A win at last!

A rather pleasant weekend for me as I had my first big trading profit since June, of course the term “big” is very subjective but in my case it means anything above 3 figures. In my first post I briefly touched on that since moving house the quantity of trading activity has decreased and unfortunately so as the quality. I’m sure a lot of it has been due to negative variance (or bad luck) on more than one occasion I’ve sat with small reds on one side and huge greens on the other which have had some intrinsic value but none of them have paid off. Although I think some of it has been due to poor decision making, whether that has been ring-rust, greed or simply misreading a situation I’m not sure, probably a combination of the 3.

Anyway, the trade was actually on football not tennis, and it was the over/under 6.5 goals market on the England/San Marino match. Why this market? Well I expected San Marino to start off stronger than some people in the media were suggesting but expected them to get a good stuffing nevertheless and as under 6.5 goals was closest to evens (£100 @ 1.9) at k/o I felt it presented the best trading opportunities. Well it so nearly went down the pan after 3 minutes when the keeper really should have been sent off and a penalty have been given. Still it didn’t and after 25 minutes and the game still goalless I moved all my liability onto the overs side at 1.3 and although the price dropped to the high 1.1xs two goals in 2 minutes a few minutes later saw the price move back out to near where it started. To be honest I was expecting more goals in the first half and it wasn’t until HT that I moved the money back onto the unders side at 1.44. Again less than 5 minutes before a goal expecting some subs shortly to mix things up I moved all my profit back to overs laying the unders at 1.07 and again 2 goals flew in within the space of 2 minutes. Again expecting more to fly in I let it run but England looked poor, just before Oxlade-Chamberlain’s 5^th I had tried to even the profit up but my bet was unmatched and before I could resubmit it he scored. This time I evened it up straight away across a variety of rapidly decreasing odds and took home just shy of £280 after commission. Looking back I have mixed emotions, I can’t decide whether this was a particularly great trading session or not. Firstly it was all conducted on my telephone (Google Nexus S)  which despite being top of the range 18 months ago is fairly sluggish now although I doubt Betfair’s mobile platforms are especially quick on any device. Secondly it is easy to rationalise something as the correct/wrong decision after the fact. Either way it doesn’t really matter it was nice to finally win.

This gave me a bit of confidence going into the Murray/Federer semi final yesterday. Ironically Cassini’s post earlier this morning is a précis of everything I wanted to say about the reasons why I ended up losing money on this match. He has described it far more eloquently than I could hope to so instead please take a read if you haven’t already.  In particular the line “It’s certainly far easier to make sound trading decisions on a game between two teams you care nothing about then it is on politics or ‘our’ football team.”  Roger Federer has always been my favourite player and a part of me still refuses to recognise that he isn’t the same player he once was. They say the frame is the most expensive part of the racket but surely Roger has enough money that he doesn’t need to get value for money so regularly. Enough said I didn’t watch the entire match turning off after Federer was broken in the second set. This was in part because I was all-red for about £40 and rather than make it any worse I just walked away, it was also because the Chinese crowd do my head in. Every year it is the same, they aren’t rude on a French scale but it is the volume of cheers through any rally that is longer than 5 strokes that really gets on my nerves.  A particular low-light for me was Roger Federer double-faulting 3 times in a row to give up a break. What happened to the Federer that aced Sampras 4 times to win a game? The first set was almost exactly the same as the first set in today’s final with both players serving like me.  Like yesterday the second set was much better with some far higher quality tennis on display. Robbie Koenig was doing his best to make up for the crowd too, a particular highlight being a characteristic scream of “Novak Djokovic, what are you doing? That was outrageous” after Djokovic followed up a great ‘tweener with a sublime dropshot.  The match is currently still in-play after Djokovic broke Murray back whilst serving for the match and has taken it to a third set

Tennis fans are very lucky because each year more and more games are screened live across the betting sites and the way the scheduling works means that you’ll never have to miss a match in which one of the big 4 are playing. Compared to football the amount of decent quality, live tennis is outstanding, however where tennis is let down is the amount of highlights that are available. I did however manage to find this video below, which was easily the highlight of yesterday's match and came 2 points after Federer had tried to get umpire Nili to pause the match for a little rain as he was clearly struggling. Even the crowd couldn’t ruin this point. 

Tomic the Tank Engine

I'm probably infringing/destroying some copyright law with the title of the blog post but a quick google search showed me that it isn't as original as I first thought.

