Alex69

HELLO, good evening and welcome to my latest blog. I don’t know if any of you have ever played any football management games, but to sum them up they’re just like women. They beckon you in with the prospect of a more exciting life, you become addicted to them, you enjoy a few highs and lows (as opposed to kitchen table mediocrity), then they dump you on your backside just when you think you’ve sussed them out. Besides, once you’ve managed Crawley Town to the European Champions League final (I have the screenshots to prove it), the only way is down.

I digress. My local cricket combo, Lancashire, have just achieved promotion back up to the top division of English cricket. When they finally got their winning runs, the crowd of 23 (two umpires, the groundsman, 18 members of the catering staff and the two twelfth men) were ecstatic, I can tell you. The nearby Tesco’s, which is seventeen times larger than Wembley, three stories higher than Taipei 101 and shinier than The Shard, meanwhile, was laughing all the way to the bank.

For a change, I have a double for you this week. Stuart Bingham will win his first round match in the Shanghai Masters, as will Ding Junhui. If either of them don’t I’ll be in serious trouble as I owe Akira ‘The Sharpened Bowler Hat’ Yamawaki as few million Yen after losing a wasabi-snorting contest to him in downtown Osaka the other night. I’m not saying my vomit stunk, but the TV news was soon reporting unsubstantiated rumours of a chemical attack. Thankfully, no women or children were hurt, only a few mixed-up martial artists returning from the local dojo.

Good luck and happy punting!

006.9

HELLO, good morning and welcome to my latest blog. I hope this reaches you well. Please accept my usual apologies for not being in touch, but I had a date with a belly dancer in Turkey the other week. I’m not saying she was ugly, but she had a face like a witch doctor’s rattle. Still, there were benefits to be had as one of the local madmen (‘Agitated’ Abdul Arslan) invited me on a few trips out off the coast of Dalyan.

There’s only so many pieces of Turkish Delight you can eat off a woman’s stomach, so once I’d blown her out it was time for a razz down to Iztuzu beach, followed by a bit of cave swimming and a jeep safari. The driver of the aforementioned was almost as mad as Abdul, which is saying something. He reminded me a little of Baldrick out of Blackadder, but without the brains or the looks. Still, we managed to get back to the mosque in the main square intact when I was set upon by three freaks who’s travelled over from Istanbul when they’d heard I was in the country. Abdul was taking a plop in the nearby public convenience as he feels it’s his civic duty to pay to lay a cable, so I had to face the trio single-handed and unarmed.

I one inch-punched the first one, who went down like a three week-old kebab. The second one came at me with a big meat cleaver, so I grabbed his wrist, spun him round and delivered a quick kick to the ging gangs, followed by a rib stamp as he fell to the floor. You generally find that when you’ve teddied the first two, the third tends to back off.

Not this time.

He came at me with all he had, which wasn’t much, so I simply side-stepped him, got him in a headlock, whispered in his ear “Mate, you’re just a pawn on a chess board you can’t even see the edge of,” (in perfect Turkish of course), then dragged him kicking and screaming onto the harbour before hitting him on the temple with the palm of my free hand and gently lowering him into the water.

Just as I was walking back, Abdul appeared and asked me if I fancied an Efes. How could I refuse? I sauntered over to Yener’s Bar with him, offering a polite ‘Merhaba’ to the locals who I’d impressed with my mixed martial art streetfighting skills.

I digress.

The darts and the snooker are coming up soon and I have a couple of certainties for you.
Back Dale to beat Davies in Rotterdam and Van Barneveld to beat Suljovic in Blackpool.

Good luck & happy punting.
Till next time!
006.9

HELLO, good morning and welcome to my latest blog. Buoyed by my correct prediction of Murray taking the Aegon title the other week, I thought I'd share some more sage-like words of tennis tipping wisdom with you all.

Novak Djokovic, who I once bumped into on Larvotto beach in Monte Carlo (he was very polite, despite me repeatedly kicking sand into his face), looks like he can repeat his 2011 success, the only trouble being Nadal looks like he can emulate his 2008 and 2010 wins and Murray looks like, well, a bit of a gargoyle. No disrespect as he’s not in the game for his looks, but my bulldog did a great impression of Murray the other day as he attempted to lick some urine off a thistle.

