Bewildered And Depressed Strong draw picks this weekend are Cesena v Chievo Verona, Arles-Avignon v Brest, Racing Santander v Villareal and Kaiserslautern v Hamburg. The strike rate on these this season is 34.2%.

Peter Nordsted's Drawmaster tips this week are Wolves v Blackpool (3.5), Everton v Sunderland (3.50) and West Ham v Liverpool (3.25).

For home value picks, I have Stoke City (1.96) v West Bromwich Albion, Sporting de Gijon (2.02) v Real Zaragoza, Monaco (2.04) v Caen and Hoffenhein (2.16) v Mainz '05.

I had Valenciennes as amazing value at 2.26 to beat Lorient, until I noticed that their code for the spreadsheet was 'VLN' not 'VAL' which is Valenica's, and all of a sudden, the value was not so good, although still worth a small interest actually.

I have abandoned keeping the ratings going on all leagues bar the top 5, i.e. EPL, Serie A, La Liga, Ligue 1 and the Bundesliga. It was interesting, but it wasn't making me any money, and the time can be better spent elsewhere. No longer will I risk Eintracht Frankfurt being mistaken for East Fife! I'm actually finding just five leagues more than enough. One of the problems with football is that come the weekend, and there's a whole slew of matches, and with so much choice, it is hard to focus. I actually almost prefer it when there are just a handful of games, and there is time to look at each one in depth. Choice leaves me bewildered and depressed. Well, maybe not, but it does make it hard to focus.

Posted by Cassini at 08:28 Mark said...

Hi Cassini

I can totally relate to your point about too much choice is not always a good thing, especially with regards to trading/punting.

I believe that the biggest obstacle that we face in specialising in certain markets is that the ‘the fear of missing out’ is so ingrained in our psyche that it sometimes overrides the rational decisions that we make, or as the old saying goes‘ The grass always appears greener on the other side’.

I have just finished reading a great book called The Power Of Less by Leo Babauta ( zenhabits.net) He is an advocate of the idea that to achieve more it is good to have less choice. His approach is summed up with the phrase:

Identify the essential & Eliminate the rest.

I believe that principle can be used to good effect in our sports speculation, by that I mean go for quality over quantity in our choices.

I think you are on the right track by focusing on fewer games but I do not have the definitive answers to how we as punters/traders can pick the essential games to focus on, but here are a few of suggestions of how I believe we may be able to find profitable areas to focus on:

With regards to football trading; I would say that for someone like yourself with extensive records that show where the majority of your profits come from, it should be a fairly straight forward process of finding where to focus your attention.

For a novice football trader like myself with a limited set of records I think that it is just a case of trial and error until I find which niche markets and styles of trading suit me and then focusing on them to the exclusion of others.

In the horseracing world where daily there are many races, each of which can have lots of runners, presenting a multitude of choices, the general consensus appears, to me, to be that you need to specialise in a certain type of race, or races and then have certain key criteria that allow you to quickly eliminate a good proportion of the runners leaving just a few to spend more quality time studying in the hope of finding a value pick.

27 February 2011 at 06:55
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