Thought I'd put in another appearance before people think I've done a runner and left the blog for dead. There's a lot going on at the moment and with no F1 it makes sense for the blog to take a back seat for a month or so.

My application is coming on nicely but I don't think I will get it finished before the F1 season starts which is a shame. Most of my spare time (of which there is little) has been spent on this and it's why I currently have over 1000 RSS feeds about F1 to catch up on! If you don't use an RSS feeder you should. They allow you to catch every piece of news and you never miss anything as they sit there until you get a chance to read them.

I have decided to stop posting in the football section as there's not much I can say about it. I will bring the attention back to F1 and post only about this. It's strange because although this site is mainly about F1, most of the traffic from search engines is form those looking to bet on football. My website stats allow me to look at the key words and phrases people have used when coming to my site…..



I wonder if those looking for 'lay the draw' have found what their looking for yet?

Thanks to all of those who link to my site. My stats allow me to tell who the most referrals have come from - some of you must be getting a massive amount of visitors! Anyway, I've updated the link section and I'm happy to add anyone else's link if you want me to.

I'm thinking of doing things differently with the blog next year. For it to be worth updating it has to give me some benefit. The purpose for starting this was for discipline - making a loss is no fun, but posting about it afterwards is worse! The blog keeps me on my toes from that perspective but it takes up a lot of time and I need it to benefit me more. I'm thinking of tying in my research with some kind of pre-race weekend factsheet - something along those lines. If anyone has any ideas then drop me an e-mail. I also want to move away from blogger but being on a windows server and only know visual basic I'm struggling to find a solution.

Before I go, here is a clip I took from my phone at the Race of Champions of Lewis in his McLaren - the picture quality is poor but the sound is great.

I’ve debated this for a while, but I’ve finally decided to post my results from this seasons F1 trading. Whilst I’m chuffed to bits with what I achieved, some of the ‘professional’ traders out there may find these amounts to be small – but please remember I do this part-time as a hobby. It’s also the percentage of your return that tells the success or failure in my mind – there are probably some god dam awful traders out there who have made more than me through luck alone and just because they started with a larger fund.

Also remember I’m strictly trading F1 and nothing else. That means I only had 18 races over an 8ish month period to work my magic.

The Stakes

My staking plan is a bit different to ‘normal’. Because I have a constant source of income through my day job, I don’t need a huge fund to begin with. I use what I call a virtual fund. I know how many races there will be in the season and then decide on an amount I would a)Like to have available to bet on each race and b) afford to loose on each race. This season my pot was £100 per race, meaning £1800 for the season. Realistically I’m never going to loose £1800! If I got anywhere near loosing £500 I would have to stop and seriously consider the fact past results may have just been luck and I’ve finally hit that loosing streak. I mainly look at things on an individual race scale and I have to be happy with the fact I may loose the whole stake on one race (there may be technical issues etc which wipe me out). With 2 races a month I’m saying I can afford to loose £200 if the worst came to the very worst.

There are two good advantages to this strategy. I don’t have to worry about loosing everything half way through the season as the pot for the remaining races it set aside (in future pay packets!). It also helps in the way the F1 season unfolds – more about this in a follow up post to this one.

Anyway, this season the amount of money I physically placed into my pot was £119.70 !! I lost £19.70 on the first race and from then on never needed to top up the fund as there was always more than £100 for each race available.

Last season (2007) I was using £50 a race so I had doubled my stakes and with that I was hoping to get a return somewhere between last years and double that (you can’t expect to double stakes and get double the profit so I was happy with anything in between). I got off to a good start last year and never put in more than the original £50.

The Profit

The actual return was more than double last year’s. In 2007 I made £364.94 pure profit and this year £887.62. Therefore I turned £119.70 into £1007.32 in the space of 8 months, whilst watching and following a sport I love. Not bad.