Don’t get me wrong. I have the utmost admiration for Murray and his sporting abilities. He’s won me a lot of money over the years and I have to thank him for that. Besides, it’s not like I’m any ‘Brad Pitt’ in comparison.

More of a hybrid of the best bits of George Clooney, Hugh Jackman, Adam West and Ron Jeremy.

I digress.

Enjoy the tennis and if Nadal, Murray or Djokovic don’t win Wimbledon this year I’ll roll naked down Murray mount (formerly known as Henman Hill, Nastase Knoll, Sharapova Slope, Cash Cairn, Ashe Ascent, Berdych Bluff and not forgetting Cliff Cliff).

Just make sure you have a ticket, because there’ll be a lot of birds there wanting sight of the 69 torso.

Good luck & happy punting,
006.9

HELLO, good afternoon and welcome to my latest blog. It's been quite some time since I last updated you all on my activities so I hope this message reaches you well. Good old British weather, eh? The blooming precipitation at Queen's Club over the last few days is enough to made a man choke on his lobster thermidor. Rather than complain, however, I was quickly onto one of my contacts in a large sweat shop in South East Asia with a bespoke design for a new style of tennis shoes. Basically a hybrid of squash shoes and golf shoes, these really tick all the boxes so I've ordered two thousand to be knocked out in time for Wimbledon. I've made sure they're all white in keeping with Wimbledon's rules and at £80 a pop I'll be in profit as soon as I've sold three pairs. It's amazing how quickly these Asian workers can turn things round, especially when half of them have their little fingers missing.

I digress.

The boy Murray is looking good at present, as I'm writing this with a pair of Gargoyles directly in my line of vision, and I can't help but think he'll win the Aegon Championships this year, rather than in 2012 when he went out to Nicolas Mahut, the French joker who once played John Isner for six weeks and still lost.

I must dash folks, as I've got a date with some idiot who thinks he can personalise the interior of my Aston Martin DB5 with Andy Warhol-style pictures of Yoffie out of Fingerbobs. This I have to see.

Till next time.

Good luck & happy punting

Alex69

Hello, good evening and welcome to my latest blog. My, it's been a while. The last time I spoke to you my hair was a lot thicker and my waistline a lot thinner. Then again, when you get used to being wined and dined by various extremist groups with a view to sharing punting knowledge it's easy to pile on the pounds and become a bit nervous. I was having a spot of lunch with one of the aforementioned only the other day. For obvious reasons (i.e. they’ll cut out my guts and feed me them if I share any secrets that could get them into lumber with the gavvers) I can’t name the faction I was being entertained by, but I can divulge that their name involves a colour and a month. They’re a pretty ghastly bunch I have to tell you – low on personal hygiene and high on creosote – but we have an arrangement whereby every tip I give them they take me out for caviar and spicy potato wedges, washed down with Black Monk’s Bavarian Brew, so who am I to argue? One of these days I’ll simply tell them where to shove their hospitality but needs must – I still owe ‘Barking’ Jon Ferguson three ponies and half a monkey.

He's in the circus trade.

I digress. I’m up to ‘Q’ on the betting advice alphabet, so here goes fans...

Q is for Quick Fix

Rome wasn’t built in a day, so by the same reckoning don’t expect to suddenly be wheeling your cash around in a barrow after one bet. Patience is an underestimated virtue and a vital weapon in the better better’s armoury. Take it nice and easy and the steady drip of cash will fill the bucket sooner than you think. It’ll take a while, of course, but that big pile of money will have been worth all your time spent investigating your bets, getting the stakes right and of course correctly identifying the right markets and the right types of wager. Paper trade your systems first and use your betting bank. Don’t go mad. Keep control of your liability and ultimately you’ll succeed. Over-stretching yourself is not only bad for your back, it’s bad for your betting bank.

