blonde poker forum

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2200795-mugs-and-millionaires-inside-the-murky-world-of-professional-football-gambling

Good article, is the author a relative?

Nope, he used to be the cricket tipster in the Racing Post.

Very good he was.

Took the lucre offered by Zac Goldsmith to jump ship and write for The Sportsman.

But when that publication went arse over apex, he was left without an organ to write for.

Freelances now, think his stuff is good and he should be at the Post. But the Editor there is pretty vindictive I believe and people who leave rarely get a second chance.

Good stuff, thanks for posting!

Wow is it only eight years since that paper appeared and disappeared in what seemed like the same month.  Amazing what you could get finance for in 2006! No wonder the game was easy back then

Good article, got to the guy who bets £16m a year on Betfair and arbboy sprung to mind :dontask:

Bad thread title Keith, "fascinating" not "interesting", it's great to read about these guys.

I know you are, or were, fairly close to Tony Bloom, do you know if Martin De Knijff is still involved with Tony?

Boring story follows....

If it's how he got his nickname The Knife, I'm out.

Thanks for posting. I know your baby "Tips For Tikay" is in fairly rude health, but it wouldn't hurt for you to pop in and give us a tip from time to time. Pretty please...
(It doesn't even need to be a classic like the 49 ers / Kaepernick write up)

Good to see you posting Keith

hope all is good

In 2004, like so many of us at some stage of our poker journey, I was living the dream. I'd just retired, & was playing poker all over Europe & loving it, going to new places, playing poker, ain't life great?

Somehow, I got an invite to play a Tourney in Sweden, just outside Stockholm. OK, lets do it, so I accepted the invite, & off I toddled, booked a flight on SAS & away I went.

As I exit Customs at the Airport, to my surprise, there is a bloke stood there with one of those hand-written signs, it said "TONY TIKAY KENDALL".

What?

I go see him. "Hi Mr Kendall, come to give you a lift to the Club, will drop you off at your Hotel first. I'll buy you some dinner too, if you fancy it." (Dinner was a DISASTER, steamed bloody herrings ffs).

BOOM, I'm famous. 

The driver fella has a white wooly beany hat thing, but was well chatty, so we chit-chatted. Running out of things to say, I mention the big story at the time in Swedish poker, Martin De Knijff. He had just won the WPT thing for $3 milly, & finished 2nd in a WSOP for $300 thou. I was at the fanboy stage, as kids are these days with Dwan & Isildur, so Martin was a hero.

He looks at me a bit gone out. Then removes his hat thing, & the penny insta dropped. He WAS Martin De Knijff!

OOohhh, I'm nearly wetting myself.

Anyway, I'm there 4 days, & Martin can't do enough for me. Never paid for any food or drinks all trip, Martin paid for everything at his club (he owned it in partnership with someone), he treated me like a VIP, made a right fuss of me.

We talk some more, turns out he has a season ticket at Stamford Bridge, goes to all their games.

You travel to England every week to watch Chelsea?

"Yes yes, a mate of mine has a box, his name is Tony Bloom, you might know him"

"What? Yea, course I know Tony, shared tables with him all over the place. I wrote a piece about him for Cardplayer after he won a big jobbie at Aussie Millions earlier this year."

And so it goes on.

But then it got a bit awkward, as Martin told me his main living came from Sports Betting, he & Tony Bloom ran a syndicate. "Interested in some action, Tony?".

I had just quit betting a year or two earlier, not keen to go there again, but I was deffo interested.

So Martin gave me the spiel, the Syndicate lasted 3 months, after that they divvied the money up & started again.

Yea, I'm interested Martin, what sort of numbers we talking?

Well we generally say £100,000 min, but I can do you a deal for £30,000 if you are interested.

Err, weather's been nice.....

Just think, if I had any bollox, I could be rich & retired now.

Amen to that.

It may save Keith an awkward reply, but I've tried to keep in touch with Keith under the radar. There is much about Fred these days that he does not really approve of, "Offers" & suchlike.

I'd LOVE him to return to Fred, it's his thread dammit, but I don't want to presssurise him. Little Bo Peep & all that.     

Quick PS on Martin - it appears he is a big "Bridge" player these days.

Be interested to know if he still has a contract with Mr Bloom.
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_de_Knijff

+1 to the request and the reasons for absence. Great to see Keith posting though, regardless.

... then two come along at once. http://www.espncricinfo.com/magazine/content/story/782041.html

Most interesting, thank you.

Can anyone explain more about "Geeks Toy"?

‘I’m a data geek,’ says City trader who bet £900,000 on Scotland’s No vote
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/sep/22/city-trader-bet-900000-scotland-no-vote-scottish-referendum

Interesting but frustrating. Because he was on a afternoon call-in there was never going to be a mention of how much value he thought was in the prices he took and no mention of how he got that much on. The line about him thinking his bet was good publicity for the pro campaign made me raise my eyebrows though.