Even if you look at it from the virtual pot point of view, a return of £887.62 (49%) on a fund of £1800 is not bad– far more than most other investment packages made during this period the media have called the ‘Credit Crunch’ (however I suspect they will be calling it ‘The Second Depression’ when it’s all over and done with ;-)

It’s not a huge amount and I know there are people out there making this each month but they are doing it professionally whereas this was in my very limited spare time. I’m happy because it was enough to pay for my trip to Monaco which was fantastic. To give you an idea of how much spare time I have, the recorded Monaco GP is still on our Sky+ box yet to be watched!

A few graphs

This first graph shows the overall profit for the season. There are actually a few similarities between the two. For example, if you imagine the drawdown from race 3 was harsher this year, the 2008 line would have followed a similar pattern. I will post about this some other time in more detail but basically it’s down to testing, pre-conceptions and slow bookies!



These two graphs show the returns for each race. As you can see the worst result was the second to last race where I did have a technical issue with Betdaq and lost a big percentage of my pot. Other than that the extremely happy to see the wins are far greater than the losses and I never lost more than half the pot in any other race.


This was something I was trying to improve on from last year. You can see below that on average the wins where the same as the losses, it was the fact I had more wins which put me in profit during 2007.



So there you have it. I’m not making thousands of pounds but I am making a profit. All the time I’m also developing my skills and growing each year in confidence. I’m not going to throw thousands at it next year in the hope I can quadruple my profit – I have a long term plan and I’m going to continue growing on that.

I found this stashed away on my PC the other day. It’s my first ever green which I made on Montoya in the 2005 Italian GP (note it was made before the event started at 9:35 in the morning. No in-play risk taking needed here). I remember being so chuffed at the time!



I’d worked out how to make money with relatively low risk on a sport I enjoyed. I didn’t know at the time where it would lead to and would never have expected it to end up paying for a trip to Monaco. I’m now going into holiday mode so won’t be posting again until 2009
– Happy New Year to you all!

Sorry for the lack of updates recently. Keeping the site up to date is hard work and I’m sure a lot of these betting blogs go down the drain for this reason. It’s been nice to have the ‘time off’ since that dramatic race in Brazil but I thought I’d better do a quick update.

Since the end of the F1 season I haven’t placed any bets or traded any events. Actually that’s a lie because 10’s on Diana to win X-Factor at the start was too good to miss and I traded out of that at 2.6 when she didn’t appear the other week. But apart from that I’ve done nothing. It’s been nice!

Since the end of the F1 season I have spent as much time as possible on my little project to create a betting application using the Betfair free API.Read about it here. Yes the free API is slow and crap but for the purposes I plan to use it, it shouldn’t be too much of a problem. If it starts to prove successful I may be able to cover the charges for the full access at a later date.

With the lead up to Christmas I doubt I will have much time to post but I have some time off over the new year and plan to do my season round-up then.

One last thing, I booked a holiday to Las Vegas in the new year. I don’t expect to come back with any winnings because I won’t be gambling too much - I will find it more entertaining watching everyone else loose !

I wouldn’t be able to do the race justice if I started to explain what happened today so I will keep this purely about the betting. Before I begin, congratulations to Lewis and Massa in making possibly the most interesting championship in years and of course to Lewis for finally winning it. Now to the betting….

Lay position on Massa

My plan was to only let the lay of 1.7 go in-play if the rain had wet the track. With 10 or so minutes to go it was looking dry and I scratched the position just in time as his odds dropped to 1.6 as everyone thought the expected rain was not going to materialise. I was listening to Radio 5 who seemed to catch on to the fact the rain had actually started about 2 minutes before the off – a lot longer than ITV. I jumped back on the lay side of Massa @ 1.62 and watched as his odds shot up and traded back out at 2.4 (pink line).


If the race had not been delayed for 10 minutes I would not have exited and would have let the bet run, but the delay ensured there was enough time for the teams to get prepared. Noticing the rain had stopped I decided to back Massa @ 2.4 no more than a minute later and sure enough his odds tumbled back down again! Exiting the position at 1.8 for a good green means I made an almost perfect trade (blue line)…..unfortunately…….

