The Chase - Part One

Profit £41.00

I did exactly as I set out to do last night, and made my £40 on the 4 NBA matches.

My 'safe' approach that I used involves doing all my in-play trading as early in the game as possible.
The first part of the opening quarter is spent looking to see how the markets are moving, and when I think I see value, I'll move in. At this point in the match, the markets move enough to generate a profit, but not volatile enough to lose a large percentage of my stake. Once I have got a bit of green, I can use this to trade with, and have no exposure.
Ideally, I'll have made all my green by half time, and worst case scenario I have the whole of the second half to undo any losses.

Its a dull way to trade and will never make me a millionaire, but as a method of making small profits its very effective.


Tonight, I had originally set out to make £110 on the 11 NBA matches, but as a lot of these are running concurrently, this is probably not very realistic. Instead I'll aim for half of that,£65, and I'll clear off the rest of my red on Friday's NBA.

How to chase a Loss!!

Loss - £175.00

Last night was a total disaster trading the NBA, and I managed to wipe out the last 4 days profits.
I went wrong as I tried to buy my way out of a losing position....sometimes it works, sometimes it goes horribly wrong.
It gets worse....I had a decent green position on the Denver @ Phoenix game, which would have made my nightly loss more acceptable, but instead I tried to be too clever and I managed to reduce a £71 green to just £12 in a matter of minutes.
No point on dwelling too much on the past, but instead look to the future.

One of the things I seem to do well as a gambler/trader is coming back well from nasty losses.
The psychological trick is not to try and make the money back on the next bet, but instead break it up into more managible amounts. I know lots of traders are against setting targets, but it works well for me.

So how do I intend to make it back???

I'm going to concentrate on the NBA for the next few nights.... I have 4 matches tonight, and another 11 tomorrow. I know if i play it tight, and with an ultra cautious approach, then I am easily capable of making an average of £10 per match. Its a strategy I generally use for trading the NBA , and most nights I'm successful (last night was a bit of a rush of blood to the head.....Gordon Gecko was wrong...Greed is NOT good!!).
The most important thing is not to worry too much if I don't achieve my targets.....when my bank has been depleted, conservation of capital is more important than profits.

Hopefully I'll post again before the weekend, and by then the nasty red above will just be a memory!!

My Betting Life Part One - How I started

My Betting Life

It all started about 4 years ago. I was a regular on a football forum, and used to post predictions for matches, which had an uncanny knack of coming true.
Somebody on the forum asked me how much I made gambling...to which I replied that I never had. Up until this point in my life, I had always assciated gambling with old men in smoke filled betting shops blowing their wage packet on horses...to this day, I have still never been in a betting shop!!

This started me thinking, and later that day I opened up and deposited my first £20 in a Ladbrokes account. Over the weeks, the £2 bets turned into £5 and £10 bets, all on Win/Lose/Draw markets....and my bank quickly grew to in excess of £800 before I started to withdraw.

I couldn't believe I was making money regularly, because as we all know, the bookie has the edge and will ultimately win. Sure enough, the profits dried up and I was just about breaking even, but occasionally taking a nasty loss as I tried to scale up my betting.
To try and get the edge, I started taking advantage of all the other online bookmakeres introductory offers, and had opened accounts with all the major players...and this is how I discovered Betfair, late in 2006.

I didn't quite understand the concept of trading at first, but quickly got into the swing of things and realised that to make money long term, trading was the way forward. Sadly, my sport of choice was football, which is probably one of the few sports that does not lend itself well to trading.

I began to dabble in tennis trading, and after an initial flush of success I made some almighty mistakes. The most notable was the 2007 Miami Open final when Serena came back from the dead to beat Henin....I got in a total mess, and ended up taking a red in excess of £1300, to date my biggest ever loss by some considerable distance. To this day, I'm haunted by this, but it turns out it was one of the best lessons in trading I could ever have...albiet a very expensive one.

I considered quitting completely at this point, as this had decimated my bank and I could see no way back.
Around this time I accidentally came across The Betfair Trader blog, and although his speciality was cricket, I could see how I could apply some of his thinking towards other sports, and turn it into my advantage. More importantly, it proved to me that it was possible to make money trading, and that the average person could do it. I quickly learned that successful sports trading depended on not just reading the game, but also reading the markets.