I’ll be back soon, but in the meantime I need to avoid a man with a beard, a limp and a badly-done tattoo of Kilimanjaro.

Chin up, chest out & shoulders back

006.9

HELLO, good morning and welcome to my latest blog.

I visited a good friend of mine the other day. He lives in one of those big old mansions where the painting above the dinner table has eyes that move and all the bookcases have secret passages behind them. He puts on the odd wine tasting evening now and then. When I say ‘odd’, I mean ‘weird’. You have to dress up as one of your favourite book characters while you’re there. I’ve variously turned up over the years as Timmy the dog out of The Famous Five, the giant peach out of James and the Giant Peach and Zaphod Beeblebrox out of The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy. The latter elicited a few chuckles I can tell you, especially as my extra head was an actual ‘Kraftwerk’ robot head from their 1981 tour of locations with nuclear power stations. 

This time, however, I came as Kevin out of We Need To Talk About Kevin.

I digress.

There’s some exciting darts action coming up this evening and there are a couple of handicap bets worth taking a look at. Kevin Painter +2.5 can be had at around EVS against the ultimate hot-and-cold blower Adrian Lewis, while Andy Hamilton +2.5 can be backed at similar odds versus Simon Whitlock, against whom he’s had many a close battle.

And finally, I’ve been following the experts on www.zerohype.co.uk for quite some time now and have found myself making even more money. Well done gentlemen, long may it continue.

Good luck & happy punting! I’m off to shoot some arrows.

HELLO, good afternoon and welcome to my latest blog. Once again, apologies for the sporadic nature of my posts, but my life has been as unpredictable as the British weather of late. I had to spend a week holed up in Monaco recently as a good friend of mine who owed me a favour invited me over to his mansion with a view to spending a bit of time at the Monte Carlo casino.

He reckons I bring him luck, so I didn’t need much persuasion to hop on a plane and join him for a few sessions on the roulette tables. After three quarters of an hour I’d accumulated enough chips to give Harry Ramsden a run for his money, so we spent the rest of the week variously living it up in La Note Bleue, sunbathing on Larvotto beach and chilling on one of my friend’s yachts moored at Monte Carlo harbour.

I digress.

Tomorrow’s darts is looming and I have a tasty Dutch for you - (comedy pause) - and I don’t mean Raymond Van Barneveld. He’s just totally so not my type.

Get on Mr Taylor to beat Hamilton 8-1, 8-2 or 8-3 as and when liquidity permits on the correct score market and soon your wallet will be bulging.

Good luck and happy punting! They don’t sell car snow chains for Ferraris at my local Halfords so I’m off to buy myself a sledge 

ISN'T it awkward when you meet someone and they want to buy the clothes you're wearing? I experienced this the other day in a delightful country pub I visited, just south of Crewe.

While I was tucking into the Ploughman’s Lunch In A Basket (tremendous value at £7.99 with a free pint of Bishop’s Thorny Elbow), this dreadful fellow approached me and offered me £100 for my blazer. I politely declined as I was just about to shovel some more Branston Small Chunk onto a nice piece of brie, but he wasn’t letting it go. I calmly explained to him that the buttons alone were worth more than a grand and he seemed to take umbrage at this, going all hot under the collar.

He offered me outside, so I told him to stop being so rude and to wait until I’d finished. He started screaming all sorts of obscenities so in one swift and fluid movement I got up, administered a one inch punch to his solar plexus and he went down like a sack of human excrement.

I digress.

Tonight the Premier League Darts is into its third exciting week and each tie throws up some rather splendid betting opportunities. James Wade has played like the proverbial dog thus far and can’t possibly play as badly as he has been doing, so lay his under-priced opponent Gary Anderson. You’ll be able to trade out on this one if you want to protect your stake. As for the other three matches, Whitlock will beat Painter by 8-5 or 8-4, so dutch those. Taylor can take Barney 8-6 or 8-5, while Lewis should end his run of draws by beating Andy Hamilton.

Good luck and happy punting – I’ve got to see my tailor about a cravat.