I sacrificed that profit towards the end as I was unsure how much the rain would affect the last laps and decided to lay Massa again @ 1.28 for a free lay. The rain was expected before the end and I figured out a better way to make a larger profit.

The WDC Championship market

During the last few races I have built a free bet position on Massa to win the championship. Last year I did the same with Alonso and Kimi while Lewis had the lead. It acts as a kind of safety net for the deciding race as it gives you more freedom with your race positions. While taking lay position on Massa today I knew I was going to win if he won the race and the driver’s title because my lay was smaller than the free bet return. The only risk was Massa winning and Lewis finishing top 5.

Instead of watching the race winner market towards the end I switched to the drivers championship market. At this point Lewis was still in 5th and heading for the WDC. Then the rain came and Vettel managed to pass him. I greened my free bet position on Massa at odds of 1.39 – probably the best move I’ve made all year!!

You can see from the graph on Massa that 1.39 was nowhere near the bottom but going into the last corner with Lewis in 6th and you would have though Massa had done enough as it seems a lot of people did. There is quite a bit matched at under 1.2 for an F1 market.



Lewis never really got matched that high, maybe because it all happened so quickly. Note the amount of money placed on Lewis compared to the rest of the market due to the fact he was leading the WDC for most of the season.



EDIT: You can see more about this here...http://betting.betfair.com/betting/formula-one/lewis-hamilton-drifts-to-160-on-betfair-during-final-lap-but-comes-031108.html

And this wasn't me by the way! Although I wish it was....http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/3366564/Fan-could-pocket-125000-from-Lewis-Hamilton-triumph.html

Other positions

I made an overall small loss with the other markets. Profits from podium and best of the rest markets proved successful with Vettel (I took these on before the race and traded out when he was 2nd – he won neither of them). I did loose on Kubica and Rosberg for points places though as with more rain they would have been in strong positions.

So for the actual race I pretty much broke even but ended up winning from the driver’s championship market. A winning end to the season has to be the best way to finish.

There’s no more F1 until late March 2009 but I will post some updates and reviews about the season from a betting perspective over the winter break. After breaking my record for the total profit made over the course of the season I’m going to have a deserved break!

I didn’t post yesterday because there wasn’t much to say about my trading – basically I didn’t really do any. It was a really tough one to call and not wanting to take too much risk I ended up leaving my positions as qualy went in play. I had been trading the odds on Kimi and Heikki during Friday and Saturday morning to get some nice ‘free bets’ on them should they be lighter than the title contenders. I could have greened them for a small profit but it would have been really small - I felt leaving them as free bets was the better choice but of course Massa stormed to pole and now I know better. Still nothing lost on qualy so I’m only down because of the P1 bet on Lewis (which he just missed out on).

As for today, we have an odds on favourite in Massa. If you followed my blog this year you will know I don’t like odds on favourites this season because of the safety car risk.

In a dry race with ‘normal’ safety car rules then 1.7 for Massa is a fair price. Today is expected to be wet and we have ‘silly’ safety car rules so is 1.7 really representative?

I have taken a lay position on Massa for race win with the following exit strategies -

• If it’s dry at the start of the race exit for a small loss. Its worth a lay in the wet but in the dry the odds start to become true – take a small loss before it gets bigger!
• If it’s wet then his odds won’t come down much lower than 1.5 should he lead into the first corner. (if they do it may be worth laying again!). It really depends on how much rain there is as to what happens next. I would expect the odds to vary quite a bit if it’s raining so it should give plenty of opportunity to get out at some point. If he still leads after the 1st pit stops then I will gradually exit the position over time. A Safety car could come at any point so I don’t want to exit early in the race, however I don’t want to leave it so late that I take almost a complete loss.
• Anything else will be in my favour. Depending on what happens I will either slowly exit the position if he’s not leading or leave as an outright if he ends up way down the order.