He sounded like a bit of a good run mug who has run far too good in life in general when he said 'it was a certainty which couldn't lose' or something along those lines. 

Haha. I'm glad you thought that too. He can't be putting us away could he?

Its an interesting article but for a journalist that specialises in gambling I found this paragraph to be sloppy, inaccurate and just plain wrong

"The sums are huge. To earn the average annual UK salary of £26,500, one would need a bankroll of around £150,000. That is because the best most punters can hope for is a return of investment between 3-4 percent. The more you gamble, the more you win. It is not unusual for a pro to turn over millions per season and place £50,000 single wagers on the result of, say, Newcastle United versus Crystal Palace"

Most pros I know have never had a bankroll anything like that yet most earn at least that in a year and not many are betting 50k a game either and it certainly isn't commonplace.  It might not be sexy but it would have been nice to have a profile of a pro that bets a hundred quid a go and grinds out a living through shoe leather, new vpns and begging friends to open accounts etc.....maybe I just dont want to feel alone......

It's software that provides an easier interface to bet on betfair (and betdaq). 

For example, you can enable one click betting so you just click on the back or lay price in the picture below and the bet goes it to the value of the amount in the middle (this can bet pre-set as a bet amount or a liability amount). 

You can also automatically close your position with one click rather than having to work out what amount to bet. 

It does other bits and pieces as well, but anyone who regularly bets on exchanges should have Geeks Toy or similar eg Gruss, just for the simplicity of the interface and quick navigation to their bets.


   

5 Reasons UK Pro-Punters Are Reaching Crisis Point
Is it becoming more and more difficult to be a fulltime professional punter? With the betting industry landscape constantly changing, today Stephen Harris tells us that many pro punters are feeling the pinch.
http://www.bettingexpert.com/blog/5-reasons-uk-pro-punters-are-reaching-crisis-point (http://www.bettingexpert.com/blog/5-reasons-uk-pro-punters-are-reaching-crisis-point)

Do people think this is a fair reflection of the way things are now? Clearly I know about bookmakers' restrictions - not least from here - but do you think he's right about disappearing edges?

That really is an excellent article.  Harris always is totally spot on and up to date with this views in his blog and this is as good and accurate as usual.  

The trouble with the game is the same question i hear a lot.  Surely anyone can make the game pay now with virtually every event priced to 100%.  The trouble is, like the artice says, these 100% books are becoming more and more frequently accurate.  It's impossible to make money even when you are betting to 100% long term if those 100% prices are close to spot on.  Most of the ricks in the old days were in 115/120% books where one or two prices were still massively wrong even with the 20% 'margin' to protect the layers.  If you look at most of the special bets put up on tft where there isn't a strong market to follow this will still be the case.  (the weather bet/top jockey/yes/no special markets etc etc)

He has the bf angle totally spot on.  The vast majority of new mugs on betfair in the last 2 years probably don't even know the exchange exists as you have to go miles out of your way to even find it when you sign up as a new customer, never mind how to use it.  Betfair (as an exchange product), as redarmi has stated before, are literally a shadow of the company they used to be and in 5/10 years i can see the exchange model being a tiny part of their business compared to 2014.  They are definitely killing the goose which lays the golden egg but what else did you expect when a paddy power guy took over as CEO?  

Cheers. Do you think Betfair are killing the goose or is it just dying a natural death like the poker boom of the '00s? (I'm currently reading Douglas Thompson's The Hustlers and hadn't realised how extensive the chemmy craze was in the late '50s with the likes of Hollywood stars and Gianni Agnelli being drawn in but it was incredibly short lived once all the pigeons had been plucked).

They are killing the golden goose without a doubt imo.  They only really ever cracked the UK market and even then they didn't take to its full potential.  I worked for an Asian firm once that was doing $25bn turnover on sports a year and they were relatively unknown verus the SBO's, IBC's and Pinnacles of the world and that was nearly ten years ago when the market was still developing and I was one of the few people in Europe that really understood the Asian market etc.  The worldwide market for low margin, high volume sports betting is huge and they could have killed off the opposition but instead they decided to join them because they never really understood the potential of what they had and spent too much time looking over the garden fence and admiring the grass on the other side instead of realising that what they had had the potential to be bigger than all of the others put together but they had to have confidence in their product and continue to innovate and it is easier to just be a "me too" even though they actually don't do that very well.

It's like putting the CEO of marks and spencer's food in charge of Aldi.  The paddy power ceo had no experience at all of running a high volume low margin product (if anything apart from bwin paddy power are probably the ultimate low volume high margin sportsbook totally at the other end of the scale to the bf exchange product) so his appointment was baffling but showed immediately that the original bf plan long term was dead in the water.

Any revenue stream that relies on exploiting a knowledge differential is doomed to failure as more and more people gain that knowledge - the value comes from the scarcity. Betting, poker, stock-market trading - all gone the same way. When that happens, the best way to create a knowledge gap is through underhand methods (nobbling horses, bent football matches, superuser accounts, LIBOR scandal etc).