HELLO, good afternoon & welcome to my latest instalment of punting advice. You'll notice that I've not been blogging as much lately. This is largely due to Grouse Season being in full swing and my penchant for getting out in the cold and doing a bit of shooting. I do of course love a bit of roast grouse in the autumn too, served with bacon, blackberries and roast pumpkin in a rich garlic suace. Fills the belly and keeps the vampires away at a stroke. What's not to like?

I digress.

P is for points
All betting banks are composed of points, which are effectively a substitute for money, but simplified into 1-100, regardless of how much or little your bets are. Betting bank points are, therefore, percentage points and when a tipster recommends you place one point on a particular bet he means that you should stake one per cent of your betting bank i.e. the total amount of money you’re prepared to risk at any given time.
For example, you decide to put away £50 for a spot of betting fun and you read in a paper that one of the experts believes Manchester United will definitely win at Inter Milan. This coincides with your thoughts on the coming match and his reasoning mirrors yours. He reckons you should risk two points on United. This translates into £1 of your hard-earned (i.e. each of your ‘points’ is worth 50p).
If you had put away a betting bank of £200, for example, then a two-pointer would be worth £4. Obviously, if the bet wins, say it was quoted at 2/1 (3.0 decimal) then your return would be £12 including your original £4 stake, thus increasing your betting bank to £208. Your next bet would be a proportion of your £208 betting bank, so a one-pointer would be £2.08, a two-pointer £4.16 and so on. It's a breeze, as John Kettley might have once said.

P is also for Paper trading
One of the greatest weapons in any better’s armoury is the paper trade. What this means is that rather going in head-first, all guns blazing and throwing your hard-earned away on stuff you know little or nothing about, you decide upon what you would have bet on, then sit back and wait for the results. Note down on a spreadsheet who or what you placed your bet on and why, then see how much you would have won and lost. Note down how the events panned out and make references to anything you may not have taken account of, such as a star player being missing from one of the teams, a particular tactic one of the teams applied or factors such as historical form, disciplinary records and the like.
It is only after a successful run of paper trading that you should start putting the same techniques into action in real life. By paper trading a system first you’re guaranteed to not only save money but also make more when you’ve honed your system, ready to put it into action in the real world. Paper trading can actually be almost as much fun as the real thing. Don’t, whatever you do, paper trade with Her Majesty’s bank notes. That’s strictly the domain of a mug punter. Use Monopoly money. See how quickly you win or lose, then have a quick game of Monopoly. You don’t have to spend all your life betting. In fact, if you bet better you could quite conceivably give up after a few years and enjoy your winnings.

P is also for Professional Punting
You don’t have to be a professional punter to make a steady income out of betting, however, just a good one who knows his sure things from his no-hopers. Another old adage which applies beautifully to betting is “The steady drip fills the bucket.”
Greedy, unsuccessful mug punters will back long-shots and multiples time and time again in the hope they can win a large amount of money quickly. As you can see by the faces and the fashion sense of punters who frequent bookmakers, this isn’t a technique that ever works.

See you all soon - I'm off for a shoot.

Good luck and happy punting!

SORRY it's been such a while, followers, but my shrapnel wound was playing up so badly I had to cut off my own leg. That wouldn't have been so bad, but the blood made an awful mess on the Axminster. Mrs69 wasn't too HP at all and if it hadn't been for the quick thinking on the part of my latest butler, Kevin 'The Gerbil' Klijsters, who recommended a thick foam of six parts Vanish to one part water, I fear my marriage might have been over. He applied the solution while I applied the tourniquet & Mrs69 went off in the huff.

I digress.

