Posts Tagged australian
Greener grass?
Posted by Peter Webb in Bet Angel on March 6th, 2010
For some time I’ve watched the Aussie horse racing and admired that they seem to often do a better job than the UK. Then of course the weather, it’s just so much better down under. It’s enough to tempt me to head out to Aus during the winter and work from there for a little while. I had thought about doing that this year, but circumstances dictated otherwise.
This week has been a little different and three meetings have been lost to the rain. As I write this one of the commentators is sheltering from hail the size of golf balls at Flemington in what he describes as ‘The worst storm in Flemington for 30 years’. Probably an exageration in the heat of the moment, but it just goes to show you that nowhere is immune to acts of god.
EDIT – He wasn’t wrong, the meeting has been abandoned!
Here is a video of the chaos: -
http://video.au.msn.com/watch/video/freak-storm-ends-flemington-race-day/x2eqbzb
Tennis trading lessons
Posted by Peter Webb in Bet Angel on January 28th, 2010
A couple of neat lessons were served up by the Tennis yesterday and both showed that statistics don’t always give you the key to actually understanding what is going on in the underlying market.
First we had the Federer match. Struggling with a vibrant opponent and having lost 13 games in a row you could have counted Federer out for the count, but a revealing post match interview revealed what was going through his head at 2-6 1-3 down. Federer commented on how the sun was bothering him and how he couldn’t wait till it had cleared the court. He also, accidentally, revealed how he timed his ‘comfort break’ to allow him a chance to regain his thoughts and break the stride of his opponent. Unfortunately I was not around for this match so I missed this opportunity but it is amazing how a break in play can change things around.
Later than morning / evening we then had Djokovic seemingly in total control of a match only to get beaten from odds of 1.12. The explanation, Djokovic suddenly felt ill in the middle of the match. At the end of one energetic rally Djokovic bent over double at the end and looked up to his trainer. A few points later he was also off for a ‘comfort break’. He never managed to recover from feeling ill and it was an easy win for Tsonga in the end. I’ve captured the movement in odds from the moment he started to feel ill. Just goes to show it’s not only stats you should look out for in Tennis matches.
Tennis trading advice
Posted by Peter Webb in Bet Angel on January 18th, 2010
I was asked to write a primer on trading tennis markets last month. You can view the full article in this months ‘Gambling on line’ magazine. Unfortunately I can’t publish this article here just yet, but I thought I would point it out for you so you can read up in time for some action on the Australian open tennis in Melbourne. I have talked about Tennis trading quite a lot on this blog as well, so be sure to do a search and read up on some of my previous posts.
Early rounds of these sorts of tournaments are often dominated by very short priced favourites. If you want to do some speculative work in the markets it can often throw up some easy profits. When Nadal got of to a rusty start today he drifted from 1.02 to a slightly panic driven 1.09. At 1.02 you can lay of a lot of liability for little risk so this was an excellent opportunity.
However, the main thing that caught my eye today was Fabrice Santoro. Santoro has become the first ever player to successfully compete in grand slam tournaments over four decades! Full story on this link, a remarkable acheivement.
