I concede that profit and loss blogs are mainly largely of interest solely to the people that write them. When this blog started out it wasn't intended to be solely profit and loss but that's the way it's turning out. I plead time - or the lack thereof. Growing up I seemed to have plenty of it. I had all sorts of ideas and seemingly plenty of time to choose whether to pursue them or no. Days and weeks seemed to drag on . I had holidays once or twice a year and at the end of the August holiday I used to stare at the sea and the thought that I wouldn't be back there again for almost a year made me feel down - I thought the time would never go by.
..............But all that was over 30 years ago. I got married, had two great daughters, both of whom are still at home, and the weeks and months now fly by. Five minutes ago it was Christmas; next week it's Easter, and we've not even had time to think about holidays this year yet. Some things haven't changed; I'll never get used to Monday mornings, but no sooner is it Monday than it's Wednesday again and the next weekend hoves into view. I prefer it like this if I'm honest but my point is it leaves me no time to write a blog which may be of more than passing interest to other people. I envy the people that either do have that time, or manage to find it from somewhere, but for me it's proved impossible. In any case, as I've said before, I've made a profit in each of the two previous seasons (I do know that, as I have a handwritten record of each and every bet), but without going back over an awful lot of records I can't say exactly how much from each type of bet and that was my main reason for blogging this season as it's forced me to keep separate detailed records of each and every type of bet. Stakes have been small, generally between £6 and £10, but that's because this blog represents only a proportion of my total betting.The general question for me was could I publish my bets in advance and show a profit. Well as it happens yes I can. A net profit after commission of £168.50 on £4783.50 staked represents a grand old return on investment of 3.5%. Not very much you might say - and you'd be right! But wait: these totals include my draw bets and those matches where I've bet on the draw have proved very unprofitable since Christmas; overall this season the roi for them is in negative territory to the tune of nearly 26%.Curiously enough those bets on which I've also gone for under 2.5 goals have shown a slight (and I mean slight) profit; just £3.50 on £711 staked. I say curiously because the matches on which I've gone for under 2.5 are selected only from those which I've already bet on as being draws. In other words I'm finding enough low scoring matches (just about) which is what you need when looking for draws, but simply not enough of them are translating to draws. Disappointing, because when I started the blog it was draws in which I intended to specialise, but, let's face it,the draws are going to need a couple of really decent runs to make any inroads into the losses, whereas I would prefer to cut these losses and play to my strengths.
My strengths, it seems, are those matches where we are trying to find goals or predict one team scoring more than the other and Those bets where I have either gone for home or away, or over 2.5 goals or both teams to score are showing a much much better return of 14.1% with a strike rate of almost 50% over a decent number of bets. The actual figures are 241 winning bets from 501 selections and a profit after commission of £431 on £3046 staked. So at this point I intend to start afresh using only these 4 types of bet. As stated earlier, the total profit so far including the draws has been £168.50, so we are not hiding a loss by starting afresh, merely trying to maximise the bank by betting in those areas in which we are strong. Now if you're betting on football' this stage of the season isn't generally considered to be the best time to start. A lot of professionals reduce their betting after Easter because the promotion and relegation issues start to get sorted out and more and more teams are deemed to have 'nothing to play for' as the days go by. I'm not sure that argument holds up as presumably the bookies too have problems when pricing up these matches; anyway, we shall see. On past performance I'm hoping for an overall strike rate of at least 40%, which in theory means that we can expect at least one losing run of 14 in a sequence of 1000 bets. Should two of these come close togethe, hopefully the worse case scenario would be a run of 28 losers. For this reason I'm splitting my £400 starting bank into 50 x £8 bets initially. As the bank (hopefully) rises I'll divide the new figure by 50 (to the nearest 50 pence and that will become the new minimum stake. I don't intend to reduce the stake unless I hit a real disaster, as I've already made allowance for disaster in the original staking!
Please be very careful if following and don't overstake - especially at this end of the season - you can see I don't risk much myself. The first bets will be up later tonight or tomorrow morning.
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