Just a brief post following on from my Wasted Youth post regarding Bernard Tomic's complete collapse the other day against Florian Mayer. On a tangent Mayer somehow busted a rib between exercising in the gym with Andy Murray (had to fit him in to this somehow) earlier in the day and going out on court. Anyway, back to Tomic who for a long time I have thought is wasting his talent by not trying hard enough. The other day he finally opened up about some of the reasons why he has been so mediocre this year. I think it is an interesting view into his and perhaps other younger player’s mindsets and whislt I don’t care much for his attitude, as a person I’m finding myself respecting him ever so slightly more. After declaring that he only gave "85% effort" he went on to say (paraphrased): 

Today I gave 100 per cent in the first set. I felt in the second set, my 100 per cent wasn't even close to where it should be. That's where I think mentally... the mental skill is one of my biggest problems.

It's been a long year. I played a lot of tournaments. I think I only rested one week after Roland Garros. I think it was the wrong sort of move that I made. I think it's costing me now, the last few months. My performance has not been as good. It's been a massive road this year. I didn't plan my schedule as I should have and it's cost me a lot of matches that I probably should have won.

I haven't had time to rest. I think it's costing me now the last few months. My performance has not been as good. Obviously I'm learning. It's all tough. There's a lot of things thrown at you. I feel last year was a different year. I wasn't expected to do good. That's where I came inside the top 40 at the age of 18. That's where I proved I can play. 'This year has been a little bit different. It's been defending points, defending stuff. I started feeling the pressure. I wasn't prone to pressure growing up. Now I think it's starting to hit me the last five, six months. It's costing me. It's been a massive road this year.

I still think that fatigue isn’t entirely to blame and that unless he can find the desire to win that the likes of Murray and Nadal possess then he’ll never be better than your average top 20 player and that will be a shame. The way he destroyed Potito Starace on Margaret Court Arena back in 2009 was simply breathtaking. 

Practice Makes Perfect

On the way into work this morning (during the talksport adverts) I turned the radio onto 5live where they were talking about the rise in tennis’ popularity in this country since Andy Murray won Olympic Gold and the US Open. It seems to be public sentiment that despite being a gifted footballer Wayne Rooney is seen as a bad role model for young children for being petulant, foul-mouthed and reckless. This got me thinking, despite his obvious talent, is Andy Murray really a good role model for today’s youth? When he’s winning comfortably his on-court demeanour is moody at best but when he’s not playing 100% he takes it to a whole new level, pained looks come across his face, the hand gestures and dramtic sighing intensify, he starts shouting at himself, he starts shouting at his box, he starts using the racket to physically abuse his feet and knuckles. If I had a child, whilst I’d be pleased they cared that much about what they were doing I certainly wouldn’t like them to think it is ok to act like a baby throwing their toys out the pram everytime they lose a point. Under Lendl‘s watchful eye it seemed like he had matured a little and that this nonsense had stopped but during the US Open final it all came flooding back. A particular favourite highlight, apart from the comical expletives, was the scream of “WE DIDN’T PRACTICE THAT” at Lendl after Djokovic ripped a cross-court forehand past him. I imagine he is the sort of person that smashes up playstation controllers every time he concedes a goal on FIFA. In summary, a fantastic player and whilst I enjoy seeing a good racket smash as much as the next guy it would be a shame if Britain produces a generation of players who think it is ok to scream abuse at their coaches and self-harm on the court every time they make a mistake or are outplayed in a point.

The blog is in danger of becoming a little Murray-centric. Today’s post was originally going to be about churn. In not at all the same way that churn is a blight on the insurance industry whilst simultaneously being the lifeblood of financial advisors, it is both a powerful asset to my gambling and an unwelcome guest of my blogging.  Of course high-volume, low percentage betting and having a limited blog readership are two completely different concepts. Fortunately, it doesn’t take an analyst as expensive as me to figure out that a lack of interesting material and advertising are the main drivers of the relatively low regular readership of my blog. The blog is about to reach 1,000 page views according to the blogger stats so I’d like to take this opportunity to thank the 13 or so regular readers for their continued viewing and hopefully my blogging will have improved, and there will be a few more of you by the time the next milestone rolls around.

Number 1

So Roger Federer thinks Andy Murray can become number one. The majority of the headline writers seem to have gone a little overboard ,running with Roger’s  (because we’re best mates) speculative "maybe this year" comment, but a little sensationalism never hurts. Murray has distanced himself from the notion of ending the year on top but is he right to?

