Work in progress...

I called the England game wrong in a fundamental way - in that the one goal win went the wrong way. However, I thought it was a very encouraging match for England. The 'old guard' weren't really missed, and it's no real shame to lose to the Dutch. Although in many ways they are an ageing team it's hard to contain Robben when he's awake and on form.

From a trading perspective it was, however, a good night for me. A good win on the England game at 1-2, made even better by the ensuing 2-2 and 2-3. I also thought Italy were far too short at 1.66 against the USA, and duly laid them pre match. I removed my liability on the game at half time and was duly rewarded when the States took, and held, a one goal lead. Wales let me down by failing to secure an equaliser against Costa Rica, and a lay of France at 0-2 against Germany would have worked for me had the Germans managed to score before the 90th minute! Hey ho.

Off to trade three Paulista games now - they do love a scatter gun in Brazil!

Pyscho and Scotty.... more of this please

I'm not after timing, it's 19.41 with a kick off against the Dutch due in twenty minutes. Obviously that title will read very strangely if the Dutch win 4-0; but for me I think these two characters are a bit of what the English national side needs. Steely minds and hard work.

Psycho has said he doesn't feel he's experienced enough to take the job full time. It's tempting to ask where, exactly, going for experience has got us hitherto.

Time, as they say, will tell.

My money, if you're interested, is on an England win by one goal.

Spreading the risk, and a favour to ask

An interesting post by Peter Webb on the nature of the mature football markets, part of which I quote:

Lots of people focus on just one match, research it to death and try and make a judgement on value; that’s fair enough. But often the market is ‘hyper efficient’ so value is tricky to find. Even if you can find it, it can take ages for the system to mature to a profit. Therefore one of the things I tend to do is spread my risk across many matches. This speeds up the maturity of the system I am deploying and gives me a better chance of a regular payoff.

I couldn't agree more with this assessment which is why my screen looks like some kind of Jackson Pollock painting with markets and chatrooms etc open all over the place as I try to multi-task. Peter's post wasn't totally altruistic though, as he goes on to extol the virtues of trading with BA linked to an Excel spreadsheet (which I suppose he has every right to do) .

I thought this therefore would be an ideal opportunity to bring anyone who is interested up to speed with my amateurish attempts to develop an SG bot as discussed a while ago.

Painfully slow progress, to be honest. With the first signs of spring and slightly warmer weather business is starting to pick up again, and I'm often late home and tired. Notwithstanding that I seem to have run into a couple of 'logical' walls, one in particular relating in how to establish the current score. I don't think it's sensible to rely on the stats sites for this - I've seen far too many errors over the years. So, as mentioned I intend to poll the correct score markets looking for 1000 odds to back, indicating that score is no longer a 'live' or available one. My thinking here is to implement some kind of binary tree with 0-0 as the primary node and going from there...

If anyone feels able to point me in the right direction I'd be grateful....