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My father loathed football with a passion, apart from one particular aspect of it. A fond memory of the old chap is of the whole family driving home on cold, wet Saturday afternoons guessing the football results by the inflection  in the voice of James Alexander Gordon on the car radio. Dad was brilliant at it, despite probably never taking even the slightest interest in the actual results. I suspect that the concept of the Scatter Gun was somehow formulating in my early teen mind - the preponderance of 1-1 1-2 and 2-1 scores struck me even then!

So it was with a wry smile that I noticed the following in the first blog post by Jon, aka Fedslam:

     

      I can't get my head around someone giving out so much information and guidance for free.

Maybe he's right. It's nice to read a positive review of the trade, but all I've done is to use the facts of the frequency of the scores in question to construct a fairly simple, fairly mechanical trade around it. Jon is obviously far more disciplined in his trading that I am - he obviously keeps detailed records for a start! I think he has fully grasped  the fact that the strategy (if that's not too grand a title for it!) is so flexible and open to an individual's interpretation that tweaks and tries are to be actively encouraged. 

The reason I rarely pursue the Mk II approach that Jon is advocating boils down to the fact that I found it just tended to over complicate things for me. There is considerable merit in it, especially if Jon's observations about first goal times stand the test of a larger sample size. I suspect they will because the matches the trade favours tend to be close cagey affairs, certainly at the start.

My latest 'tweak' is to set the trade up in the normal way, and then to top up 1-1 2-1 and 1-2 at 50 minutes or so if it is still 0-0. Taking advantage of double figure odds on 1-1 and odds into the early 20's on the other two scores really boosts the green when the trade goes your way, without needing to increase the initial stakes by too much.

What can't be too mechanical, and to a greater or lesser extent shows whether the person conducting the trade tends toward the trader or the punter, is choosing how and when to take your profits. I'm reasonably confident that if I'd hedged 2-2 on all the games that 1-2 or 2-1 occurred with a reasonably decent amount of time left that I'd be ahead compared to the number of games that actually hit 2-2. Remember, although the trade is geared to 1-1 1-2 2-1 there are plenty of other results that can result in 1 or two of those scores being hit at some point. Greening those matches at the right times can result in really big wins relative to stakes, and those are the matches I aim at. In doing so I probably sell myself short on others, and miss some completely. So I wish Jon / Fed all success in his exploits and hope he continues to religiously record his efforts for my benefit as much as his. Any 'slate' he might feel he owes me will have been wiped clean :-)