Yes. As it currently stands in the race Djokovic has 10,410 points, Roger 8,895 and Murray 6,910. The gap between Murray and Djokovic is therefore 3,500 points and by my reckoning there are 4000 points available to Murray (3500 to Djokovic) which essentially means Murray needs to win in Shanghai, Basel, Paris and each one of his matches at the ATP Tour Finals (which I couldn’t be any more excited about after getting tickets for 4 sessions). At the same time Djokovic would realistically need to lose all 3 tour final matches and be knocked out no later than the QF in the two masters series tournaments.  Of course if the ATP take on board my suggestion and dock Djokovic a point for every £ I’ve lost on him over the last 2 years then Murray has a much stronger chance. All he’d need to do is close the (just shy of) 2,000 point gap to Roger.  As it happens, if I were a betting man I’d rather have money on Roger finishing number 1 than Murray number 2 this year.

Murray’s detractor’s seem to have seized the opportunity to pointlessly attack him. One of my favourite comments (somewhere on the BBC site) went along the lines of “so what? Even if he does become number 1 it’ll only be because Federer’s too old, Djokovic’s knees have gone and Nadal’s so injured he should just retire”. Beyond the fact that, unless I have missed something, Djokovic’s knees are far from gone, it is pathetic reasoning. When Roger is old and grey he will likely be remembered as the greatest competitor in the history of the sport. Nadal will probably be remembered as one of the top 3 or 4 and Djokovic will be a worthy footnote as a fantastic player. Being 4^th in an era that contains all 3 should bring no shame whatsoever.  If he has a good October and January then there is a strong chance he will be number 1 at some point either then or before Wimbledon. No doubt if he does there will be more of the same type of criticism levelled at him but then the same people would probably argue that Lleyton Hewitt didn’t deserve to be number 1 either.    

Revisited Youth

Remember the days before Facebook/Twitter/Mobile Internet\Sky Sports News\Football First etc, when it was very easy to avoid finding out the football scores. Essentially all you had to do was avoid watching the news, which when I was a kid definitely wasn't hard. Reminiscing those old days, I decided that I would turn my phone off on Saturday and wait for MOTD to tell me the scores. The weather was lovely which definitely helped distract my constant need to know what the scores were, if anyone had texted me, how many emails I had, whether anyone wrote on my facebook wall. We went out for a meal Saturday evening, and I desperately tried not to eavesdrop any conversations lest they be regarding the football. Slowly but surely 10:30 crawled around and I sat down with a lager feeling like a kid at Christmas. This was going to be awesome. First set back of the night was discovering Shearer was back on but even he couldn't ruin Chelsea's fantastic performance (not for a lack of trying mind you). Cue the montage of games coming up, game after game went by without Everton appearing and I started to think that as usual Everton would be on last. Of course, everyone thinks their team is always last, although I'm fairly sure Everton actually are! As it turned out it would have been better had we been on last because just like I was 6 again, I stormed up to bed after watching yet another diabolical refereeing performance. Until I got to work today I didn't even realise Reading somehow got a point.

Point of this post? There isn't one really, except that I've learned that waiting for MOTD is a waste of time.

As a follow up to my last post for those interested here are two graphs representing the same, Top 50 data but for the WTA tour

Wasted Youth

In a previous post I mentioned I wanted to write about the career progress of a couple of previously highly talked about juniors, Bernard Tomic and Grigor Dimitrov, I was also going to through Ricardas Berankis in too as liek the other two he is also a previous junior US Open winner (and unlike Tomic was a junior number 1). The inspiration for the post came from Tomic’s Davis Cup captain and former world number 1 (for 1 week) Pat Rafter who publicly lambasted Tomic for his “disgraceful” performance. Rafter was right, as I suspect was John McEnroe who accused him of tanking. A part of me hopes he was genuinely just woeful on the day because if you can’t muster up the enthusiasm to win at a Slam then what will you care about? The idea was then backed up after watching Dimitrov playing Tsung-Hua Yang in Bangkok and seeing that despite being 21 he still occasionally struggles to know what shot to play. One point in particular at 1 set all and 0-30 down exemplified this when Yang hit a cross court backhand to Dimitrov and after initially running around it for the inside-out forehand at the very last second he changed his mind, stumbled with his footwork and hit a tame backhand. As it turned out he won the point and the match even winning a point whilst lying down at one point.

