Friday, June 16, 2006

Please God, take away my betfair account

I can not place a winning bet for love or money.

Last Sunday, during our now new tradional "KFC-World Cup Sunday", I thought to make the games even more interesting, I'd put a couple of bets on the games (random things like what the correct score would be, who would be winning at half time, then go on to win it at full time). However my betting style tends to be more "get rich quick" rather than "go for the sure bet", so instead of betting on the favorite (and thus shortest odds), I always go for the 32-1, 100-1 shots (who wants to win only £4, when you could win £64! £64 people!! I'm 100% certain that Ghana will beat Italy, and at 56 to 1, it would just be throwing money away NOT bet on this!!).

This is probably the direct reason why so far of all the 17 bets I've made, I've won only 1 of them.

Thankfully, I am a massive coward when it comes to betting, so all of my bets have been for the high stakes of £1 a pop (so I'm not on my way to Gamblers Annonymous quite yet). However, this losing streak means that what has gone from a way of making football slightly more interesting has turned into me now spending every evening on my couch, watching whichever money losing game is on the telly, screaming for really, really random things like:
  • Ronaldinho to be booked or
  • desperately wanting just one German goal to go in the back of the net or
  • desperately hoping that the Germans and the Poles will be really peaceful and loving teams, and thus not try to kill each other on the pitch and get any yellow cards. Or
  • desperately hoping that everyone would try to break each others legs in the Italy Ghana game so that there would be more than 5 cards shown.

The one and only bet I've won has been when some random Brazillian was named Man of the Match. And that wasn't even a bet I thought up, but a tip my broker gave me.

The further downside to this constant losing means that now I have to stay glued to the laptop to start chasing my loses, coming out with lines like: "I should lay a 0-0 correct score at £2 at 1.5, to then cover my other 3 bets for correct scores, for a total loss of 25p, instead of £3... THEN I'll wait until the odds go down to 6's, then arb back my Croatia to win bet, so I'll make 20 pence..."

All this stress, and my best betting day so far has meant I've lost only 25p..... 25 PENCE PEOPLE. I officially suck at betting. This does mean that if you want your team to ever win, get me to back the opposing team, because whatever I back loses and I do control the cosmos. This does not mean that I will stop throwing my money away and I'm pretty certain this World Cup will lead to my future life as a constantly losing professional gambler, who has Ocean Finance as speed dial 1.... My folks are gonna be so proud of me..

No comments: