Talkbet

September 30th

Apologies for the lack of posts, been busy the last few days, blogging takes a low priority :o)

Saturday as predicted was another miserable day, the football app made a loss of £242 and various other sports gave me a loss of £297 in total on the day. The only silver lining was a profit of £9 from the horses. I was a bit unlucky with the football though to be fair, I missed out on a couple of potential huge wins, Man U got a very dubious penalty to go into the lead and if the Arsenal v Hull game goals and gone in a slightly different order then it would of been a very pleasing day indeed. Just to rub salt into the wounds I noticed the next day that Barcelona had got beat 1-0 away, I was surprised that my app hadnt placed any bets on this game and it was only then that I noticed that the app had fallen over early in the evening, the Barcelona result could of well turned things round for the day :o(

Sunday saw things get back on track. Football saw a profit of £290 as finally the bets that I was placing started coming in, I work on value odds so I know sooner or later if the bets I'm offering are poor value then I will win over time. It can just get a bit demoralising though if you suffer losses day after day. Horses made a loss of £20 which was disappointing.

Yesterday saw another comeback. Football made a very pleasing £335, not bad for a Monday with little action! The horses also had an excellent day with a profit of £52, thats more like it.
I'm in a dilemma with the horses, I'll let the current app run as it's in profit so no harm there. I'm not sure whether to embark on writing another app for it though, I've tried writing automated trading apps before and they've come to nothing. Writing apps can take weeks/months of effort and tweaking, it's hard to give up on something after spending so long on it. So I have to decide whether I try writing another app based on an idea I have or try and come up with something different, decisions decisions....

I like the notion of value odds, some people dont believe in them but my football based app proves to me that laying poor odds makes good profit over time. It also means you can have a straight bet on something based on the data you have produced and dont have to sit there sweating on trading it out. If I could find a system that could produce ratings for horses and thus then produce odds I'd like to use that instead of some self written automated trading app.

September 27th

Very brief update on yesterdays results, utterly abysmal day :o(

Football lost £355, horses lost £30, all other sports baseball etc had losing days. Going through very tough time and bank is looking very unhealthy given the pasting its taken this week!

Today seems no better but will update more tomorrow or Monday.

Thanks for the comment, nice to know someone reads the blog,have added the link.

September 26th

Another losing day yesterday following the downward spiral for the week! The football application had a bad evening with a loss of £187, not good.

The horses also had another losing day, it means that over the course of the last week the horse racing application has made the grand total of £4.55, wow :o) That figure is neither here nor there really, I'm adding some more races into the equation so I'll leave it running another week.

This weekend might see the start of some powerstats predictions, just depends on whether the teams have played enough games as yet, I should know later, exciting stuff!

Funny how when I'm winning I enjoy posting, am enthusiatic and seem to have plenty to talk about but when I'm on a losing streak I just can't be ar*ed :o)

Hopefully have a decent weekend and a nice long blog on Monday, we shall see.....!

September 25th

Should of carried on with my little experiment from the day before and layed Villa and Man City last night, would of had a couple of decent wins!

Football had an off night losing £55 but no real damage there.

The horse racing made a tiny loss of £1.25 so still hanging in there for the week, not sure if it's luck, coincendence or a profitable system with the horses really, I am sure increasing the stakes will see it swiftly consigned to the bin :o)

No personal bets for me yesterday, fancied Chelsea at 1.7 but when I looked again they were 1.6 before coming down to 1.5 at kick off. The result justified the drop in price.

Just finished doing the donkey work for my value odds application for football, what a horrible slog that was and not something I'd embark on again. Hopefully should have something meaningful to use in a day or two.

September 24th

Well at lot better yesterday on the horses with a profit of £30 which is encouraging. I am still going through lots of ideas and possibilities in my mind about any new angles I can use on the horse racing markets whether thats pre race or in play, haven't really come up with anything just yet.

Football made a loss of about £30 yesterday so nothing to worry about.

Some of my USA sports, namely Baseball, are taking a bit of a pasting at the moment, I'll review the figures at the end of the month but might well remove them from the list of sports I run my trading apps on.

I was a bit bored on the train going home last night so went through last nights Carling  Cup games on my mobile, this competition normally springs one or two surprises in each round so I layed Arsenal, Liverpool and Sunderland all at odds on. I thought about West Ham but with the new manager just coming in and the odds being to high I left them out of it. The lay of Sunderland paid for the 2 losses on Arsenal and Liverpool. I also backed Fulham as I fancied them to have a run at this competition and they were decent enough odds at Burnley (Burnley won 1-0) . So a small loss on the night but I think there is definite mileage in opposing some of the bigger odds on teams in this competition.

 

September 23rd

Cracking night last night with the football app, a pleasing profit of £315 swelling the coffers nicely. I also had a couple of decent wins in some of the USA sports I cover which made yesterday a decent day.

The downside to yesterday was horse racing, how often have I said that before ?! It lost £22, not exactly bank blowing but it's only small stakes on selected races and none of them came in, hence the loss. Horse racing really is something I'd like to crack, yes I know I keep saying it. If anyone knows any systems or fancies emailing me some systems for me to trial and review then let me know. Also, if anyone else runs 'bot's (I hate that word!) on horse racing markets and can turn a profit from them then let me know, would be nice if I knew I was working towards something that is achievable, instead of flogging a dead horse if you'll excuse the pun.

