note that if you have ever played or even watched tennis then you need to forget everything you’ve learned about how the game is played. In order to win you’ll need the forehand of Fernando Gonzalez, the amalgamated backhand of Roger Federer and David Nalbandian, the tenacity of Rafael Nadal and Federer’s ability to drop shot a tennis ball like it was a rock. Standing against you, Beacher has the pace of Usain Bolt, the stamina of Haile Gebreselassie, the wing span of Yao Ming and the accuracy of some sort of tennis robot. I forgot to mention that to make things worse you’re saddled with the positional awareness of Titus Bramble.

As you are unable (or I haven’t figured out how) to tell your guy to approach the net you’ll need to be able to dominate the baseline rallies. How do you do that? In essence it is very simple; all you need to do is time your shots close to or, preferably, exactly on the prac-o-meter line. If you are going to mistime your shots you need to make sure that you don’t fire the ball down the middle of the court. If you do it will enable him to move forward and either hit a clean winner or take a dominant net position. Once you are hitting the ball with decent timing the easiest way to win the baseline rallies is to push him cross-court a couple of times before peeling off a forehand winner. Note, during this process if your backhand cross-court is too good he will likely mishit it which will clip the top of the net and trickle over (he never actually nets). I don’t think it matters which side you serve to, I tend to prefer to serve to his backhand but I think that’s personal preference rather than decent strategy.

Holding serve shouldn’t be too much of a problem once you start to win the baseline exchanges. Breaking serve is a whole new proposition though. Willy likes to serve and volley, at a guess I’d say he does it 75% of the time and the best chance to have a greater than 3 stroke rally is to return to him cross-court. On the odd occasion he doesn’t charge the net (easier to tell on the second serve) I think the return down the line is more effective but when he does serve and volley I haven’t won a single point after using that shot. Once he is at the net, for some reason you’re unable to lob him so you only have two options, try and pass him or hit it straight at him. As I mentioned before he has a ridiculous wing-span and so only the most accurately timed of passes will beat him from the baseline. I think the best option is to drop shot it at his feet. IF your timing is good then hopefully you’ll rush forward and his dig will sit up nicely for you to put away. If not then he’ll more than likely lob you. The other option is your guy doesn’t run forward and he dinks it over the net, in this instance the best option seems to be to dink it back and hope you he sets it up for you to put it away. Drop shotting when he isn’t at the net or to the wings when he is, is a low percentage shot as 9/10 he’ll tuck it away.

Having finally beaten him 6-0 I’ve now uninstalled the game because it was driving me crazy and taking up far too much of my time. Best of luck.

Edit: Like a true addict I kept the game uninstalled for about 24 hours before giving in and playing again.

Analytics

I arrived home this evening to a pleasant series of emails from Manchester City Football Club, specifically their analytics department. For those of you who are unaware of this department please take a look at their website. I too was unaware less than 24 hours ago until reading this post over at A Football Trader’s Path. Data analysis is what I do for a living (technically it is “Business Intelligence”) and this is the sort of project which interests me. I don’t have anywhere near enough spare time to replicate some of the more ambitious projects out there but I was hoping to do a few interesting visualisations with the data.  Exactly what these visualisations were I hadn’t really thought about so I was a little taken aback when I checked my emails.

Lacking inspiration but wanting  to dive right in, I remembered hearing about Theo Walcott moaning about wanting to be played as a striker. I decided it might be interesting to delve into his stats last season. As it turns out it wasn’t, he played every game out on the right wing. The only other player to play in the same position in the same formation over a reasonable number of games was Nathan Dyer. Theo scored more and set up more per game, their crossing accuracy was about the same but Dyer was much more involved, passing the ball successfully 50% more often. That was about as far as I got with that one before I realised I’d need to spend a significantly greater amount of time analysing the data before I got anything meaningful.

