Diary of a professional punter

[redarmi]

Hayley Turner is a really good addition to the BBC team.  She is really interesting to listen to and has the kind of insight that you never get from Carson.

[redarmi]

....although to be fair she is like a group horse in a seller in that company

[Nico29]

Yeah when carson says things like 'it's value at any price cos i think it will win' i switch the sound off.

[redarmi]

Actually decided to hold off on Bristol City for now.  Bloom seems to be in love with Peterborough so will wait and see what happenin Asia in the morning.  Might get bigger.

wiiiiiiiiii just realised I forgot to put this on.  I run good.

[redarmi]

This is such a massive own goal from racing.  Soumillon fined £54k and banned for his ride on the winner of the Champions Stakes.  Possibly the best moment for the best hoerse ever tomorrow and he might not even be the headline.    Just ridiculous.

[doubleup]

redarmi - a question about laying off

I backed <2.5 rangers st mirren at 2.58 - on the assumption that the intial bet was ev+ <lol> - would you lay off at a goaless half time?  The question I'm really driving at is, do in running players stick robotically to pre-race assumptions or do they adjust, so they think in my example that StM are playing better than expected and will continue to do so?

[redarmi]

Thats a really great question.  Going to grab something to eat and watch a bit of this Barnsley game but will answer later when i can do it justice.

[Sheriff Fatman]

Thats a really great question.  Going to grab something to eat and watch a bit of this Barnsley game but will answer later when i can do it justice.

A man of taste!

[redarmi]

redarmi - a question about laying off

I backed <2.5 rangers st mirren at 2.58 - on the assumption that the intial bet was ev+ <lol> - would you lay off at a goaless half time?  The question I'm really driving at is, do in running players stick robotically to pre-race assumptions or do they adjust, so they think in my example that StM are playing better than expected and will continue to do so?

As I mentioned earlier in the thread you shouold only really lay off if you consider it to be either neutral or positive expectation at the time that you lay off.  In this case it is impossible to say whether it was agood idea to lay off without an idea of the price.  Price is everything.  i didn't look at this game but in the average second half I would expect there to be no goals about 28% of the time and if there were no goals in the first half slightly more than that.  I don't want to get too technical but football largely follows a poisson distribution and the main area where it falls down is that teams don't actually score independently and the reason for this is that when a game is a draw, and, in particular, a goaless draw they don't neccesarily go all out to win.  Both teams may be willing to settle for a draw, not in the fixed match sense, but just in a general manner.  This interdependence increases as the game goes on so is generally more rpresented in the price.  All that said I would certainly make that adjustment less in this game because there isn't much chance of Rangers settling for a draw although St Mirren would be more likely to than the average team.

Moving onto your second point.  In my opinon markets overadjust to what they are seeing.  The most recent information that you have (in this case the first half) is the most important and, disproportionately more so than the last half they played, but it isn't more important than the previous 40 halves that they have played that you used to assess your prematch price yet sometimes the price looks like it is.  This is all slightly dependent upon what point you are at in the season ie I would have made big adjustments after Liverpools first game of the season this year for example becuase there were a lot of new elements to the team.  Your prematch adjustments do change somewhat when a goal has been scored (you generally increase the expected number of goals slightly and reduce the probability of the team that scored to score the next goal) but I will deal with that properly another time.  Does this answer your question?  I know I ramble a bit.

[mickyp]

Red, on average how many horse races a day do you make a market for ?. Great diary by the way, interesting to see you having a good few bets at my local  track, Kelso today.Have you ever been up here.

[redarmi]

Depends really.  Today I did the three big races at Ascot (did them earlier in the week).  The other bets came from a variety of sources I trust, generally form judges or modellers rather than info.  I don't really like stable info as such.  The best bets actually were in the 325 Kelso and I got that by just having a quick flick through the prices and saw that there were massive differences of opinion between Corals and the other books so decided to have a look and decided Corals were right.  It was an a amazingly gutsy piece of odds compiling for James Knight the Corals compiler who was a big price about a few horses that everyone else made much different.  On an average Monday I might do 6-8 races and during the summer a lot more.  I also bet on maidens and 2yo races without pricing the whole field because it is almost impossible to frankly but I always have a price in mind.

[doubleup]

The thing I was really driving at was that the <2.5 price I took was, I think, related to Rangers short price ~1/4 (St Mirren had the lowest goals per match average in the league, so I thought that there might be value) - so does the model (presumably poisson based) that decided the pre event odds just run along until there is a goal or do the users of the models intervene?  If they just let it chug along then the output will still (imo) be wrong as (imo) the initial price was wrong and I shouldn't lay.

The poisson thing is quite interesting as goals in a football match is the way it is always described, but it had occured to me that the scoring rate of each side must change depending on whether they were ahead or behind.  I just assumed that the defensive response of the leading side cancelled out the attacking response of the trailing side.

[Chompy]

How closely do you monitor the Racing Post forecasts and how much notice do you take of who compiled it?

[redarmi]

The thing I was really driving at was that the <2.5 price I took was, I think, related to Rangers short price ~1/4 (St Mirren had the lowest goals per match average in the league, so I thought that there might be value) - so does the model (presumably poisson based) that decided the pre event odds just run along until there is a goal or do the users of the models intervene?  If they just let it chug along then the output will still (imo) be wrong as (imo) the initial price was wrong and I shouldn't lay.

The poisson thing is quite interesting as goals in a football match is the way it is always described, but it had occured to me that the scoring rate of each side must change depending on whether they were ahead or behind.  I just assumed that the defensive response of the leading side cancelled out the attacking response of the trailing side.

Adjustments will be made but they aren't that big.  I tend to deal in supremacies and goal expectancies in football matches and it would be unusual for me to make more than a 0.1 of a goal adjustment in running (maybe more for a big fave).

[redarmi]

How closely do you monitor the Racing Post forecasts and how much notice do you take of who compiled it?

Nothing like as much as I should.  I used to know Paul Stansfield and respected his view and i think Nev did a couple for a while.   I was also Emily Weber was a good judge of sprint handicaps and without blowing smoke up your arse I had an idea from your old posts on Smartsig and sprintline stuff that you had a clue but I could also easily read a spotlight or forecast and not have any idea who wrote it.  I also think someone can be a very good judge but it doesn't come across when they write for example I know Matt Williams is punting for a living now and making it pay but as a writer for the Post he wasn't someone I would pay any attention to.  Who do you rate?