I was all set up to write a review of November to publish today, and then the weekend happened. Or more accurately, in the early hours of Sunday morning the golf tournament in Australia came to a conclusion and I had to put those original monthly review plans on hold.
Why? Because with Ryggs Johnstone – a player I must admit to not ever having heard of – Weekly Golf Value had provided me with a 75/1 winner and by far the biggest return I’ve had from one single bet all year. The November review can wait a day or two.
There’s quite a story here. One that I need to remember when things aren’t going well and variance is showing me its more menacing face.
As you know if you read this column regularly, I have started to use the Bookie Bashing Golf Tracker to find my own bets each week rather than blindly following the golfers put up by WGV. As a rule, I look to get on before the WGV email comes through but only by 30 minutes to an hour or so. As a result, generally speaking I’ll be on four or five of the golfers that are listed amongst those to back by WGV. There is always a fair crossover, although I tend to end up backing a few more players in each tournament and covering a greater proportion of the field in terms of win probability (c.20% compared to WGV’s c.15%, give or take).
This week however, after using the Tracker, I’d only found five golfers I wanted to back. Five golfers who fit into my self-imposed parameters to qualify as a bet. Parameters that includes considerations of price, level of +EV, etc. More to the point, the win probability covered by these five players, according to the Tracker, was a mere 5.3%. Not enough.
So when the WGV email came through, I had a look to see if there were any golfers I could easily add to my list. As it happens, four of the five I’d identified myself were on the WGV rota too. Three weren’t. Checking the Tracker, one of the three wasn’t value at any book I could use, but two were – Victor Perez and…yes, you’ve guessed it…Ryggs Johnstone.
The terms of my Johnstone bet were different to WGV’s who were tipping it at 100/1 and 150/1. The best value I could secure – and it was considerable value – was at 75/1 but the place terms were more favourable. Big value, big stake….BIG WIN!!!!!
Did I simply miss Johnstone when I scoured the Tracker first time around? Or did it become value in the half an hour or so between my search for bets and the WGV email coming through? I don’t know. What I do know is that if I’d found more bets on my initial search, I’d not have backed Johnstone. For once, the Gambling Gods were in a good mood, and had smiled down on me.
With the bet settling in the early hours of Sunday morning, this will go down in my December figures. Meaning November was a bit of a struggle and a month I found pretty tough going at times. More on that in the next post though, when I really will get that Review done and dusted. For now, I’m just going to ask my wife to peel some grapes for me, bring me wine and rare delicacies for me to enjoy, basking in the warm glow that comes from the knowledge that the new month’s golf betting ROI sits at exactly 1000%.
*Added the “(to date)” into the title because, well, you just never know…