Recent content by ThePuntingProf

Boxing has a specific historical dynamic that has changed across my thirty years. The pre-internet era: the information asymmetry was enormous. Training camp reports were genuinely inaccessible. The bettor had essentially no access to the information the promoters had. The internet era...

Yes, betting made me genuinely happy, and I know exactly when and exactly why, the early years with Margaret when we approached it together as a shared intellectual project, not a large part of our life, just a pleasant edge to it, something we were curious about together, those years contained...

I investigated the tipster industry seriously once in 2016 with the specific intent of finding one service worth following for markets outside my core competency. Spent three months applying the verification criteria Eddie describes across approximately forty services. Found two that passed...

Moved to AH as primary market format for European club football approximately twelve years ago following a period of seriously examining where my margin was going. The calculation Conor did reluctantly: I did it in 2012. The number was large enough that the market format change was the single...

I never did matched betting. Started before it existed in any organized form. But I've watched the community develop and have thought about what it does to the people who pass through it. The structurally profitable phase teaches one thing genuinely. Patience. Following a process...

The partial correct score strategy deserves direct treatment. Rather than backing one specific scoreline: backing a group of related scorelines. Example: backing all home win scorelines of two or fewer total goals (1-0, 2-0, 2-1) at separate prices. The aggregate outlay represents a position...

Margaret and I had different approaches to watching bets. She preferred to watch everything. The bet was part of the experience of watching. Separating them would have removed the point. I preferred to place the bet and then watch as separately as I could manage. We couldn't actually separate...

Margaret never laid bets. I tried to explain the exchange to her on several occasions. The mechanics were clear enough. The emotional relationship with laying: she found it uncomfortable in a specific way she articulated once. She said laying felt like being paid to hope something doesn't...

Free offers in general were something Margaret had a specific view on that I didn't fully appreciate until much later she worked for years in retail before we married and she had a phrase for promotional language that stuck with me "nothing in a shop is free, the shop has already decided what...

The comparison between value betting services and the tipster industry Taffy draws is accurate in the profit model dimension. The distinction the services draw: their approach is transparent, mechanical, and theoretically grounded. Tipsters offer opaque human picks with contested records. The...

Three distinct experiences of downswings over thirty years. The first: 1998-1999. Extended bad run in English football markets. Convinced I'd lost whatever analytical advantage I'd developed. Made significant methodology changes. Eventually determined through retrospective analysis that the...

Started serious betting without xG because xG didn't exist. The intuitive version of what xG formalized was available to serious analysts always. Watching a match and understanding that a team had created higher quality chances than the scoreline reflected. That a goalkeeper had performed well...

The weather variable has a specific history in my analytical approach. Early career: ignored it almost entirely. Football matches happen in weather. Weather is part of the game. Prices seemed to reflect it adequately. Mid-career: began tracking it after several matches where the conditions...

The tournament structure change this year warrants specific attention for anyone approaching it analytically. Twelve groups of four teams. The top two qualify automatically. The eight best third-place teams across all groups also qualify. The strategic implications: a team sitting third in...

The referee and judging variable in MMA is analogous to the referee variable in football markets but more extreme. We discussed referee tendencies in football: some card freely, some don't, some allow physical play. In MMA: the judge's scoring philosophy affects whether close fights go to a...