Yet to bet

2 days of Melbourne gone and I haven't had a bet yet! Well, not quite true - had a bet on Fedak on the basis she beat Mladenovic, the junior world no1, in qualies and was playing Polona Hercog, who has an awful hard court record. But when the 1st set proved to be very close I decided to get out for no loss. Fedak went on to lose, so maybe beating Mladenovic was no big deal.

Found it hard on the 1st day to get into the tennis after following the NFL. Each sport and it's market has it's own rhythm and patterns and it was hard to switch after 6 hours of NFL. Plus the outside courts were on/off due to rain delays, never a good time to bet. So I just watched Pova vs Kiri then went to bed.

Very sad to see Pova lose like that. The serve seemed to have improved since last season - 61% 1st serves in - but still not the reliable weapon it used to be, and she made countless ue's. All the more baffling as she had apparently played some good stuff in the HK exhibition a couple weeks ago. There must be a concern that we might never see her back at her pre-injury level when she strolled to this very title 2 years ago. But you could say she's lucky to be playing at all - RC injuries tend to end careers!

Nothing really seemed worth a bet today, other than the previously mentioned aborted bet on Fedak. 1r is a very tricky time - one hesitates to pile in on the favs as all will be having their 1st matches, some maybe their 1st matches of the season, yet there's no confidence in any of the outsiders either. Having said that, of the 50 1r matches completed, 40 have been won by the fav, a surprisingly high % for 1r. High profile casualties were Pova and Cibulkova, the latter blowing a 5-1 3rd set lead.

At least we're into the 2r matches tonight, with some amazing matchups, headlined by Dementieva vs Henin and Wickmayer vs Pennetta. Neither match seems worth a bet on, but should be good just to watch.