Punt.com - A Blog About Gambling by a Professional Gambler.

Get disgusted for fast results.

I've been doing some thinking about my performance this week and relating it back through my 5+ years of trading.  Specifically about the way I relate to risk, how I deal with taking the risks and the way this has changed during this period.  This may well turn into a very random ramble, but a few things have occured to me and I just wanted to get them onto the blog, hopefully it will be of some interest, if only to myself.

Let's start with this week.  I got off to a great start, my first match I racked up a fairly nice win by anyone's standards.  It was the perfect match and the perfect start to the French Open fortnight.  But since that moment until yesterday lunchtime things took a downward turn, I jumped into positions without thought, my mind was scrambled with the myriad of options available to me and I quite literally lumped on anything that vaguely resembled a tennis player with a good price and an easy to remember name.  Note here that I was aparently uncaring about the level of risk I was taking, these weren't small bets, yet I treated them as if they were nothing and unimportant.  It sends shivers down my spine writing about it, but at the time - there was not a care in the world.  As a professional, it's a pretty disgusting state of affairs.

Rewind back 5 1/2 years.  I had £75 to my name.  All that mattered to me was not losing.  Not losing ANYTHING, let alone the £75.  Every trade was placed with the sole intention of minimising risk and downside.  I would sweat over each £1 I made.  Looking back I admire the way I was, in some ways I was a superb trader without much knowledge, but all the determination and speed.  My bank grew quickly, but I would maintain my feelings towards risk for quite some time.

Clearly you can't really compare myself then to now in a perfect sense, I had little money then and these days I have a much larger amount to my name and this brings new challenges and methods for trading in such size.  But, there's some things that I need to get back that I've lost along the way.  The main one being a repulsion towards trading badly and losing.

This sounds a rather strong feeling to have - repulsion.. Fear of losing money was also present, but mainly it's a feeling of disgust towards not so much losing, but doing things wrongly - which usually results in losses.

Back to yesterday lunchtime.  I was pretty fed up, it's the French Open - a Grand Slam event and one of the best trading events of the year.  I was down, being particularly stupid (even by my standards) and then I realised how foolish I had been and quite frankly, it disgusted me.  I was angry.  I put down a mental marker at that moment (polite term for slamming my desk and shouting loud enough for the neighbours to hear) that I would do things rightly for the rest of the day at the very least - if I lost, I lost, but I would be right with everything I did.

And it has just struck me how powerful this feeling can be.  I often say to myself - get angry with it, stop being an idiot and lets do things properly.  But I do believe the feeling of revulsion or disgust at what you've become, might become or been doing, is a more powerful thing, and can stick with you longer.  Maybe better than this, is the almost instantaneous effect it can have on you and your bad habits.

Next time you realise you've been a tosser, get disgusted!  I'm now ahead for the tournament after a series of wins from that moment, it's no coincidence - I started doing many things differently almost straight away.  Things I should be doing all the time anyway.

French Open trading update.

It's been a strange week for me so far.  A lot of losses, some good wins but overall I'm roughly level.  It's been stop / start with both the weather and my P/L, tough to get a rhythm going and tough to read the play.  My trading and my brain have been in a bit of a muddle because of this I've been struggling to get things in order. 

One part of this is down to the sheer number of matches going on.  I'm a fairly experienced trader these days, but I still get into a mess when there's so many matches to look at.  It's a case of being distracted too much... I might just be able to trade 2 matches at the same time.. but 3 or 4 is too many and I end up taking a position and not managing it correctly.  Which is actually what's going wrong when I'm trading one match at a time anyway.

There's been a lot of momentum changes in the matches so far.  It's been tricky getting used to 5 set matches instead of 3, there's a lot of conserving of energy going on with the players and I think it's important to decifer when a player is putting in maximum effort and when he isn't. 

A good example was Moya's game yesterday where he was very slack in the 4th (restarting the match 0-4 down in the 4th set overnight) against Seppi... he came out in the 5th,  several gears higher and Seppi couldn't cope, great game strategy though and one that's used a lot by various players.  You can do well opposing someone who's winning a set a bit too easily just before the start of the next.  Their odds are often way out of line.