Anyway, that was the post I was initially going to write and probably still will at some point but for now I’d like to briefly showcase the lack of any decent juniors breaking through on tour recently. The aforementioned Tomic is the only teenager in the top 100 and by the end of the month he will be 20. Incidentally there is only one 20 year old too and that is Ryan Harrison at 54. For a while now I’ve been thinking/noticing that there is a lack of youth making its way up the rankings so I decided to look at the ages of the top 50 players at end of each year since 2002. I usually use the end of the year for looking at rankings as it is a constant date but really it is a little arbitrary. Below is a graph that shows the average age in years for each season for the top 10, 20 and 50. For 2012 I’ve taken the current rankings (not race).

As you can see up until 2008, on New Year ’s Eve, the average age of the top 50 player hovered around 25 years 6 month. Since 2008 though this number has gradually crept upwards to the point where this year if the rankings were to stay the same, the average age of the top 50 will be 27 years and 6 months. The top 50 should in theory always have a mix of youngsters making their way up the ladder, the “better than average journeymen”, the older “decent” players and maybe a few old greats on their way down. What has happened over the last few years though is that in the absence of decent youngsters pushing the herd of mid 20-somethings, the herd has slowly grown older. The graph shows this quite clearly. In 2008 the average age of the top 10 was 24 years 6 months, in 2012 it will be 27 years 8 months. The table below shows the respective rankings of the current top 20 since 2008. In 2011 6 players retained their top 10 status and this year 8 out of 10 have with last year’s number 10 Nicolas Almagro being replaced by last year’s number 11, Juan Martin Del Potro. It would be easy to argue that 9 players would be keeping their place had Mardy Fish not missed the entire European clay court season. Similarly 15 of the top 20 have also retained their place.

Rankings in red are outside top 50,

rankings in green signify injury hit seasons

Anyway, these are the “facts”, as the race currently stands Almagro is sitting at number 10 and that would make 9 players retaining top 10 status. Once the season is over I hope to write a follow up piece including my thoughts as to why this has actually happened and why I think, despite the lack of youth in the current top 50, it will soon be 21/22 year olds rocketing up the rankings like Nadal in 2005 rather than 26 year olds like in the case of Tipsarevic. I’ll also try and amalgamate the reasons why the opportunity has passed Dimtrov by and will probably pass by Tomic too.

Edit: I need to get better at organising my thoughts. Completely missed that I think there is more behind the trend than simply players getting fitter allowing them to compete at the highest level for longer. Same goes for the younger players not being physically strong enough. Also, for those interested below is a box and whiskers plot of the dataset used in the original chart.

For any who are interested, my first experience at the races wasn't as awful as I had imagined despite losing money on every race. However I won't be going back in a hurry, despite paying £20 to get in and stand on the finish line I barely got to see any of the action and the wait inbetween races was far too long.

Procrastination

The inspiration for this short entry comes from a post over at Centre Court Trading and in particular the phrase: “I lose focus every now and then and I still find it tough to shut out distractions when I’m in need of a new stimulus”.

The majority of people will, every once in a while, be asked to review their strengths and weaknesses. Perhaps this will be in a job interview or a team ‘bonding’ session and for the most part it tends not to be taken too seriously. “I work too hard”, “I care too much”, “I’m too dedicated to my work”, “I’m happy to work overtime for free” etc etc. I’m guilty of it too although in my personal time I do like to do some self-reflection, most commonly in the form of a modified AAR. What have I achieved? What have I learned? What could I have done better? And what am I going to do differently next time? Well, seemingly like the Sultan, I definitely get distracted too easily and often find myself trying to focus on multiple things at once. Being a man, I don’t do this very well. However by far my biggest weakness is procrastination, and indeed I am an expert at it. In fact under “what am I strong at?” first on the list would be procrastinating. If I have to do it, I’ll probably find something (likely more arduous) else to do instead. Its a disease. Right now, I’m only writing this because I don’t want to dust and hoover before the football.

Its probably the biggest limit on my gambling profits. As I mentioned in the very first line of my first post I love watching and gambling on tennis but so often, as soon as I feel like I should be gambling on tennis I immediately find something else to do instead, read forums, watch tv, do house work, go for a run, you name it. I don’t try and fight it anymore because there’s no point in gambling whilst distracted. This is the reason the whole “should I gamble full-time?” debate largely passes me by. The fact that I probably couldn’t earn enough doing it is a secondary issue.

Tomorrow I’m off to the races for the first time in my life. I hate horse-racing but it is what my company passes off for team bonding and at least there is free car parking. If anyone is at Salisbury races tomorrow I’ll be the guy not drinking, not gambling and not having fun.

Anyway, in order to avoid continuing to blog I’m going to go do some dishes.