Jack Houghton's Betting Challenge: The conclusion ... "I'm just a blind squirrel"

Other / Jack Houghton / 10 August 2010 / 1 Comments

A squirrel finds a nut - not something that Jack Houghton did much of (metaphorically speaking) in the last year

"My moments of prescience were more than soured by the many lowlights of the Challenge though: the defeat of Norwich by Tranmere for some reason hurting more than the rest. A worse game of football I have not seen."

Jack Houghton has spent a year gambling a fictitious £1,000 on every sports and special event he could set his eyes on in an effort to disprove a theory - that winning gamblers specialise. So what was the result? Read on to find out

When writing Winning on Betfair for Dummies I had postulated that "winning gamblers specialise", but, at the beginning of last year, after a string of remarkable winning tips, in a variety of sports, I'd begun to doubt my own wisdom. After all, if I'd had a sparklingly profitable six months betting on everything from the Dubai World Cup to French Open Tennis, why couldn't the run continue?

At the time, I set out three possible explanations for my amazing run of tipping form:
a. that I was God;
b. that a well-honed betting antenna can quickly tune-in to the value in any event;
c. that even a blind squirrel finds the occasional nut.

Then, on August 15, 2009, I set out to disprove my own advice. With £1,000 in a new Betfair account I resolved to live the life of the armchair scattergun punter, betting on whatever event happened to be up-and-coming.

The results were not encouraging. After bumbling along for a few weeks with about the same amount of money I started with, there then began a slow and inexorable decline in funds; followed more recently by a sharp decline as I took ever greater risks in a vain attempt to regain profitability.

It all ended with a losing £7 treble on some nondescript midweek racing: a far cry from the blue riband Olympic 100m final that had launched the challenge (the predicted win for Tyson Gay taking a full year to materialise).

Between those bets were 160 others, on 26 different sports. Those "sports" included the Oscars, a General Election, the World Chess Championship, and many others. Indeed, at one point or another, the Betting Challenge ventured in to more than half of Betfair's All Sports menu items.

The biggest win came courtesy of Menorah at Cheltenham; the biggest loss from Jan Vermeer in the Derby. Other highlights included the prediction of a hung parliament long before the media cottoned-on, and predicting three of the World Cup semi-finalists (although, of course, not the eventual winners). These moments of prescience were more than soured by the many lowlights of the Challenge though: the defeat of Norwich by Tranmere for some reason hurting more than the rest. A worse game of football I have not seen.

In a way, of course, I had nothing to lose here. After all, if the Challenge was unsuccessful (and, oh boy, wasn't it) then it only served to prove my original advice correct. A damn fine book, that Winning on Betfair for Dummies: full of sage counsel.

It remains true though that every long-term winning punter I've ever come across (and through my work I've come across a few) has an incredibly narrow focus in terms of the sports they will bet on. At most, they might cover two or three sports, but it's far more common for them to only ever look at one.

And most even specialise within that: football punters who focus on the Scottish First Division; racing punters who only bet on Nurseries; and cricket punters who focus on international one-day matches. At the extreme end of this, I read recently of a guy who only bets once a year - on Eurovision - and am friends with someone who only bets on... wait for it... horseracing stewards' inquiries.

Personally, I cast my net a little wider, but whenever I bet outside those events I know intimately (increasingly, these days, only novice hurdles and chases) the profitability, in the long-term, decreases. True, when I venture outside of my comfort zone I might find the odd nut, but, for the most part, I'm a blind squirrel who keeps falling out of trees.

Comments (1)

1. R Hills is God | 20 August 2010

   Where did it all go wrong? The author of seminal punting tome 'Winning on Betfair for Dummies' reduced to scrawling some crummy betting challenge that wouldn't even make the grade of a general betting forum thread. At least they use real tenners there in their bid to martingale up their dole money to a billion snarlers, not ficticious ones!

   I must say the form of the 2002 Martin Wills isn't working out at all..........