You cannot lose if you don't play

Anybody recently taking up watching The Wire will recognise this quote from the second episode of season one. I think it can be a perfectly applied to the world of gambling, but is one sometimes I don't adhere to. By sticking to betting or trading purely on sports you know about you give yourself a better chance at success. But I'm guessing there's plenty of people out there who have bet on sporting events they know little about, a class 6 seller at Wolverhampton? A Belarusian football match? A volleyball match (because there was some hot females playing)? A match where you see no value but bet anyway because it happens to be on TV?

Easy traps to fall into at times but one that needs to be avoided at all costs. By simply keeping a track of your record in each individual sport you should see which are profitable and which are not. One would think the sports you know most about should see you perform better, might not always be the case because sometimes it's easier to find an edge in a obscure sports markets rather than more popular ones where the bots and professional traders lurk. I know for certain that my football betting and trading has been profitable, it's my horse racing trading and other sports trading that has let me down time and time again. Therefore I'm putting an end to trying horse racing trading from now on. Seems so tempting to trade the horses purely because it takes place a time when nothing else is going on, but I've shown I'm useless at and should really just give up. Other sports I haven't really had a large enough simple to judge whether I'm good or bad but I didn't really feel that comfortable trying to trade the tennis this week. Snooker I found a little better, but I was mainly just outright betting rather than trading. My cricket betting/trading went a little balls up this week with the Pakistan/England test, got into a good situation by laying the draw quite early on but managed to get myself into a mess by backing Pakistan at low odds but then switching to lay them as England came to bat second time round. Should really have got out after first couple of wickets tumbled, but didn't and suffered a double loss as I'd backed England to get 250+ runs as well.

So more or less I did exactly what I said I shouldn't do last week and lost £535.15 this week. My Betfair P/L is very mis-leading because I was hedging a lot my bets with better bookmakers odds this week especially on the snooker, true figure was about £50 up over the week and not £350+


To conclude sometimes the best bets you can ever make are the ones you don't make. Same goes with poker, a pivotal moment in a poker tournament could be the fold of marginal hand pre-flop that could have got you in all sorts of bother had you played it. Didn't mention my poker this week, well that's because I've hardly played and was down a small amount. I will try to play more next wekk.