The start to this race is crucial and I can already feel the tension from my room in the UK 7 hours before the race! I can’t imagine what Massa and Lewis must be feeling.

Lets hope for a nice clean fair fight and congratulations to whoever ends up as the 2008 World Drivers Champion.

The markets get a bit stale towards the end of the season. Everyone thinks they know what will happen and jumps in early or they are cautious and hold back till the Friday, which means there’s not much action in the meantime. I normally have a flutter on the first practice session which has done so so over the course of the year so with not much happening I’ve had a closer look at what’s on offer for ‘Who will top first practice?’

Lewis has topped the first practice session for the last 3 races (China, Japan and Singapore). Is it a case of those tracks suiting the car or him, or is there a trend here? I have noticed of late that Lewis tends to do a short stint at some point in the first session which is usually the one which sets him the fastest time (I’m talking 3/4 laps at most when most others will do 5-7 lap stints in P1). This seems to be some kind of testing pattern the team have been using. Maybe there is some technical reason for it or maybe its purely physiological and they/Lewis want to get off to a good start.

I would have expected his odds to be around 2.5 to top the first practice session but most bookies have him at 2.75. This is expected to be a Ferrari track so that may have something to do with it – no doubt the long up hill climb will benefit the red cars better, but with less fuel on a 3 lap stint it may not matter. I’m not really that interest in 2.75 but Coral are offering 3.25 which look’s interesting given the above.

Don’t take this as a tip – I’ve not yet taken the bet on myself as the weather is a concern. The weather is expected to be wet which could be to Lewis’ benefit should it be a light drizzle, but will mean anyone could top the session with heavy rain.

Although it’s normally a disadvantage to only be able to trade your selected event every other weekend there is one big advantage –the long break since my loss in China has given me plenty of time to think about ‘what went wrong’ and ‘what could have gone better’. Of course a lot of it is down to luck but after a loss it’s very easy to get carried away and try chasing that loss. If you have nothing to trade on for another 2 weeks it gives you plenty of time to re-set your mind and start over again.

Hopefully I don’t need to explain what’s at stake this weekend in Brazil. I’m looking forward to it more than last year for some reason, maybe because this season has had so many surprises you can help but think there’s one last twist ( not that you could top last year’s twist). Formula1.com have done a list of the permutations which can be found here….what ones your money on?

Its always hard to tackle a race weekend when the championship can be decided as was the case last weekend. In effect there are two races going on - the normal Brazilian GP and the championship race. There are 4 cars who could play a part in the championship race and another 16 in the normal race. None of the cars in the either race car too much for the other and it gets more complicated when you consider the two team mates may /not have to play a role.

For example Kimi has out-qualified Massa in the last two races and seems to finally be on top of his set-up troubles. In a normal mid-season race I wouldn’t hesitate to back Kimi @ 7 for pole as he is this weekend. But of course the main reason he’s that price is because out of their two drivers, you would think Ferrari want Massa on pole. That may not be the case though and pole means nothing at the end of Sunday - but there’s still that nagging thought.

There are a couple of prices that look good which I will keep to myself until I get matched. Once again there is a chance rain could disrupt the weekend so I’m looking mostly at in-play trades.

When the pressure has been on them the two rivals have not exactly shone brightly this year – you could say Lewis done well in China but at no point during the weekend did Ferrari look quick enough to put any real pressure on him. The weekend as I see it will go one of two ways: 1) Lewis to repeat his performance in China and lead all weekend 2) It’s a close run thing which will likely result in an error by one of the two contenders / FIA decision deciding it / weather causing a Force India to win after a safety car on the last lap resulting in Lewis finishing outside the points and Massa 2nd.

If it’s 1 then SkyBets 9/1 for Lewis to score a hat-trick (pole/win/fastest lap) would not be a bad covering bet.