Technology means these gaps close up ever more quickly. Think back to when Doyle Brunson worked out that 22 beats AK all-in pre - in the games he played in no one else knew that. It would have provided a steady income for him for *years*.

The betting companies aren't interested in a fair fight - why would they when they can stick up roulette and slots and have people queueing up to make -EV bets, even when it says so on the machine.

So ridic how Betfair has gone in the same direction as the other bookmakers.

Traditional bookies were absolutely shitting themselves when betfair took off, trying to imitate them and then making moves to try and get betfair banned.
God only knows why betfair took the route it did.

Talk about how times change. I remember getting my first account at flutter.com, before betfair bought them out.

I have recently come back to betting and the value/prices have defo gone down on betfair, even in the past 6-12 months.

They weren't acquiring new punters. The other bookies would have websites full of money back specials and free bets, yet a new punter who visited Betfair's website and tried to have a bet would be faced with a spreadsheet - a wall of numbers like something out of the Matrix. Also, any new customers they did get were far less likely to do their brains on the casino games - gaming revenue as a % of sports was much lower than their competitors.

I know we have touched on this discussion before but this just seems to be a case of them not understanding what they are and the value of their underlying product properly.  Sure the punters that they acquired are less likely to do their brains on casino games but surely that misses the point.  They have an underlying product in the exchange that could have done billions, perhaps even trillions in turnover if they marketed and understood their product properly and marketed it to the right people in the right way.  Instead they decided that it was a mass market consumer product and that their margins and business should be comparable to the likes of Paddy Power and William Hill but they were in a different market.  Their product was more comparable to the Metals exchange or LSE.  They had a very real opportunity to create an entirely new and huge market which they had first mover advantage on and, because of liquidity, an effective monopoly on.  Instead they decided they wanted to be another player in a market that is already developed and to squeeze the customers that they already had on the exchange and completely neglect the growth potential for the market that they had effectively invented.  Not only that they have done it badly. 

To do that though would be a long-term play - when they went public that necessitated hitting quarterly revenue targets and short-term thinking.

No it didn't.  If director's put their own short term interests ahead of the long term that really isn't in the interest of their shareholders at all.  If I had my way, I'd be happy if all my potential investments had short term crises at some point.  Nothing better for boosting returns in the long run.

To be fair to them, if they were only thinking short term they could just have sat on the exchange and casino, spent nothing and just booked the profits.  By contrast, spending a chunk building a sportsbook can't be the result of short term thinking, surely?  I am not saying they are making good long term decisions, just that building a sportsbook appears to be a long term decision on the surface.  I strongly suspect all their bad poker decisions over the years were the result of long term thinking too!

This is the main reason for 365s success in that their directors day to day are also their majority shareholders so every decision is always made in the best long term interests of the firm every time.  There are never any political short term bad for the business long term decisions to meet short term directors bonuses/ share option targets etc. this in my experience of working for numerous gaming firms really sets these type of firms backwards massively long term and allows owner managed firms like 365 to crush them long term.

There was a discussion recently on Fred about the poor quality of football statistics and the likelihood of the usual suspects (Brighton's & Brentford's owners &c) having access to better. This is good on the increasingly proprietary nature of baseball stats.
https://sports.vice.com/article/how-wall-street-strangled-the-life-out-of-sabermetrics (https://sports.vice.com/article/how-wall-street-strangled-the-life-out-of-sabermetrics)

Just saw this.

Tikay is right, the thread has moved in a direction I didn't envuisage and don't really like but instead of staying and being resentful best for me to step aside and leave everyone who still enjoys it to carry on without me sniping or making snide comments.

To be honest I rarely read it these days because I'm actively trying to avoid things which annoy me.

Failing miserably in the Ched Evans thread it seems!

What don't you like about the TfT thread Camel?  I'm sure there are a few folk that have gripes about it and it makes for less of a resource than it once was. The contributions from right good minds have dwindles massively from the beginning imo, unless of course your willing to shell out and read most of that stuff elsewhere.  But even the guys who for all I know aren't involved with paid up services seem to post less in terms of both selections and general chit chat. 

Don't really want to go into details KMac, suffice enough to say it used to be my favourite thread on blondepoker and it no longer is.

Delighted that it has been so successful and hope people continue to enjoy it for many years to come.

Real shame to hear this, I don't know u personally Camel but I obviously know of you. It's a shame that you no longer want to contribute to a thread that you started and that has been a major part of blonde for a few years, of course it's people that make a thread and forum, the more that people do not post or help keep the wheels turning the greater chance of it dying. Of course everything has a life span and who knows what TFT's is. There are certainly people that have a greater knowledge than myself for all things betting related so I admit that my contribution could be more, however I just think it's a real shame that something has put you off and your not the only one. I know you probably don't want or need the drama of a fall out for going into details, hopefully a few of you guys will come back every now and again to spread your knowledge.