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 My well documented World Cup betting strategy was to concentrate on long term plays and keep bets on individual games down to a minimum.{readmorelink}Read more{/readmorelink}
Equally as well documented is the fact that I stuck to this strategy for less than 24 hours before getting sucked into the Argentina v Nigeria game and digging myself into a hole which would gradually get deeper and deeper.
The good news is that I can look back on the 2010 World Cup and reveal that I was probably one of the few punters to emerge with a profit.
While I should be very pleased with this there are two things that have cooled the celebrations somewhat.
Firstly had I stuck to my strategy I would have finished with a very healthy profit as my long term plays in the volatile spread markets came home smoking. The problem was that over the 4 weeks I had consistently leaked funds the bookies way in the matches themselves meaning my nett position while pretty good would have been so much better had I just shown some discipline.
The second downer occurred on one of my tournament spreads where I paid the price for not doing my homework. I went high on German goals at 7.6 meaning that I started making money once they got to 8 goals.
As in all spread bets the market had a stoploss or maximum win and when I took the bet I never checked this. On Saturday night I shouted home the 3 German goals against Uruguay thinking that I was profiting further each time the ball found the back of the nett only to find the next morning that the stoploss had been set at 5 with the bookmaker I took the bet with.
It turns out that when Germany scored their 4th against Argentina I stopped making money and although the 5 point profit equated to one of my biggest ever football wins I could not help but feel robbed in not benefitting from the 3rd place playoff game.
To make matters worse the stoploss at a competing bookmaker was 10 points so had I taken the time to check on this finer detail upfront I would have placed my bet there and collected the full 8.4 points profit. Sometimes even when you win in this game you feel like a loser!
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This article was written for the CitiGaming supplement of the Citizen Newspaper and was first published on the 15th of July 2010.
Brent Graham is a blogger on www.goodforthegame.co.za and presents a sports betting radio show every Thursday night from 22h00 – 22h30 on 1485AM Radio Today or Channel 169 of the DSTV Audio Bouquet.
You can follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/brentgraham or get on his mailing list by dropping him a line at brent@goodforthegame.co.za
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