So began my Betting Life Part Two - The Learning Process.

To be continued.....

Ireland ruined my day!!!

Profit £53.00

I clocked up a good profit on Friday Nights NBA, and even managed to pick up a few ££'s on the Super 14 rugby.

The gambler in me made an appearance though, I thought Wales were a fantastic bet to beat Ireland in the 6 nations.... and duly waded in to the market with £100.
If I had my sensible trading head on, I would have either greened out or reduced my exposure at half time...but I thought I'd give it 10 minutes of the second half to see what happened.
Ireland ran riot in that opening 10, and I had to close out eventually for an all red £35.

Of course, later in the game I could have traded out for a profit, but I wasn't prepared to take the risk.
I can live with losing £35, but I would have been gutted if I had blown all my daily profits, so common sense prevailed.

Rugby League Trading

Profit £97.00



When I first became interested in betting, it was all about football. I loved the game, I'd watch and follow all the major leagues around Europe, and I became quite adept at making money on it.

A strange thing has happened over the last few years....I no longer go to matches, rarely bet on them, and seldom even bother to watch on TV anymore.



The void has been filled by Rugby League....I had never even watched a game until about a year and a half ago, and now I'm obsessively following both the Super League and the NRL.

(Although I can watch Rugby Union, I often find the games are turgid.....constantly resetting the scrums, all the farting about at the breakdown, the constant ping pong exchange of long kicks can make these games unimaginably dull to the novice rugby fan)



I watched the St Helens v Leeds match tonight, and it pretty much had everything. It was played at full speed, full force...lots of hard tackles, good tries and the odd fight or two.

It also turned out to be superb for trading, and I managed to make a decent amount of cash without to much sweating.



On another note, BT F***ing Internet have still not replied to my 3 emails sent last night, nor have the maintenance team bothered to get in touch.
No problem, I'm going to start bombarding them with daily emails until they fix my problem and refund my money.
Next stop Ofcom!!

Another rant about BT Internet

This is now getting beyond a joke (see previous post) with my supposed 8Gb BT broadband!
My actual connection speed is now on par with an old dial up modem, and still cuts off intermittantly.

I have complained yet again via email to BT, demanding they sort it out straightaway and refund my £100 odd line rental/broadband fee for the last 3 months. I'm sure they will reply within a week or so, with their usual (in)efficiency.

How you are supposed to complain effectively via contact centres in Bangalore (or wherever they are based in India) is beyond me.
All you get is standardised replies (eventually, if you are lucky) and false promises.
Nobody seems to take any sort of responsibility....Whatever happened to good old fashioned, one on one, human contact???

I have nothing against the people in the call centre. For what its worth, on the face of it they are extremely helpful, polite and apologetic. Its the system that sucks!!!

If anybody out there knows how I can get BT to move their arses and resolve my problem and give me my money back, please let me know!!!


Meanwhile, in trading land, I made £12 profit.....I had to use my mobile phone for an internet connection, because its actually appears faster than broadband. Due to my technolgical problems, it was 10% stakes tonight, but all went well.

The Gym, Profit....and BTInternet!!

Profit £126.00

I have spent the last few days working hard at the gym, training until I'm almost sick. I'm determined to make up for lost time, and get myself into shape.

This has meant little time for trading tennis, but curiously enough, profits have been good.
In the last two nights I've dabbled, and everything is coming up green!!
I was beginning to think that I would reduce my level of tennis trading and instead concentrate on NBA...but it I can keep up these levels of profit it would be a foolish move.

My on-going feud with BTInternet is still not resolved...

I have had a connection problem for well over 2 months... I told them way back at the start that it was a problem with the line. During these 2 months, I have been sent emails with advice like check your modem is plugged in etc, and promised numerous phone calls which never came.
Finally, after refusing to pay my bill (foolishly paid now!!) I spoke to a nice, helpful woman on Sunday night, and together established that the problem was.......a fault in the line!!!!

She contacted the maintenance people, and I was promised they would be in touch within 24-48 hours to solve my problem.
4 days later, no phone calls and no email.

If you are looking for a broadband provider, do yourself a favour and have nothing to do with BT F**king Internet.