16 July Reverse Martingale

5 out of 7 favs won today, with one match being evens the pair at the off. The losing favs were AMG, who had been an uneasy fav anyway after Hradecka's impressive display yesterday, and Rezai, again not unexpected as it was her 8th match in 11 days. What was surprising was Patty and Agnes both progressing relatively serenely even though they have both had equally arduous recent schedules. I'm surprised the market has Agnes as such a strong fav vs the impressive Hradecka tomorrow.
Took it relatively easy today after yesterday's losses, a kind of reverse Martingale if you will, with small exposures and building up greens in running. I did mess up the Strycova match, caught out by Larsson's unexpected 3rd set rally which caused me to go all red.

I was also done by Betfair's failure to put the Goerges match in running and their subsequent decision to suspend it when they realised their mistake. I think only 4 games had been completed when they suspended and normally they would let such a match run on, only suspending if the 1st set has finished. It seems to be at the whim of whoever is on duty, with no clear consistent procedure. Those silly inconsistencies drive us punters to SEETHE. Thankfully it doesn't happen very often.

Doubtful I'll have any more bets this week. Prague kicks off at 11 UK time so I could maybe play the 1st match, but if it runs on for 2 hours then I'd be in trouble as I'd have to leave, so best avoided I think.

Next week is Bad Gastein and Portoroz, two nice little tournaments. Portoroz caught me cold a couple years ago when they changed the courts over the winter and I'd not found out in my research. It used to be very fast, one of the fastest hardcourts on the tour, but they changed it to a slow bouncy surface. So you had the likes of Errani winning instead of the Srebotniks. A very puzzling first few days it was until the penny dropped.

Looking forward to both immensely!

15 July calm down, dear!

5 of the 6 favs trotted up yesterday - only Pironkova got beat, hardly a surprise after her poor 1r perf. As I type, Rezai's in the 1st set tiebreak but so far, all 7 favs have won today.

Took yesterday off and started today well, but had a disaster on the Szavay, Oprandi and Errani matches, not greening up when I had the chance and not going red soon enough. And I was snookered by Hradecka's dominant display - rare to see a fast 1.01 train in WTA. Not entirely sure why I decided to try laying those favs today. Oh well, bad day.

Temptation to pile into Rezai was strong, but walked away as she was way too short playing her umpteenth match in a few days and against a competent claycourter.The qf's tomorrow look promising. Mustn't chase!!! (hence the title of the post)

Hard work today

Lots of matches, many overlapping, lower ranked players prone to all sorts of chaotic behaviour! Got to love it.

Of the 13 matches in Prague, 10 were won by the favs, the losing favs were Bacsinszky and Chakkers. One match I'm not sure who the fav was as it was a LL match and only added late by Betfair. Quite an amazing strike rate for the favs, although it seemed rather more chaotic at the time. Pretty disappointed in Chakker's performance - she'd played very well against Dulgheru last week and her oppo today, Pervak, didn't strike me as being up to much when I saw her play Pova in Wimbledon. A crazy pre-match market, with Chakkers matched at odds from 1.57 thru 1.94, SP was 1.65.

In Palermo, favs won 8 of the 12, a more normal sort of strike rate, though only 1 of the losing favs was really short odds - Parra Santonja. The other 3 were all 1.85+, Camerin, Pivovarova and Parmentier, so no real shock any of them losing.

Usually it pays to avoid the players who played in the latter stages of the previous week, but they all came through today, although Dulgheru has since withdrawn.

My main win today was on Cornetto, who I refused to believe could lose to the hopeless LL Paszek. It went much, much closer than I thought it would and I had to go no lose in the 3rd set for safety's sake, and wasted a lot of green. Otherwise it was all bits and pieces. With the fav strike rate, especially in Prague, I have a hollow feeling that I should've won a lot more today!

There's only 7 very ordinary looking matches tomorrow. May well take the day off.

12 July

Don't think I missed much action at the weekend - all 4 favourites won, although 3 went to 3 sets. Congrats to Szavay and Rezai.

After the weekend break it was back to business with qualies and 1r's. Amazed to see the amounts being matched on Betfair for these matches. I noted 3.2m GBP matched for Rybarikova vs Tatishvili - that's what you'd expect for a Tier 1 final.

I didn't note the SP's of the qualies - the Palermo markets went up pretty late anyway. Of the 7 1r's, 5 were won by the favs, Amanmuradova and Rybarikova being the losing favs, Craybas franking her 4-0 h2h with Akgul, making it 5-0. Maggie went to sleep after an easy 1st set and then couldn't get going again - has this ever happened before?

There was a bit of a plunge on Duque Marino, backed in to 1.35 at kickoff from 1.85 overnight, but it was a very thin market, one of the thinnest of the day, with only about 80k matched by kickoff. Interestingly, there had been a similar plunge on Castano when she played Zuzana Kucova's sister last week.

Started off with a nice win on Ungar who I'd backed pre-match on the basis that Paszek is a poor, and larger, imitation of her former self who I never thought was much good anyway, and Ungar, although no world beater, has been playing and winning on clay. Then I loaded up some more early in the 2nd set when Paszek bizarrely went odds on having had an mto between sets and clearly struggling. Thank goodness for a feed as no way could I have made that bet from SB only. You might wonder how the win was so disproportionately large - Paszek was low 1.3's fav, and the staking plan allows for a double max bet in special situations, and I felt this was one.

Then spectacularly effed up the Rybarikova match! Was sitting on a nice all green when Maggie broke to go 5-5 in the final set. Felt confident she'd trot up from there so switched it all and chucked in some more. But she didn't. Bah. Maybe a bit guilty of being too gung ho after the earlier win.

The rest of the day was a bit of an anticlimax after those 2 matches.