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.