27th January - Total Profit - £216

It started with tennis and with me still not feeling confident just did 2 bets and left with a quid's profit.

Onto the horses and the place market in live running - 3 out of 4 correct the one that failed fell at the last leaving me down £3 on the horses.

A new column appeared on the spreadsheet as I gave handball a go - I have watched a lot of handball and think I can spot a winner in a match and a couple of trades got me £2.

So basically I wasted my day and started the football with my target for the day still to get.

Portsmouth v Aston Villa - the game started off with the two teams playing high tempo football and this is dangerous - or it appears to be dangerous as the action goes from one end of the field to the other in very short time. What I sussed out is that with high tempo games you need players who have exceptional first touch to be dangerous and Villa and Portsmouth only have about 2 or 3 players with this quality, meaning that when the ball is passed wide at pace to a winger, the winger usually wont control it with his first touch and the defender will be all over him or the ball will be played into the centre midfielder who will have 2 opposition players to nick the ball off him and thus this game can be traded quite normally but with the usual prerequisites in place, i.e. if an attack looks dangerous and you're in a trade get out and take the small loss, if there's a corner and a dodgy defence then trade out - in this match I like the defences of both sides and was out of a trade when the ball was passed to Heskey who scored. After he scored, Portsmouth upped their game for 10 minutes or so and I opted out of trading and in the 2nd half I tried to set up a position whereby I had an open bet on Villa so that if they did score then I would be able to make a nice profit. What transpired was the odds were around the 1.45 mark and fluctuated two or three ticks depending on who was attacking, so rather than just leaving the position open, I backed and layed a few times and made £5ish just on the match odds. I could have continued doing this all through the 2nd half but then I got the message from Sky "if you want to continue watching this then cancel one of these recordings" - I didnt want to cancel one of the recordings and turned over and stopped trading. A bit frustrating as I had made £13.50 and would expect to have made a bit more if I hadn't turned over - however the Mrs would have had me if she missed her CSI or Gok.

So onto 10:00 and El Nacional were playing Nacional, neither of which were the Portuguese Nacional so what was it - tuns out to be a south american pre qualifier to their equivalent of the Uefa or Champions League. El Nacional of Ecuador were playing Nacional of Paraguay. Long story short the Paraguayan team were the far better team and were dominating, so careful trading ensued, after half time El Nacional (the crap team) scored from a freekick, then I was faced with a situation of trading on a result that I didnt expect to be the final result and abstained, last time I looked the crap side were winning 3-0. I made £9 but only £7 is counted for the 27th as £2 was settled after midnight and will counted for the next day.

Results:

£21.00 3.33%