The Footy Trader

Manchester United totally wiped out Chelsea and Scolari is not too pleased with that, unsurprisingly. I didn’t expect there to be such a comprehensive thrash type scoreline at 3 – 0 but I have been expecting Man U to be heading upwards in the league because of having two games in hand on the other teams in the top four.

As for my trading at the weekend, I did do some trading on the under 2.5 goals with the Villa game and then I missed the start of the later games. I think I will have to start setting a reminder on my iPhone of when the games are due to start so that I can get in there in a timely fashion. I didn’t even do anything with the lay the loser strategy, as I was looking at the Stoke Liverpool game and there was no score to do anything with. In the Villa game after the first goal I could have done the lay the loser but the lay odds were way too high. I may consider looking at the possibility of doing a dutch of the win and the draw instead it may be more controllable.

OK so now I will go and look at the fixtures list for this week and start making some calendar appointments that will wake me up in time for when the game is due.

I would be pleased to hear from you if you have any ideas for betting strategy on football games. Tell us what is working for you or even what is not working. Is anyone still working on the Football Cash Generator and how are you doing with it?

I have been trying out ZedBet and I have to say that so far I have been impressed. I sent money in via a bank transfer and it got there quickly and I found the site to be easy to use when looking for the market I was interested in.

More important is getting money out when you win and is looking like that will be just as quick. I sent in the withdrawal request email. No online forms on the ZedBet web site just send in the information they request. and I got a reply back within minutes to say that the details had been sent to the payment department and I will be paid as quickly as possible.

They will pay out for free once per month which is good. I have seen this policy on other betting sites also. I will let you know when the money arrives. Now it is Thursday and nearly midnight. I was surprised to get confirmation of the withdraw so quickly as it is so late. I thought that I would get an email back in the morning. Well done ZedBet.

The other good thing to mention is that they have a welcome bonus at the moment and it is up to 100 Euro. Not bad at all. I got lucky with my first bet which won for me, and then I got the bonus of 100 Euro which sadly lost. I had a bet on Slavia Prague playing at home and I thought they might get revenge in a home game as they lost in Hamburg.

I have just been checking the stats on the Soccerstats site and in particular the under 2.5 goals stats. As you know I believe the getting value with your bets is important. So I took the data from Soccerstats and put it in to Betcalc.com which has a value calculator. The reason I did this was because the stats this season indicate more goals and more games where the final score is more than 2.5 goals. Last season I remember it being around 48%.

With 48% you needed to get odd of at least 2.10 to have a value bet and now with 43% as the statistic for games under2.5 goals you need odds of 2.35 to be getting value.

I don’t think that the odds for the unders on Betfair or Betdaq has reflected this change in the numbers, so that is not such a good thing. You need to be getting value because if thing do go wrong and you have to leave a trade as a straight bet then you want to know that you have the value.

If you get bets at odds of 2.30 on the unders on 43% in the stats then after one hundred bets you will have lost 1.10 pounds or Euro or whatever. If you get odds of 2.35 then you should make 1.05 Euro or pounds.

Lets look at the odds available in the premiership games on today

Chelsea v Newcastle – 2.38
Aston Villa v Man Utd – 1.98
Liverpool v Fulham – 2.04
Man City v Arsenal – 2.28
Middlesborough v Bolton – 1.82
Portsmouth v Hull – 1.82
Stoke v West Brom – 1.87

So you can see that in most of these games there are poor odds where getting a value bet is concerned. I think also that this can affect how fast the odds change at the start of a game too. Obviously the higher the odds the faster they will fall when five, ten, fifteen or twenty minutes have gone in the game and no goals have been scored.

What you could do is to look at the odds after a goal has been scored. Often the odds go up fairly high and then have a sharp fall for the next five or ten minutes of the game. It could be a better strategy than taking the poor odds at the start of the game. All you have to worry about then is the quick equaliser goal. I dodn’t know what the stats are for that occurance but it should be slim enough that the overall strategy will be a winner.

Liverpool deserved a draw from the game at home to Athletico Madrid  although Madrid were very unlucky to go home with a draw. Work that one out. Great game to watch and Liverpool were playing well but couldn’t get the ball in the back of the net. At the finish on 95 minutes Liverpool were awarded a dubious penalty and Steven Gerrard put it away.