Undeterred I then remembered how much I dislike Scott Parker as a football player and decided to see just how often he passes backwards. Turns out there was only more disappointment there. The graph below is a scatter plot of all players who passed more than 200 times last season and the percentage of those passes which went forward. I marked out 4 data points. The black square is Scott Parker who was nowhere near the worst offender in the league with a massive 28.3% of his passes going forward. No, that prize went to Swansea’s (now of Liverpool) Joe Allen (red diamond) who sent only 15.4% of his passes in front of him. The other 2 highlighted points are  Luka Modric (green triangle) who sent 26.9% of his 2656 passes forward and Clint Hill (yellow diamond) who was the only outfield player to  hit over 60% of his passes forward (60.5% of 489). A slightly fairer graph is below the first that shows only midfielders playing in the most defensive midfield position available.

Not the most exciting piece of analysis, but after getting excited at the prospect of writing about how glorious or terrible Theo was I felt like I needed to write about something. Also I won’t in good faith be able to tell my friend who supports spur that Parker should go play for Barca because they can’t pass forward either. I will however be bringing Joe Allen up with my Liverpool supporting colleagues first thing in the morning. Hopefully over the next few weeks as I try and turn this flat file into something more usable I’ll be able to come up with some interesting statistics to share. Until then I’ll leave you with the news you’ve all been dying to hear, Beacher is now 52-0 against me. 

Gilles Simon

The majority of football fans support a team, whether that is their local team, their dad’s team or the winning team probably depends on the person. Personally I’m the middle option; I support Everton because that is who my dad supports. When it comes to tennis it isn’t quite the same. My dad doesn’t like tennis, in fact it is probably the only sport he won’t sit and watch. Quite how golf or test cricket is a more entertaining spectacle I don’t know – but each to their own. If he was to have supported a tennis player I guess it would probably have been Jimmy Connors. Now as good as Jimmy was back in the day if I was to have inherited my choice of player then my schedule would be fairly light (in fact a little research tells me that he’s currently injured and not competing at all). No, tennis, like all individual sports, is a little different to team sports as each player has a limited career span. Going back to the football analogy, my support of tennis is like the friend everyone has who supports 15 teams. Mine supports Millwall, Newcastle, Reading, Arsenal, Celtic, Hearts, Barca, Inter Milan, Ajax, Gamba Osaka, Shandong Kuneng, Newcastle Jets, New York Red Bulls and Flamengo. I’d also be like the guy everyone knows who loves the lower league football, who’d much rather watch Burton Albion vs York City than West Bromwich Albion vs Stoke City.

Five years ago I was unlucky enough to find myself without a job and quite frankly without much hope of or inclination to get one. The usual sob story. To pass the time I started gambling, as you do and quickly found out I was good at it. Just as quickly I found out that perhaps I wasn’t after all. After a short but frustrating time not winning a lot but not losing too much either I started to notice some patterns and started developing some tennis systems. Most of these were comparable to “Lay the Draw” in their effectiveness but it was a start. Over time these evolved and became more sophisticated and eventually they sort of merged from separate trading ‘strategies’ to be applied in certain circumstances to an overall trading ethos. The essence of this ethos still stands today and in its simplest form it is to go against the grain. In the midst of this ethos I still occasionally had the odd strategy or challenge, for example the previously mentioned “Andy Murray is going to buy me a house challenge”. The middle of 2008 saw the first successful one size fits all strategy I had and that was to back Gilles Simon after he lost the first set. This was only really an extension of some of my other betting but nevertheless it bought in what was then my largest weekly profit in October 2008. I’ll likely never forget that tournament, it was the Madrid Masters and in the first round he came back from a set down to beat Igor Andreev (another favourite of mine at the time), in the second round he came back to beat James Blake, in the third he came back against Robby Ginepri, in the quarters he didn’t need to come from behind against Karlovic but in the semis he came back to beat Rafael Nadal. The week would have been perfect for this strategy if it wasn’t for the guy who was going to buy me a house. Incidentally I decided to stop blindly backing this at the end of the 2008 season which was probably a good thing because it wouldn’t have been profitable and in fact he probably lost more matches from a set up than he won from a set down.