The main area where I think I'm going wrong is getting on at the wrong odds in a whole match context.  What I mean is, the bets I'm placing might be fine, but I'm not allowing for what might happen and I'm certainly not getting some of the best odds available on a player during the course of an entire match.  I tend to be just getting on and leaving it, which is not a good idea, given the number of twists and turns we're seeing.  A consequence of this is that the intra-match / set upside and downside is not being weighed up the way it should.

As I say, the bets themselves are fine, but by no means the juiciest margin on a player in each match.  I have to work on weighing up where the biggest edge is likely to be for various scenarios and wait until this occurs, rather than getting on at the wrong time and thus treading water.

A few reactions and judgements of form so far..  Serena is not playing that well, doesn't seem to be timing it that well, but you have to think she will find it against good opponents.  She'll need to, because so far she's no match for Henin or Jankovic etc. 

Vaidisova has come back from a wrist injury, but appeared to hold it worryingly in her first match of the tournament, she's still mentally weak too - the racquet was thrown and the coach given a look after just 1 1/2 games!  It did make me chuckle.  Some growing up needs to happen soon.

Sharapova is looking more like Bambi on ice on the clay, an opponent that can keep the ball in play whilst moving her around will see her off comfortably. 

Federer looks good, I quietly fancy him to take it this year.  Nadal is just being Nadal..  Hewitt had a battle with Gaudio earlier, Gaudio should have won it, but it came down to mental strength in the end, both were making like walls, Hewitt just made like a wall for longer, or at least, that's what Gaudio felt.  Importantly though, Hewitt's shots did not seem to have enough power to get through Gaudio, definitely a concern for him going forward, and the stumbling block for him v Nadal. 

Baghdatis is looking transformed after indifferent form over the past few months.  I think he's lost some weight, he looks faster and he's hitting it harder whilst being patient.  I hear he's changed coach...

Back to trading.

David Beckham 6/4 NOT to play entire England v Brazil match.

At the risk of sounding too much like the Kicking Bets blog, I thought this was a great bet.  William Hill had this price this afternoon, I'm not sure how long it had been there, but it got taken down swiftly after I had £800 on, hardly a large exposure for them, being the big company that they are.

This is the first bet I've had with a bookmaker outside of Betfair for a long time.  I used to place a lot of bets with various companies until one by one they began cutting down the amount I was allowed to bet and sometimes asking me to stop betting altogether.  I've been very lucky to get this bet on.  I did want much more on that this, but it was all they were willing to lay.  I would be very surprised if Beckham wasn't subbed at some point..  Either way, I'm going to this match, so it'll be fun cheering for Becks to be taken off.  Decent odds for a fun punt.

::update::update::update:: 1st June 9:45am

As JohnT from The Gambler has kindly pointed out, Bet Direct are offering their own Beckham Specials, the same bet with them is 2/5 !  With Beckham offered at 7/4 to play the entire match.  I could close out my bet for a risk free profit, but I intend to let it run.  Here's a snap of the Bet Direct site.  Pleasing.

      

Wet start to French Open.

I hate rain at tennis tournaments.  Luckily though, I had the family round this morning so I wouldn't have been able to trade anyway... So it was most welcome earlier on.  Grand Slam tournaments are always cause for excitement and expectation in these parts.  2 weeks of unlimited trading and punting opportunities, with lots of liquidity in the markets and plenty of new tennis punters fancying their chances.

This years French is going to be all about setting up another Fed / Nadal final, it's the match everyone wants to see.  In the women's there's interest to see if Serena can continue a run at the Grand Slam, she's by no means a favourite and a slow start in her first match today might suggest she will struggle.  It offered up my first trade of the tournament however, with a back of Serena as the market paniced with her a set down.  Thankfully she got into gear and took the next two easily enough.