The value odds application for football matches is coming along nicely, it's very time consuming and I'm having to type rows of numbers into Excel, create a formula and then transpose that over into the Java application. I have about another 250 formulas to do!!

September 22nd

Another Monday morning, where do the weekends go ?

I spent a while on Friday going through lots of stats for the horse racing applications and the bets it had been placing, I came up with some interesting stuff. Basically I have now cut down the number of bets and markets being played on, we'll see how it goes from now on. It made £7 on Friday, £21 on Saturday but lost £9 yesterday so a promising enough start.

Football had a bad day on Friday with a loss of £150 but came flying back on Saturday with a profit of £550. Yesterday all was going well until the usual Sunday evening chase games (Real Madrid & Barcelona) came along and as the weekend punters piled into the two spanish giants they duely obliged leaving me with a loss of £170 on the day. 

No personal betting for me over the weekend, am keeping my bank quite tight at the moment waiting for the powerstats to start kicking in which they should do next month once there have been enough games played this season to start making some predictions on.

And no, I'm not going to mention yesterdays game.

September 19th

The early kick off at Fratton Park last night meant it wasn't really worth the commute up to London for the day so I had a day off work instead. Great game and great result, the second leg over in Portugal will certainly be a tight affair, would love to be going over there but alas funds prevent me from doing so :o(
Maybe if we get through to the group stages and get an attractive away game then I can sort something out.

The decline in fortunes betting wise continued. Where did we get up to ? Ah yes, Wednesday, the horses had another rubbish day finishing down £40. So yesterday I tried a small config change in the application as well as a major reduction in stakes, unfortunately I didnt have much time to run it on all the markets so my original app at original stakes was still running on most of them, the horses finished down £18 for the day. I'll take a look later to see if the new config changes made any difference.

Football also lost £27 last night in some USA game.

My personal betting meant that I backed Over 2.5 goals last night in the Pompey game at Half Time (1-0). We then duely missed a pen before making it 2-0, I laid off for a free bet on the overs but unfortunately it stayed 2-0 so I neither won nor lost. Kicked myself on Wednesday as I fancied a lay of unquoted at Half Time in the Real Madrid game, this was a ridiculous low of around 4's I think, as it was I forgot all about it and then remembered as Sky Sports showed it as 1-0 at half time!!

Thats about it for now, good luck if you're having a bet today.

September 17th

Today is a new day, forget about yesterday it's gone. So go the words, or words to that effect, of some advert on the telly, for Bran Flakes is it ?? It's how i feel though about betting at the moment, having a hard time of it and all I can do is try and think about what the new day will bring!

Yesterday was a very demoralising £98 loss on my horse racing app. I had recoded it and was hopeful about it, no such luck though. It's running again today but if it's another shattering loss then it's back to the drawing board which is always a disheartening experience if you think you might have come up with something. Having said that, I have one more slight configuration alteration I can make to it which I'll try if today goes awry, probably at much reduced stakes though.

Nothing on the football last night, I don't run my football application on European games. I picked out some personal bets that I thought about but in the end did nothing. Probably for the best as I picked out 4 with 2 of them winning and 2 losing, I'd of probably made a small loss.

Meltdown in the financial markets, Lehman Brothers is pretty much next door to where I work. Some of the stuff has been so over the top, have a read here, time for a reality check luv ? Poor girl, not being able to have her dream wedding!!
Or what about poor Kirsty McCluskey, 32, who worked on Lehman's London trading floor, who's exact words were "It is terrible. Death. It's like a massive earthquake,". Oh please!!! Like death??? Like an earthquake??? Tell that to the friends and families of the 12,000+ people killed earlier this year by an earthquake in China.
If you want a reality check to find out how people deal with intense hardships and suffering in life then you need look no further than this story of 4 year old Ellie May going to her first ever day at school.

September 16th

Abysmal day yesterday. The horse racing app continued it's losses with a hit of £44. I've now recoded the application to reduce the stakes across different levels, hopefully this will see an upturn in its fortunes. I looked at some of the data in Excel for the application and it was clear that partial matching was proving a problem, hopefully the recoding of the app should cure that although it could well be that the system doesn't actually work and the losses I am incurring are just bringing it back into line to balance out the original profits I made. Obviously, now I have increased the stakes the losses are severely denting my original profits!

My football application had a few nasty hits in some insignificant games before I then had the chance to rework it and double my stakes on it. It's been something I've been meaning to do and I timed it right by getting the new stakes going on the Spurs v Villa game, that brought back a win of £75, even so football still made a loss of £68 on the day.

All my other American sports betting made a loss overnight so it doesnt make good reading! September is proving a tough month, seems to be one step forward and two steps back, half way through it though so still time left to get things back on track.

I didnt get involved personally on the Spurs game last night, I wanted to but just couldnt make my mind up on it, to tight to call and both teams to unpredictable for my liking.