Whilst some of my favourite players over the years have been so purely because of gambling success, Gilles Simon wasn’t one of them. (I realise that Simon isn't really the tennis equivalent of Burton Albion, but the next article about a player will be closer) The only reason I adopted this strategy was because of how much I already liked him. He was something different to pretty much everyone else on tour. By the time I started watching him in the beginning of 2007 he was already a top 50 player but it was clear he had something about him and it was only a matter of time before he was top 20 and who knew maybe even high top 10s. His slender frame made him stand out from the crowd but despite that it was incredibly rare that anyone bullied him on court. Whilst not possessing the hardest of shots his ability to soak up his opponents’ pace and redirect it back at them was magical. His timing was impeccable which is probably why he had such few unforced errors despite going long stints of the matches painting the lines from both the fore and backhand. 20-30 shot rallies were a common occurrence and, just like Andy Murray, despite looking like a counter puncher his timing allowed him to, out of nowhere, suddenly switch it up and hit winners (again, usually painting the line in the process). Furthermore whilst his French contemporaries, Richard Gasquet, Michael Llodra and Paul-Henri Mathieu were labelled as mentally weak and chokers, Simon often showed incredible mental strength. At the time the only other player that I could put in the same league mentally was Roger Federer, oh how I miss those mental giant Federer days. I’ve deliberately used the past tense because he was unlucky to suffer a few nasty injuries and although he is now back inside the top 20 and he still plays a similar game I feel he’s not quite the player he once was. I wonder whether this is in part due to him becoming a father, a topic worth further exploration in a later post. I still thoroughly enjoy watching him play but at the end of the 2008 season I had hopes of him staying in the top 10 for many years, something I doubt he is capable of now. I cheered his 250 level victory in Bucharest earlier this year like the majority of this nation did when Andy Murray won Olympic Gold. Allez Gilou! Whilst he’s not my all-time favourite player, his refreshing counter-punching style sees him comfortably in the top 5 and not just because he has an awesome name! 

On a final note I suspect the majority of people who vaguely follow tennis will recognise Simon from his outspoken comments regarding unequal pay for men and women at grand slams. “The equality in salaries isn't something that works in sport. Men's tennis remains more attractive than women's tennis at the moment.” Once again probably a topic for another day but I’ll end with Maria Sharapova’s response : “I'm sure there are a few more people that watch my matches than his.” 

Weekend Finals

I had high hopes for this weekend, it was full of sporting promise, tennis, football, golf, cricket, F1, it was all happening, all weekend. In the end though it largely passed me by. Taking full advantage of the last day of sunshine I’m likely to see for a while I invited pretty much the entire family up to see my (the bank’s) new place on Saturday. Inevitably this resulted in me missing almost all of the day’s sport but I wasn’t too disappointed, I managed to catch the end of the WTA final in the morning which by all accounts Laura Robson kept respectable.  I was a little more disappointed yesterday though, my highlight of the weekend was to be the St. Petersburg final between Martin Klizan and Fabio Fognini. However my stomach had obviously gone into overdrive after my early lunch, as I couldn’t stay awake and napped through the entire first set. I woke up to Klizan breaking for a 6-2 2*-1 lead and a quick check of the match stats showed Klizan to be cruising. A wild backhand into the net at 0-15 though gave Fognini some hope that was quickly snuffed out with two decent serves. An easy put away for Klizan at 30-30 somehow went into the tramlines though and Fognini had the break point. That unforced error seemed to start a chain reaction which saw Klizan give up the break only for Fognini to throw down 4 UEs and his racket to be broke back again to 15. After 4 breaks of serve Klizan finally held his nerve and went on to rattle off the last 3 games and take it 6-2 6-3. My first real memory of Klizan is him beating Alexandr Dolgopolov in Morocco a couple of years ago. It was only really memorable because Dolgopolov was a player who I had started to notice, mainly because of his unusual technique and in particular his slice. However, in an entertaining battle Klizan came out on top in three sets although I didn’t have especially high hopes for him. I didn’t really see too much more of him until Wimbledon where he pushed Troicki very hard and since then he’s had a great run of performances including a 4^th round at the US Open beating (and costing me a fair bit of money) Tsonga along the way.