I'm not a big outright winner fan.  I rarely bet on people to win the tournament, I prefer to stick to the matches.  Though I've had some small nibbles at Jelena Jankovic to win at 7/1 roughly.  She won Rome very convincingly beating Kuznetsova in the final, only allowing her to hold serve twice if I remember rightly.  Question marks remain over her ability to close out big matches, but she may just be ready for that challenge this year.

In the men's tournament it's near impossible to see past the big two.  I've had tiny bites into Hewitt at 100/1 roughly and Soderling was too big at 999/1.  Not that I think either of them can get past Rafa or Roger.

Tomorrow's forecast is more rain and extreme wind, great.  The courts looked incredibly slow today, that makes it harder to finish off opponents, so we might see a few comebacks.  Then again, I've seen very little play today so I'm going to reserve proper judgement.  Good luck.

Andy Roddick and Men's Fitness, photoshop shocker.

For a while now I've felt Roddick was looking trimmer on court.  I can't remember where it was when I first noticed it, but in my opinion he's looked leaner than he has for a while.  ...But not quite this lean!  Just how small does his head look compared to his chest and arms ?!  'Andy... suck your stomach right in.. and tilt your head back a bit, we'll edit out the double chin and enlarge the rest...'  You can find the full article here.

Punt.com spring cleaning.

Decided to have a tidy up of the site design, add a little colour to it, smarten it up.  My intention for the blog was always to have the content as the main focus, hopefully this is still the case. It's a work in progress, fonts, banners and sidebar items are still undergoing changes. 

Betfair's New Commission Rates.

Yesterday Betfair announced that it would be raising it's commission rates.  For those that don't know, here's an explaination of their rate system..  This, predictably, hasn't gone down too well amongst the customers, myself included - nobody likes a price hike do they ?

Taking a look at the new pricing structure, it would appear on average that most people are 6-8% worse off.  Personally I'm probably between 3 and 5%, having worked my way over the 100,000 commission points fairly regularly, they've been fairly lenient at this far end of the scale compared to the majority of the core user base.

I had a lengthy call with my premium account manager earlier today about the increases.  He was in a fairly stressed mood, they are all run off their feet replying to and calling customers about the increase.  There was some interesting stuff to come out of the call.

The main reason he called was due to a post I made about the customer service needing to improve in proportion to the increase in rates.  I stand by this comment, I know he was unhappy with it but could understand what I meant. 

If you are a big account, you get looked after at Betfair, but if you are in the other 98% of users (% is my guess) then you get the standard helpdesk line.  This is an area in need of a big improvement from Betfair.  Very often the help is substandard, or slow (in the case of emails).  My manager was quick to point out that this is very often the case with big companies that are growing quickly, true - but it still should be addressed. 

Betfair are in an incredibly strong position in the betting exchange market.  I'm not sure of the definition of a monopoly, but it's probably close to having one.  It's for this reason that they can raise the prices and get away with it easily.  The other exchanges suffer with poor liquidity (not many users and very little money in their markets).  Without liquidity, gamblers and traders don't play, but without gamblers and traders there is no liquidity - it's chicken and egg stuff.  If Betfair play their cards right, they can charge what they want, without causing enough of an uproar for some sort of mass exodus to occur.

It would appear there's a growing band of people wanting this to happen, but unwilling to leave familiar waters in order to start providing that liquidity elsewhere.  An example of this is at The Betfair Trader's blog.  Here is a trader that's in the middle of the rate bands, he'll really feel the difference to his bottom line, his annoyance at the changes are mirrored by many.  Some clever thinking on the part of competitior exchanges is needed to lure people across.

My account manager is, understandably, for the rate changes.  He had many good points about Betfair and how they can justify the new prices.  For example, they have not raised them in 3 years, and the rise is well below inflation.  Not raising them in such a long time is possibly going to cause more of an uproar when it does occur. 

But I'm not sure the inflation arguement stands up that well, given the way exchanges work.  It's not the same as raising the price of ordinary goods, raising the prices of a commission structure directly affects their business model.  Raise them too high and the exchange becomes useless to anyone using it.  There would be no hope of making money for most users apart from maybe the most ardent of traders and even then, they would surely move in their droves.  Have the rate too low and the exchange clearly wouldn't be making the profits that it should, no one can begrudge Betfair it's profits, having offered such a revolutionary betting product.

