Now I only started actually writing a blog in late July which only gives results for the last third of the cycling road season so I will talk about a mix of the blog bets which are all on the googledocs sheet linked on the right hand side and pre blog bets, which 90% of which will be on my twitter (whether or not you want to trawl through all my tweets is debatable though...). In my experience it is imperative to record your bets so that you can have an idea of what your good at and what needs work on, or if you follow the various tipsters about, who is good and who is not.
Initially lets look at the big numbers and then drill down into detail. From late July through the blog I posted up 240 bets in various cycling markets staking 228.2 units with a p/l of +64.28 units which I was really pleased with for such a short period of time. Obviously looking at the spreadsheet you can see that this was largely derived from just a few of those 240 bets but like backing Golf, in cycling there are 200 riders a race and there will be dark periods but keeping the faith eventually paid off.
Now lets look at the full year statistics by bet type. Over the course of the season there are plenty of different bets available, especially during the Grand Tours which is why there are so many options here. I also split out TT and TTT's as for me the race against the clock is a different proposition to a normal stage race.
Particular highlights from the stage win bets were...
Pauline Ferrand Prevot winning the Worlds Road Race at 33/1! such a shame this is basically the only women's race all year you can bet on. I'm going to try and include videos for these as they were such happy moments!
Next up in my personal hall of famers for the year was the much maligned Ben Swift proving that he has a lot more ability than a lot of people give him credit for when he sweeped up a 300/1 (inplay about 15 mins from the end) e/w placing in Milan San Remo. I still think he had the speed to win if his positioning was better, watch him on the left hand side of the road in the sprint.
Anyway those two were my favourite bets of the year, but returning to that table one area which was really disappointing was H2H bets (backing one rider to be classified higher than the other), I put a lot of effort into these over the year for a 0.9% return. To improve on this I'm looking to try and only pick out the really wrong odds and not the more marginal picks, sounds easy but I doubt it will be.
My best races of the year were the World Championships, Paris Nice, The Three Days of De Panne, and Milan San Remo, with the worst race being the Vuelta where I shipped 30 units, Catalunya was nearly as grim also. I tried to make a nice graph by event but ultimately could not make it intelligible!
And now for the big category that I just had to include is the one that got away. Dario Cataldo stage 14 of the Giro 33/1. Watch the sky man's legs just stop in the sprint v Battaglin, if it looks slow its because it was on cobbles half way up a mountain. This video doesn't do it justice though, Cataldo was always going to beat the Colombian Pantano and Battaglin only caught them up just before this video starts. A great stage though even if I was close to shedding a tear for my P/L graph.
Next year hopefully I can match this year and try and improve on those H2H's! I'm also working on a database which might give me some nice graphs to include on here but that will be dependent on my time commitments. I'll be blogging everything I can but do follow on twitter as that's where inplay and late additional bets will go. If I get decent results then I will want the odd small donation to the charities on here as that was the point in the first place. Have a good xmas and new year and I'll see you for whatever race the bookies put up first from down under in January.
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