Speaking of Tsonga I was going to give his final against Andreas Seppi a miss but having failed to stay awake for the majority of the previous final I decided to watch it. In summary it wasn’t much of a contest, Tsonga was just too powerful and too accurate for the much improved [on hard-courts] Seppi. It started rather ominously for Seppi with Tsonga banging down an ace and holding to love. Seppi hit back though and got to 40-15 before two unforced errors brought it back to deuce. A couple of unreturned serves won Seppi the game. A wonderful forehand from Seppi forced an error at the net from Tsonga and Seppi was ahead for the first and only time at 0-15 but putting Seppi in his place Tsonga rattled off 4 easy points and took a 2-1 lead. More hard hitting from Tsonga earned him two breakpoints. He had been rather poor so far that week only converting 10 of 39 chances and that stat didn’t improve when Tsonga netted the return. He did however convert the next one after a half-hearted net approach from Seppi was spotted by Tsonga and his thumped cross court shot was too good for Seppi. That was the beginning of the end as Seppi didn’t come close to troubling Tsonga again, finding the power and accuracy just too much. He went on to lose the next 7 games but apart from a long forehand on match point Tsonga looked classy and at ease, dropping just 6 points on serve all match to win 6-1 6-2 and in truth that probably flattered Seppi.

With both tours moving to Asia for the next few weeks and me having to go to work it is unlikely I’ll get to watch too much tennis. That is a shame, but instead of dull match reports it will give me a chance to write about some of my favourite players, the types of matches I like and my previous gambling exploits, both successful and not. First up will be why I used to love Gilles Simon and why I don’t so much anymore.

For those who are interested Beacher now has a 48-0 record against me. I wish it was in my nature to give up, but sadly it isn’t. 

Stick Tennis

So today I managed to find time to play two tennis matches. The first was against a good friend of mine, and was a nice excuse to test out my new racket. For many players the sheer variety of rackets and all their technical differences can be quite daunting. Not for me, for as long as I can remember I’ve always owned Prince rackets for tennis, squash and badminton. However, about 6 months ago I found myself in the unfortunate position of needing to buy a new racket after I accidently ruined the current one. I somehow was peer pressured into changing rackets to a Babolat (Pure Storm Ltd 95). On the face of it they were relatively similar, they both had the same 95” head size and were of a similar weight. However the Babolat was definitely slightly more head heavy and despite my best efforts I just coudn’t get to grips with it. In fact I was so bad with the racket I was going into the match with my friend Russ having lost the previous 4 matches convincingly. It reminded me of Novak Djokovic’s troubles when switching to Head back in 2009, although sadly Babolat hadn’t paid me a fortune to use their equipment. Last week I decided enough was enough and went out and ordered a new Prince EXO3 Rebel 95. Within 30 seconds of knocking up I felt like I was home and the racket just belonged. Despite my new racket I was still up against it though as we were playing on a local hardcourt; easily my least favourite surface whilst at the same time Russ’ favourite. The match didn’t start too well with me dropping my service to 15 and the first set never really got going for me. Too many unforced errors and far too many winners from him. Eventually I gave the set up 1-6. The second set started a little better with a beautiful inside-out forehand winner followed by a sumptuous dropshot. I couldn’t break though and as it turned out neither of us did for the whole set. He eventually took the tiebreaker to 4 after a couple of silly unforced errors early on. Still, I felt confident about my game for the first time in months which was the main thing and in the end its all a bit of fun.

My second match was against my new arch-nemesis, Willy Beacher of Stick Tennis fame. I’ve never been great at computer games but I do find Stick Tennis an entertaining waste of time. I’m too much of a scrooge to pay £2.99 to unlock the full game so after beating the first 4 players on ‘World Domination’ the only challenges left were on the practice courts. I breezed past all comers until I squared off with Willy. It seemed like he was barely trying and yet in our first encounter I won just a solitary point and even that was off an ace. I now know how Roger Federer felt in Miami back in 2004. In each of our previous matches prior to today Willy had dominated me and my previous best score was 1-6. Never deflated though I raced to a 40-0 lead and after shanking a forehand wide I eventually won the game to 15. That was the first time I had managed to win the opening service game – cue the 24 points in a row against. But wait, 3 thunderous returns, 2 down the line and 1 cross-court and Willy was teetering. Scoreboard pressure. After a seemingly never ending rally to put Gilles Simon to shame Willy went long and I had the break 2*-0! Nobody beats me 32 times in a row. However a suspect line call that went his way seemed to be the signal for him to go on a rampage and before I knew it I was 2-5* down. I did manage to break back, perhaps Willy choked, I don’t know but either way it didn’t matter ad I tamely handed the break and with it the match back. Still, I’m improving.

Edit: See here for a post explaining how I finally did it.

Virtual tennis matches probably aren’t of interest to many people so I apologise but I had to fill the post up with something in addition to the main purpose of this post which is the question: can anyone tell me if it is possible to add non blogger/wordpress blogs such as http://wearetennis.com/en/blog to your blogroll? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Cheers.

Prologue

I love playing tennis, I love watching tennis and I love gambling on tennis. In short, I love tennis (although I’m partial to a little football on occasion too) so I thought, “why not immerse myself in the sport even further by writing about it as well?” A few reasons came to mind, not holding a degree in journalism was one, not having the time was another, and in the end I talked myself out of it, I had previously written a blog 3 or 4 years ago along a similar theme but it didn’t last especially long.

Then four months ago I bought my first house which set off a chain of events that has led me to change my mind and start this blog. The essence of the story is that before buying the property I would watch and gamble on tennis approximately 15-20 hours a week and, as a hobby, it was quite profitable (I made enough for a deposit on a house at least). My mistake was thinking this could carry on the same once we moved in and I started to do all the DIY my girlfriend had planned for me. Now, in most aspects of life if you’re not focused you probably won’t be successful and, for me at least, gambling is the same. Between work and DIY I was shattered and wasn’t ever in the right frame of mind for sitting down for a tennis session let alone trying to shoehorn in half a set here and there and trying to force some action. Fortunately I didn’t lose too much money before I decided that if I couldn’t dedicate myself to it then I was better off temporarily stopping altogether. This wasn’t as easy as it could/should have been but that is for a later post.

So why the blog? Well about a month ago I decided to get back in the saddle and start gambling again but so far it hasn’t gone too well. Also, as I mentioned right at the beginning I love playing tennis but at the ripe old age of 26 I’ve already reached my peak; the occasional ball I would once have thundered back down the line now flies past my racquet and the Köellereresque dives that once frequented my game are becoming an endangered species. The combination of those two has started to slightly dampen my love for the game. Therefore, I’m hoping that by writing about my favourite players, my thoughts on matches that I watch and about my (hopefully profitable) gambling on these matches it might help to keep my enthusiasm up. Hopefully I'll find something to write about at least once a week and that someone will enjoy reading it.

Addendum

It is probably a little late to dedicate a whole post to Andy Murray’s triumph at the US Open but I’d like to mention it and a paragraph on the blog’s opening post seems fair enough. First off, I’m a big Murray fan, back in 2007 I even had an “Andy Murray’s going to buy me a house challenge”. Sadly that never quite came to fruition, neither did my 2008 “Juan Martin Del Potro is going to buy me a Ferrari challenge” but those are both posts for another day. I don’t agree with the majority of the print media who suggested that winning the US Open in such a ‘Golden Era’ is the greatest British achievement in tennis. With unarguably the greatest player ever now 31 and the pretender to his throne’s knees finally giving out, I don’t think it is a particularly fair comment. What I do think is fair to say is that Murray’s win is the greatest British achievement in tennis, full stop. To get to the top of any sport is a phenomenal achievement and the leaps and bounds he’s come on physically in the last couple of years and mentally this year is nothing short of incredible. He had plenty of doubters, largely from a press and public that would on average struggle to name more than 6 tournaments but hopefully he can now kick on and win another couple before any of the decent youngsters mature enough to challenge. It truly was a great end to a fantastic 6 weeks of sport.