O is for Odds
Odds are the chances you have of winning, according to the bookmaker, i.e. the person or organisation ‘laying’ the bet. Yes, there’s a fair chance you already know this, but like any skill you need to have a solid understanding of the fundamentals.
For example, an outsider might be quoted at 15/1 or 16.0 (‘high’ odds) depending on whether you prefer fractional or decimal. In this instance, you’d put a quid on and get £16 back, including your original stake of £1. Alternatively, the odds may 1/5 or 0.2 (‘low’ odds/ ‘odds on’) depending on whether you prefer fractional or decimal (put a quid on and get £1.20 back, including your original stake).
In a nutshell, the bigger the odds i.e. 15/1 is fifteen times ‘bigger’ than evens (1/1 or 2.0 decimal), the lower your probability is of winning, and vice versa.
Nearly all online bookmakers these days offer odds in both formats, so you can’t go wrong - unless of course you’re a bit of a chump/mug punter. Below is a hypothetical example of how odds are presented in different ways and what they actually mean.

Example: Blackpool v Yeovil Town (football)

    Decimal    Fractional
1 (home): Blackpool    1.40    2/5
X (draw)    3.75    11/4
2 (away): Yeovil Town    5.00    4/1

Here are some calculations made with the two odds formats, made with a hypothetical stake of £20 on Blackpool to win.

It is important to distinguish between the total payout, which is added to your betting account after a win, and your profit, which is the payout minus your original stake.

Example A: Blackpool to beat Yeovil Town (home win)

Home:      Stake x odds
£20 x 1.40 or 2/5      Payout of £28 inc original stake (profit of £8) 

Example B: The draw

Draw:      Stake x odds
£20 x 3.75 or 11/4    Payout of £75 inc original stake (profit of £55) 

Example C: Yeovil Town to beat Blackpool (away win)

Away:      Stake x odds
£20 x 5.0 or 4/1    Payout of £100 inc original stake (profit of £80) 

Never let the odds influence your bet. By all means take the best odds available to you once you’ve chosen your market by a quick reference check on www.oddshecker.com or similar, but never place a bet just because the odds look tasty. This is one of the fastest ways you can part with your cash, for it never to be seen again. By betting purely because the odds look substantial, you’ll have to trust to luck time and time again. Better betters make their own luck. Practise makes perfect. Look before you leap, in other words. Remember, with everything else in life, if the odds look too good to be true, they probably are. Find out why the selection you were looking at has such high odds – it might be because the bet is an in-running bet and the team/player is already losing or possibly the team you’d selected might be only picking a half-strength side or even the team isn’t the team you thought it was! Some of the foreign football leagues are absolute murder for having similar-sounding team names. Seems such an obvious point to make, but it’s true. Every other team in Turkey seems to end in ‘spor’ for example.

O is also for Online Betting
The one and only drawback about betting online is that your computer doesn’t have a cash dispenser, so that any profits you withdraw have to hang around in cyberspace for a few days before they magically appear in your bank account. The opposite applies to deposits. Once you click that ‘confirm’ button, your money leaves your bank account quicker than a Jamaican sprinter.
Other than that, betting online or via your mobile phone is an absolute joy compared to betting anywhere else. You’re in complete control, you can see each and every market updated live and you don’t have to suffer anyone smelling of booze, plop and B.O. trying to tell you that you ‘should have done the forecast’ (go into any high street bookmakers and there’s a fair chance some scruffy loser will be on hand to offer you his advice.

Not only are there many and varied online bookmakers offering appealing free money match bets, there are also plenty of websites happy to help you with your punting and offering free tips. These are not necessarily worth following, but can help you make an informed choice of what to back, lay or leave well alone. There is a list of some of the best online bookmakers elsewhere in the book, but one essential addition to your favourites list is the site www.oddschecker.com – a handy area for price comparisons on just about every event worth looking at, easily navigable and equipped with useful additions such as a Dutching Calculator, Hedging Calculator and Bet Settler. More on these later. You’ll often get to the point where you’re ready to make your bet, but need to know where the best odds are. Oddschecker tells you this in an instant. Very handy. There’s no point in staying loyal to one particular online bookmaker as odds vary between each site and each event. They can be compared with supermarkets in this respect. Although it’s nice and easy to do all your shopping in one supermarket, can you really put your hand on heart and say that not one single item could have been bought cheaper elsewhere? Unlike supermarket shopping, however, you don’t have to traipse around carrying your bags. Your next bet is never more than a click away!