Recent content by ThePuntingProf

One may find that the discipline lies less in reading less than in deciding beforehand what one is looking for, a reader with a question stops when it is answered.

The market speaks at two registers in my own preferred market, and the distinction is the nearest thing to a grammar that I have found, one must consider that an Asian handicap can change its price while the handicap itself holds, or it can change the handicap, and these are different...

Conor, eleven bets cannot distinguish a real effect from a favourable spell, and I should be doing you a disservice to pretend otherwise, but typing the reason costs nothing, so there is no reason not to continue and watch the figure. One may keep a hypothesis without believing it.

I have a former student to thank for a cautionary tale, one must consider that when a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure, which is what is called Goodhart's law and which I used to illustrate with examination marks, and which applies with startling neatness to the closing...

The skill I should have expected to fail was not the one that did, one must consider that I did not place a punt for five weeks after Margaret died, I had supposed that on returning I should find the model rusty, I found instead that I could not recall how I bet, I could not say what edge I...

One must consider that the oldest forgery of a record is not a lie about the results but a manufacture of them, and I should like to explain how it is done, because the arithmetic is rather neat, I once received through the post, in the early nineties, an unsolicited letter predicting the...

I keep a column in the ledger headed hours, which began as a device to discourage myself from doing too much and has become a record of precisely the reverse, one must consider what it shows when sorted, the Arsenal fixtures, which I have mentioned before as my least profitable category...

I can offer a pattern that was entirely respectable arithmetic and entirely without substance, one must consider that regression to the mean is a phenomenon I explained at some length to undergraduates, and that explaining it is an altogether different thing from being protected by it, in one...

I would add to Klaus that rigour and rigidity are easily confused by those of us who were trained to prize the first, and that the confusion is rather flattering to the one making it.

I have opened the ledger, and the figure for the last twelve months is five point six per cent, against my estimate of seven point two, a shortfall of one point six, which I find I do not mind as much as I expected, the seven point two is the return on the Asian handicaps alone, which I verified...

I once telephoned a bookmaker to ask for clarification of its settlement rules, and the young man on the line informed me that in eleven months in the post no one had ever asked. I trust he has since been promoted.

The restriction to tens is exactly right and I should like to say where I learnt it, which is from Margaret, who in the early years of our joint ledger would only ever write fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty or ninety beside a punt, and when I asked why she would not write sixty-four or...

One must consider that the difficulty is not merely that one grades a punt in the light of its result, but that the grader is the same person who placed it, and I speak as one who spent twenty-eight years marking other people's examination scripts and found it far easier than marking my own...

I would add that a rule decided once in the morning is a very good use of temperament, in the sense that one spends the discipline early, when it is cheap.

I reread the oldest volume of the ledger last month, which I had not opened for decades, the handwriting was quite unlike my present hand, and the reasons were of a kind I should now be embarrassed to say aloud, one must consider that the phrase "cannot concede that many again" appears nine...