Friday 17 January 2014

A quick look at 2013 from a betting perspective......

I did promise I’d post up something regarding 2013 from my own betting perspective but for reasons discussed before on the blog, I’m not too interested in using this blog to showcase my P&L. Not sure anyone really cares what I win or lose betting apart from me and I don’t want anyone to think I’m using this blog to entice anyone to join the service. However, what I thought I’d do instead is give some interesting facts about my betting from 2013 by way of a compromise.

To make it explicitly clear, these stats are from my own betting and not the systems or the service, so please don’t read too much into them! It’s more for a bit of fun. :)
  •         2013 ROI (based on £ won v £ staked) was only 4% (my lowest calendar year £ ROI since I started betting on footie)
  •          2013 ROI (based on pts won v pts staked) was 6.6%
  •         2013 ROC was in excess of 100% - perfect case again of ROI for show, ROC for dough
  •         96% of my profit over the year came from season 2012/13 as opposed to season 2013/14 (53% of the bets I’ve placed in 2013 are from this season!)
  •          I backed 923 teams to win with 320 winners (34.6% Strike rate) – equivalent to 4,463 system bets!
  •          February was my best month, September my worst month
  •          6 profitable months, 3 losing months in 2013
  •          League Two my best league (by far!), SPL my worst league (by far!)
  •         Blackburn were my biggest loser in 2013, followed by Middlesbrough, Plymouth and Oldham (TFA subscribers will be aware of these teams!)
  •          Newcastle were my biggest winner in 2013, followed by Burton, Leyton Orient and Morecambe (slightly surprising but I had a big Newcastle win this season!)
  •         The teams I backed the most (in terms of unique times) in 2013 were Wimbledon, Derby, Oldham and Braintree
  •          The teams I placed the most money on were Braintree, Blackburn (boo!), Wimbledon and Torquay
  •          My biggest winning single day saw my bank increase by 41% (in reality, the weekend wasn’t as good as this as Friday and Sunday were both losing days)
  •          My biggest losing single day saw my bank increase by 20% (in reality, the weekend was worse as Friday and Sunday were both losing days too!)
  •          Both the biggest winning and losing days happened in the space of two weeks earlier this season

Overall, quite interesting to look at some of this stuff and it does bring home a few memories over the past year. February was a truly amazing month and I remember thinking at that time how easy this game was as I seemed to be treading water at that point for a little while and then boom, along came a month like that.

I think September will always be etched on my brain the same way that Feb-11 and Apr-11 are. I think the fact it happened at the start of the season and the fact the service also suffered the same sort of losses meant I had 99 other people suffering at the same time which made it a very tough time mentally. For me personally (and others I’m sure), I increased stakes this season off the back of last season’s profits and when you have no bets for the summer months, then when September comes, you can’t wait to get placing the bets and making money again. Couldn’t have been more wrong really and the fact that many people are still recovering from the September losses shows how bad the month was!

I expect next season, I’ll maybe think twice about the stakes I play in September but I honestly believe this sort of variance can happen at any time. If I knew when I was about to lose money, I’d probably just give them bets a miss and wait until I knew I was about to win money and then place my beats. Simples. ;)

Seeing some of the teams I’ve backed so often brings back memories. I’ve lost over 25% of my betting bank backing Blackburn last year. Quite a stunning stat really but they do seem to appear too often in my ratings considering the limited ability that squad has! The Newcastle stat is surprising as I’d never have picked them out but when I think how much I had on them this season to win at home to Chelsea, it makes sense. I also had big bets on them at home to Stoke when they won easily and they were a biggish bet away to Cardiff when they won this season. At the tail end of last season, I had them as big home bets against Stoke (again!) and Fulham. Not sure I’d get 11/10 on them beating Fulham at home these days but I got that last season.

I was actually surprised my biggest winning day and losing day were so close together but they fell into different months and given I tend to look at things monthly, it didn’t quite click this had happened.

923 bets across 9 months is around 25 bets a week. Sometimes feels like more bets I place but when I look at it weekly, it’s looks more sensible. Probably split 20 weekend bets, 5 midweek bets on average and that’s not too bad a workload for someone like me with limited time.

Overall, my 4th calendar year betting on footie and in some ways, my best year and in other ways, my most disappointing year. This season so far has been poor and that has really brought down the yearly ROC figure and the ROI for the year but overall, if I was given this sort of return every year, I’d take it.

What’s my hope for 2014? Well, it started very well as the last blog post showed but as I also said on the last post, I didn’t think the next downturn was too far away and I was right. Last weekend was horrible and I’ve lost a chunk of the profits I had built up in the first week of the year!

I guess I hope for a really good end to this season for the service and my own betting. I tend to look at things season by season rather than year by year and at the moment, this season looks like it could potentially be my worst season to date which would be disappointing, especially since I increased stakes this season!

This has been my least enjoyable season so far and I guess I’d like that to change. I’m finding it tougher than ever to run the service, manage my betting portfolio and continue to progress my career but I just about manage. Not sure I could continue indefinitely like this though and given I’m unlikely to give up my career for this, I can’t see me running myself into the ground unless I’m enjoying what I’m doing.

Bookmaker restrictions mean that more and more of my bets are placed with Pinnacle, SBO although I retain a small number of other UK accounts I use on a Saturday morning to place bets and they’ll lay me decent stakes. The days of me being able to get top price on my bets or beating my advised odds are gone and unlikely to return unless I find a way to place the bets easier and before I release to subscribers (which always feels like something I’d not be comfortable with). I imagine if I didn’t have a full-time job, running multiple accounts with family names and friends names would be doable and would probably add a significant amount of return onto what I make at the moment but that’s not happening in the short-term. If this season has taught me anything, it’s that I’m as far away from being a full-time bettor as I’ve ever been and I’ve really no appetite for this to change.

I’ve a few ideas for the service for next season as one complaint I get is that I close the doors of the service in June or July which means that anyone who’s looking for a footie tipster at the start of the season can’t join. I quite like this aspect though as I don’t have time to help people understand the systems when the season starts and I also like the fact the service is not overrun with numpties moaning at me about results although every Summer a few of these types join but they tend to jump ship at the first poor spell, so I don’t have to deal with them for the whole season!

Anyway, I think that’s given a little insight into 2013 and some thoughts for 2014. If this was a school report card, I would say 2013 was an average year but given the first half of the year, it should been an amazing year for me. 2014 will just need to be much better then! 

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