This is an important point, and almost certainly raises doubts of the extent to which they can raise their prices in the future, and indeed the future of the business as a whole.  For the average punter (someone who places bets and leaves themselves open to losing or without closing the position), making a profit on Betfair has become harder in recent times.  The markets have evolved quickly, they are fast and they are efficient.  For punters without a big edge, commission already wipes a big slice of what they might make, in fact it's probable it makes the difference between winning and losing for quite a few.

Today's increase will further reduce the prospect of winning for many users.  And when you get into this territory, it's not long before you begin to lose customers.  In fact, I was told they've had one or two closures.

Betfair's userbase is still expanding, for now.  Most of the growth probably now comes from international users, the British userbase left with not much room for expansion (there's only so many gamblers in the country).  But what happens once the growth slows or stops.  Where is the room to grow profits then?  The commission rates are already bordering on too high... profit growths will need to come from elsewhere.  This is why I cannot see Betfair being able to justify many more price increases.

The big players have been left unaffected.  There's a few people well above 150,000 commission points, so far above that they'll never need to worry about such trivial things.  I'm not sure I can manage to get that total of points, I've been happy to get to 2%, it's frustrating to see that mark being moved further away from me again.

Another point my manager was quick to note was that Betfair are offering new products, which require money to make available.  Live video feeds, Sports stats, Betfair radio, Betfair labs, etc etc.  I have to wonder how many people use these things.  Clearly enough to make them a priority it seems.  But most of these are available elsewhere and for free.   I do wonder about the sense in pushing for these utilities, and whether the userbase was sufficiently surveyed about the demand for such things.  Maybe they were, but I'm sure any survey question might have missed out the bit about raising rates in order to pay for them.

There is nothing that can be done about the rate change though.  No matter any amount of bleeting on their forum, Betfair aren't going to u-turn this one.  And everyone will still be using their platform to trade on, liquidity will remain poor elsewhere and soon the moaning will die down and the old rates will become a distant memory once more.

What Betfair should do though is take the initiative and improve their levels of service and integrity in line with their standing in the marketplace.  To suffer with customer service is exceedingly frustrating as a customer of a business in such a strong position, it comes across as arrogant and greedy... Two things I'm sure most at Betfair aren't, certainly not my account manager :)  They owe it to themselves to build a better reputation than they currently have amongst users.

They need to work on communication skills and speed of reply.  Some humility would also work.. very often I'm made to feel as if the customer is always wrong, rather than right or cared about.  Raise your standards, put your customers first and look after everyone, now that you've pushed the rate envelope, you have no excuses. 

Well done Roger Federer!

Roger Federer ends Nadal's 81 match win streak, with an incredible display.  Maybe he has me to thank, 1.38 a gift I thought on Nadal at the start, and for a while it looked like it was.  Rafa took the first set 6-2, plenty of errors and frustration from Roger.

Something happened in the 2nd set however.  Patience arrived in the form of a gently played backhand return of serve from Roger.  It looked fairly innocuous, but as Rafa hit more and more serves to it, Roger built a solid rhythm from it, slowly gained confidence and built a platform from which to build a rally and get chances to unload progressively harder on his forehand.  And what a forehand.  As Peter Fleming commented, the forehand had been on vacation for 3 weeks, it was back and it was huge, particularly the off forehand. 

Question marks arise about whether Rafael was tired, in my opinion he only looked tired at 4-0 down in the final set.  Very few errors from Roger as he ran out 2-6 6-2 6-0 winner.  If he can find it at Roland Garros, we have some fireworks to look foreward to. 

I'm glad I didn't have the bet on Rafa prior to the match.  I very rarely bet pre match.  I got stuck in hard laying him in the middle of the 2nd set as Roger looked increasingly confident.  The result has wiped out a lot of my weeks losses, and allows me to move foreward feeling confident. 

