Apologies for the lack of updates. I have a number of work projects on the go of late which have kept me preoccupied. At one point I didn't gamble for a whopping 3 days in a row(ridiculous...i know)!
I have found the time though to begin design a database to fill with historical tennis match data. There are a number of things I want to analyse. Not only player abilities but also trends such as the correlation between the match win price and the 1st set result.
An example would be players priced to win @ between 1.01-1.05 win the 1st set %x of the time.
There's that plus a whole bunch of other queries it can answer. Plus I have a few general handicapping ideas I want to try so i'm quite excited(sad I know) about finally finishing it.
Saturday, 24 April 2010
Been betting a lot more basketball recently. I've layed LALakers to win the championship @ 4. Kobe Bryant is declining and even at his best is not even worthy of comparison to LeBron James. imo Lebron James may surpass Jordan as the greatest player ever.
Cleveland and Orlando are the 2 best teams in the league and by a considerable margin i'd say.
As a side note: I'd been playing around with some of the blogger themes, as you no doubt have noticed. In doing this I accidentally deleted all my links. So for those of you that exchanged blog links with me I apologise and will be tracking you down in the next few days(though if you're reading this just putting your blog link in the comments will save me a great deal of time).
Kelly criterion is the optimal strategy to maximize capital growth.
It's premise is that with a greater edge, a gambler/investor's stake should increase. Now the problem with betting the full Kelly stake is we have to know our exact edge to be sure we're betting the correct amount. Since few (if any) do, the answer is to bet fractional Kelly.
My personal preference is 1/4 to 1/2 Kelly dependent on the league i'm betting on.
An example:
Lets say we think team x will beat team y 2-0 3% of the time and this score is available to lay @ 19 on Betfair.
Laying at 19 is the inverse equivalent of backing at 1 + (0.95 * (1/19)) or 1.05. This is assuming %5 commission.
We plug the %97 win expected winrate and our 1.05 price into the kelly calculator and it tells us we should risk %37 of our bankroll. Now betting half kelly with a £5k roll equates to £925 risked. But for simplicities sake we can round down or up to the nearest unit size.
Had we been laying @ 25 our stake would have been smaller or laying at 15 it would have been greater.
Don't forget the one thing every correct score layer needs! a Betfair account.
(sign-up from the link below and receive £25 free)
Saturday, 13 March 2010
Looking forward to the WorldCup. Correct score laying wise internationals and cross-league games(CL, FA Cup etc.) are more difficult to analyse, though i'll have a more lengthy post about it nearer the time.
Not completely unrelated to that.............. I have built up a decent position on USA outright winner market at prices ranging from 82-90. Obviously they have very little chance of winning. However that doesn't matter, we simply lay the bet off after the group stage when it will drop significantly.
For those that don't have Bet365 accounts already, they're giving away £200 when you sign up to a new account. This is a great bonus to take risk-free advantage of with Bonus Arbing via Betfair.
It's unlikely(though not impossible) for you to find a +ev bet to arb but a neutral ev or even slightly -ev bet is fine since we're doing it with free money. The idea is to bet the max £200 then lay it off on the exchanges. There is a work through requirement of 3x the bonus amount but this doesnt matter, the idea is we want to lose on bet365 and win on betfair before we hit the work through and if we haven't done it after the 3 bets we can just withdraw from Bet365 anyway. Heres how's it's done: Step 1: Deposit £200 with Bet365 and bet it all on Team X @ evens(example price). Lay off Team X on Betfair @ 2.02(or if you're lucky 1.90). We take a small loss(or profit) on this match but get £200 free from Bet365. Step 2: repeat Step 1 on the next match if we win on Betfair we're done and £200(- the small loss from the arbs) richer. If not we repeat again until we win on betfair or hit the workthrough requirements and withdraw our profit from Bet365. An easy way to make some risk-free money!
What is a good return from correct score laying? Well, anything over 0%! A skilled gambler should easily be able to hit well over %2 ROI laying correct scores over a significant sample. %1 should be achievable by most and is a good target to aim for. 1% doesn't sound like much but it can add up to significant sum over time. (For those that don't know ROI means return on investment and is the profit shown as a percentage of total amount wagered.) For example: A gambler with a £3k bankroll spending a few hours a week laying correct scores should easily be able to lay an average of 10+ games per week. Laying to a £1000 liability per bet gives a total amount wagered of £10k per week. If he hits his %1 ROI target thats £100 a week, or a little over £5k profit over the year.
I gave a pretty terrible and incorrect analogy in my blog post as was pointed out to me by Cassini. My point being that 350 in a row sounds a lot more impressive than it actually was. I could randomly pick correct scores and hit at %90+ but it wouldn't be profitable. The message I was trying to give was that you will be successful with most of the correct score lays. However, that doesn't mean you should lay at any price. Every score has a >0% chance and since it is nigh on impossible to predict a correct score to within 2 decimal places a good rule of thumb is just to avoid laying at more than 100.