Sometimes you have to think that footy is a weird game, but then that’s what makes it so compelling to watch and enjoy. You never know what is going to happen next.

Chelsea losing in Roma was a shocker too when you consider the form they are playing with lately. A couple of 5 – 0 wins lately in the Premiership.

England playing and winning. Manchester United beating Celtic and the first two goals being offside. That was bad luck for Celtic. There was a Rooney goal disallowed for offside which should been allowed, offset the previous bad decisions halfway though. When there is such bad refereeing decisions you have to wonder how they can wonder why they need the Respect campaign for the Referees.

But then again there is the thing about this problem of human fallability which makes the game so interesting. There would be some much less for the commentators to talk about and for the fans to complain about if all the decisions had to be confirmed by an extra official watching the game on a TV and getting out a measuring tape to access more accurately the decisions.

Mind you that could stop all of the play acting though by the players pretending to have been badly injured when the tackler didn’t even touch them.

I found a download available to be able to trade on Betdaq. It is a java application so it works native on my Mac. It is an early version so not very stable but interesting to have a look at and try, especially seeing as Betfair have this thing with wanting to charge successful traders more money. Many people have moved to Betdaq and the liquidity is getting better too.

I have set this up as a home win in the Football Cash Generator and Here is a snapshot of the settings in the spreadsheet. Click on it to get more detail in the larger image.

UPDATE – profit from this one worked out like this. €100 less 5% = €95- €5.34 loss on the nil nil = €89.66

So the Football Cash Generator fund opened with €250 now is €339.66

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

As part of the run up to the Euro 2008 the teams are playing friendlies to get themselves in trim and to work things out. I set up a matched bet today on the France game because I set up new accounts and had free bets to use up. I backed the correct score of 1 – 0 with €31.79 @ odds of 6.5 for France at Will Hill and laid it off at Betfair odds of 6.8.

With the higher odds I get more of the money into my Betfair account if the trade works that way. There were no good odds for me on the draw which I often go with so I looked around some more. I think I am getting about 75% of my free money from this. Won’t be so good if the scoreline ends up 1 – 0 though but I should be alright France have a good enough team to score a couple and then again Colombia could put one in the net too.

Tags: Euro, Championship, 2008, France, Colombia, friendly, international, football, soccer, betting, matched, Betfair

Everything was looking great with the game that looked like I would get all the cash into Betfair but There just had to be a goal in the last minute. Valladolid couldn’t hold on to the 1 – 0 lead that that they had for most of the game.

So the next part of the plan is the bets I have on the Match odds of the Manchester vs Chelsea game on Wednesday. I took quite a while looking for a game with the right odds and eventually got 3.20 on SkyBet and 3.20 on Betfair. Normally there is a bit of a gap between the odds and you lose a little in the translation as it were. There is only a small loss with this trade.

I think if the bet goes the Side of SkyBet I will try for a withdrawal direct to my bank account. I don’t really want to do that – I could have done it with the 150 Euro I had there but I have a funny feeling that there will be bank charges to deal with.

I suppose I should be philosophical about this because it is money that I got easy and is just cutting into the profits I have made in the last couple of months. It is just that once I have the money in my grubby little paws I want to hold on to it. It really is all part of the game though. I will have to keep this in mind when I start on the next round of trading.

Premiership over for the season just the FA Cup to look forward to, although I will be working when the game is to be played.

There is the final of the UEFA Cup to look forward to I suppose. I will be €45 better off whatever happens although it will be easier for me if Rangers lose as I have that side of the deal laid on Betfair.

I suppose we can enjoy the European Football during the summer but without England in the mix it will not be so interesting for us English. I expect I will give my support to Spain instead. I have not seen so many of the Spanish La Liga games this year as I have been watching more English TV

Tags: UEFACup, Premiership, Betfair, betting, La Liga, FA CUp

I have this game here Ajax are winning 3-1 at 75 minutes and I have laid the draw at Betfair and Backed the draw at Lasseters, the new online Aussie bookmaker.

I also have a trade on the Boulogne vs Grenoble game and Grenoble are one up, would be great if they could go another one up to but a bigger cushion between the draw.

Earlier I had a back bet at Lasseters odds of 7.00 on the game ending 0-2 in favour of Chelsea, So I have a pile of cash in Lasseters to sort out.

Tags: Bookies, matched betting, Ajax