Truely an incredible match, some amazing tennis.. this, is why I love to watch tennis and to trade it.  Well done Roger !!

Roger Federer's worries.

I'm worried about Roger.  I think he's showing the first signs of losing his mental game.  He'll need to get this right quickly, before the brain rot he's suffering from takes too much of a hold - See Mr. Coria for an example of that.  I'm not saying Roger will suddenly disappear, but it's sad to see Roger suffering like this.

Mistimed shots.  Lost Sets and Lost Matches.  Dropped Service games and opponents that now see him as "beatable".  Roger is worried about them all.  I'm not a mind reader, but his body language really does tell a story this week.  I don't think I've ever seen so much emotion from Roger.  During yesterday's match with Carlos Moya, we had slumped shoulders, cries and shouts of anguish, fist pumping and even a smile!  In the past we were lucky to get a half mumbled "come on".

There's a battle taking place in his head.  He's trying to forget his worries and play whilst putting them to the back of his mind.  The problem is, he's tense.  These mistimed shots bring all the worries to the front of his mind.  One bad shot is taking Roger 15+ good shots to put right, such is the dent to his confidence.  Hit 2 in a row and you can almost give the game away.  I imagine it to be a bit like trying to hold a float under water, eventually it slips out of your grasp and pops up to the surface again.  He'll need to fill it with water to sink the problems completely.

For a gambler, the important point here is that he's become unpredictable.  There's 2 or 3 different Roger Federer's showing up in each match.  His match against Monaco for example, loses the 2nd set amidst a barrage of unforced errors, somehow holds on in the early part of the 3rd, then from nowhere finishes it off very quickly when in sight of the finish line.  His next match v Ferrero was the old Federer, incredible tennis, Juan-Carlos had next to no chance of ever winning that match.  His quarter and semi final matches v Ferrer and Moya were similar stories - a mixture of great shots and awful shots, with no way knowing what's coming next.

He's a dangerous guy to bet on.  His match stats rarely match up to what his odds suggest they should be at the end of the match.  His prices are short, but there's a factor that might well make the prices right.  And that is, do his opponents believe they can beat "Roger Federer"?  His name still carries influence over the other players.  Not only do they need to perform, but they need to think they can win.  I'm not sure they do.  Yet.

One player that doesn't suffer with that is Rafa Nadal.  They meet again today in the final.  Most readers will know my dislike for giving out tips, so please don't see this as one...but...  1.38 on Nadal looks a gift.  Cue Roger playing the match of his life, no unforced errors / ridiculous drop shots from 25ft behaind the baseline etc.  Good luck today, at the time of writing, I have not had a bet on the match.

The professional gambling journey.

Perhaps I should read my own blog a bit more often..  Maybe I should write on it a little more often too.  It seems I've lost some sight of where I am going and what I'm trying to achieve. 

It's been quiet at punt.com for a while, and that's because I've felt good about what I was doing.  Yet somewhere in the background there was a change happening to the way I trade and a loss of awareness of what I'm doing (or not doing).  It's not a coincidence that I've begun to lose.  So fine is the line between winning and losing, that even small changes can make the difference.  The change I've encountered in my game, is not small.  Yet it crept up on me, because I've been having good results - there's good results from good trading, and there's good results from being lucky, these tend to dirty the picture somewhat.

There's many many technical issues.  These are quite easy to rectify, I still know how to get them right and when to use them, I simply need to execute with conviction.  It's the conviction part that leads me towards where I think the real issue is here.  I touched upon it in the first paragraph..

I said that I have lost sight of where I was trying to go.  Today I realised that perhaps the problem is in the trying to actually go somewhere at all, rather than what I want to do along the way.  In fact, as gamblers, we don't really have anywhere to go, apart from a hole in the ground when our time's up.  Hopefully that is a little way away for most of us, but in the meantime - there's no deadline, no hurry to get somewhere and nowhere to get to.  A concept that few of us are familiar with in day-to-day life. 

