Thursday 12 August 2010

Introduction - Part One

Hello and welcome to my blog. There appear to be many more betting blogs than when I first started blogging back in January 2008 but I’m sure this blog will offer something a bit different than the numerous other blogs out there, so I hope you enjoy reading it.

A quick bit of history about me and why I have this blog. I’ve had an interest in gambling from a very young age and I was betting regularly on horseracing from about the age of 4! My grandfather was a very keen punter and like so many who follow horseracing from a young age, he got me interested and things just grew from there.

I’ve been a fairly successful punter on the racing from my teenage years but due to limitations around the bank size and the fact I had very little discipline (most teenagers don’t!), then I tended to give back most of whatever I won or instead of reinvesting it in my betting bank, I spent any profits I had.

Whilst I was at university, I started to take my punting a little more seriously but again, a lack of discipline along with a lack of a betting bank meant I didn’t get anywhere quickly.

After moving house in late 2007 and struggling to cope financially with the pressures that my purchase would bring, I opened my first Betfair account. I then started reading betting blogs and in particular, trading blogs and thought I would give trading a go on the horseracing even though I had no experience of it.

In January 2008, I started a blog to track my 12 month experience on Betfair as I learnt to trade horseracing. After a few months of struggling to trade on Betfair but finally managing to develop my own trading system on the racing, I basically got some comments asking if I would be interested in running a horse tipping subscription service as I was being quite successful with the selections I was posting on the blog.

Things then snowballed quickly and before I knew it, I opened a horseracing subscription service in October 2008. The service then steadily grew and in April 2009, I went on the sort of run that tipsters dream about where I had winning week after winning week and the service grew rapidly by word of mouth. I won over 160pts in 4 months for my subscribers and at the peak of the service in that Summer, I could have had one of the largest subscriber bases for a horse tipping service as I had a waiting list of over 100 people wanting to join the service.

With gambling and tipping in particular, one minute you can be flying high and think you’re invincible and the next, you can be lucky to hit a winner and unfortunately, that happened to me! I let a bunch of subscribers join from my waiting list at the start of a dreadful run and due to my lack of experience (and other mitigating circumstances), I couldn’t cope with the pressure and things snowballed until I decided to close the service with immediate effect and refund everyone who had subscribed in the previous period. As well as being a costly exercise for me (meant I worked for the last 4 months for nothing), it was a costly exercise for the bunch of guys who joined at the peak!

However, to put things in perspective, in the last 8 months of the service, I won over 80ts profit and had an ROI of 17%. Over the full service, I had an ROI of over 12% over 500 proofed bets, so I have nothing to be ashamed of in terms of the service and how it performed. On my retirement from the horse racing tipping game, the service was in the top 3 on the proofing site for 12 months performance and when you consider that came after a shocking run, then I’m not too disappointed with my performance.

After I took a break from the stresses of running the service full-time whilst keeping hold of my full-time job, I decided I wanted to look at using my analytical and Excel skills to possibly have a go at betting seriously on football. Roll on 8 months and this blog has appeared…..What has happened in the last 8 months?

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