The introduction of a destination / goal, is asking for trouble.  These can take many forms, most of which involving some deeply rooted requirement to make a certain amount of money, either per match, per day or any other time frame.  Perhaps the most destructive influence of this manifests itself in need to make back what you've lost.  It buries your trading plan under a quickly increasing weight of emotional baggage.  Consistancy and control in employing a trading strategy becomes a seemingly invisible goal.

So it's the journey that we have to learn to love, and not the looking forward to reaching a destination.  This being a bit "cliché", makes it all the more troublesome to do.  It's easy to resist this approach, it requires the sort of passivity and steadfast consistancy of approach that's tough to achieve everyday... let alone month on month.

It involves doing the same, technically correct things over and over and letting the money take care of itself.  Worries and cares over wins and losses matter not, if you simply remain aware of the right things to do and DO THEM, without question.

Resistance comes in the form of questioning our own ability to do this over a very long period of time.  Questions about boredom and time wastage will arise in our minds, as will the inevitable noting of that last rather large loss we just experienced and how long we might be waiting to make that back, etc. etc.

When professional trading is viewed in this way, it becomes apparent that "patience" and "discipline" are small parts of a larger puzzle.  The complete picture being "the journey" itself.  Problems of discipline, patience and ego, occuring when one resists focusing solely on our journey.

Why is this difficult to do?  It's because it's not something you can 100% actively do.  You can't actively "non resist"!  Just like sportsmen can't try their hardest to get into the zone, it happens when you don't try.  The best we can do is be aware, have a great plan and be in a good condition to execute it.  Enjoy being attentive.  You can actively pay attention to how you feel and what's happening to the match and how it is affecting your plan, if you are doing this then there's no time for impatience, and you are engaging in the journey without knowing it.

Preparation of your trading plan will take care of most things.  Prepare one that has contingencies for everything you can imagine, make it air tight and have it focus on keeping you at the table (minimising losses).  A complete plan will remove all issues of ill discipline, because that match/market scenario is already catered for. 

If you can't execute it, then you are resisting and it's time to stop until you are in the right frame of mind, be sensible about the length of time this can take.  I took the month of February off, granted I had a trip booked, but it coincided with a bad run.. I came back and acted on my plan perfectly for a while.  As time has gone on though, I've become mentally fatigued by it again and it's probably time for a week off before the French Open. 

Having said all this, I'm not completely against goal setting.  I know the importance of having ambition and a dream.  I traded for a while after I achieved a long term goal without a new goal in mind and I didn't have a clue what I was doing.  There's a lot you can find on setting "S.M.A.R.T." goals, all I would say is make it long term and make sure you make very clear to yourself about HOW you will get there - by following your plan and dedicating yourself to trading properly.  If you must have short term goals, then I recommend making the conscious decision to trade each and every match correctly.  If you do this, then you should feel good about your losses as well as your wins.

It's been a long post, but I needed to get a few things out.  Frankly I'm disappointed in myself in the last week.  I believe I was lucky to get away with the previous week's profits and this week, the God's decided they would show me the real consequences of my actions.  It needed to happen and was a certainty to occur at some point.

You pay for alarm bells to ring in this game.  Tuition fee's have once again been hefty, but worthwhile I hope.  There's only one or two matches this week I feel I've traded well, most importantly, the last one today - Hewitt v Nadal.  I still lost, but am content to lose having traded well.  The payoff was almost enormous, but thats the way it goes.

I want to get back to technically correct trading, and I want to be relaxed whilst I'm doing it.  There's several methods of executing my bets that I've been too lazy to do the last couple of weeks.  My focus will be on doing these properly, and making sure I have plenty of energy to do it.  I also want to be more aware of trouble and back away from troublesome scenarios.  I'll be working on my plan a little to put these into effect and make them easy for me to do.

I also want to get back to a good routine away from the computer.  Make sure my trips to the gym are more regular and get more fresh air.  Fit body= fit mind is unfortunately true, for me anyway.  I strongly believe good balance away from trading spills over into your work.

Good luck in your trading and focus on the journey and not the money.