Don't play roulette (nap)

I just went into Pinner to run a couple of errands and felt a strange complusion as I passed the Coral shop to go in and try my luck. So I put a pound in the roulette machine and put it on red. Black came up. Another pound in, on red. Black came up. I left. Note to self: don't play roulette.

This reminded me of the golden days in 2004 when online gaming was still a relatively new phenomenon. Lots of the major online casinos gave sign-up bonuses and monthly bonuses. The sign-up bonuses were usually for £50, sometimes more. The money would be transferred into your account once you had staked ten times the amount of the bonus. Example: I deposit £50, therefore I have to make £500 worth of bets before the £50 bonus was put into my account. Now this might sound like a lot, but it wasn't. Most people would just spunk the money all at once, but you could just sit there and play 500 games of blackjack and stake £1 on each hand. That's your £500 of bets done, and it would take about an hour. I was pretty lucky I seem to remember and usually finished a bit up on top of the £50 bonus itself. You'd have to be desperately unlucky to lose all £50 if you were only staking £1 per hand, and I don't think I ever even came close.

The same would then happen every month where the casinos would do a 'monthly reload' bonus, which were usually around £25 per casino per month. Easy money. The reload bonuses earnt me about £250 a month, and the one-off signup bonuses probably netted me about £500 that year. This was all when I was 18 and still at school, so it was a lot of money to me back then (it would still be a lot of money now). I've said it before, 2004 has been the best year of my life so far and will probably stay that way. Obviously the casinos wisened up to the fact that people were doing this, and these bonuses are few and far between today.

Earlier on I felt like finally having a day off the booze after a heavy weekend in Bournemouth and another couple of sessions since I got back, but sod it I'll be down the tennis club later with Daz to watch the matches. Back at work tomorrow.

Btw I'm going to start using Twitter a bit more so watch out.

Thanks for reading.

Function?

I should really update the blog more often as it will be fun to look back on all this in 30 years time and probably laugh my socks off at how stupid I was. A lot of the time I sit down to write an entry and then think 'nah not blogworthy' and then move on to something else. I'll have to try to just include all that stuff from now on. The standard of the blog might go down, but let's face it it's hardly a must-read website anyway!

This bet I put on Fabian Cancellara to win the Tour de France is looking interesting, he's still at the top and his price is now down to 50/1 with most bookies. I only put a small amount on so I'll just let the bet ride and hope for something special to happen. I have no knowledge of cycling whatsoever, I just followed Chris's tip over at Kickingbets (link on right). The chances are Cancellara will quickly fade, but it's a bit of excitement for the time being.

Last night I went down to the club after work and there were a good few heads down. The night finished up sitting out on the veranda with some cocktails Tom Lewis had been making. Alex and I got into a discussion about hosting our own function down there, something like a disco where we'd bring along a laptop and do the DJ-ing ourselves for free. That way there could never be any criticism of the event from a financial perspective as it would be guaranteed to make a profit. We could then just go bananas on the publicity front and tell as many people to get down as possible and hope for a decent crowd to show up.

Three more days and then we're off to Bournemouth for the 'tennis tour'.

Update

1. I backed Cancellara at 100/1 to win the Tour de France, see Kickingbets for the reasons.

2. I spent an hour on a bike at the gym the other day and pulled my arse. Won't be spending that long on one again!

3. There are still a few things I want to mention from the Roddick v Murray game:

• Andrew Castle is the most biased commentator I've ever heard. He must be getting paid to make so many pro-Murray comments, even when they're entirely unwarranted (ie he's playing badly). Why can't the BBC just give unbiased coverage?
• I'm fed up of hearing how 'young' Murray is. It seems whenever he loses they keep going on about how he's 'only 22'. Well let's just compare Murray to his main competitors. At age 22 Roger Federer had already won Wimbledon, whilst Rafael Nadal had won four French Opens plus Wimbledon. Novak Djokovic had won the Aussie Open. So can everyone stop telling me how young Murray is please.
• An example of a stupid Castle-ism from the Roddick game: "the pressure is showing on Roddick here; you can see the amount of sweat dripping from his cap". It was a scorching afternoon, was Castle actually serious?
• John Lloyd then started saying that Roddick's groundstrokes were the best he'd ever seen them. Fair enough, they were very good. But I hate these ongoing conclusions the commentators keep making that if anyone takes a set off Murray then they're automatically playing the best tennis of their careers, or they have the best backhand in the world, etc etc. Also, why is John Lloyd so pro-Murray? I thought he'd dislike him seeing as he's always pulling out of Davis Cup games.
• Last thing: it was hugely annoying how Murray kept celebrating literally every point that he won. Fist-pumping, shouting 'yeah' each time. Then the BBC would show us a tornado-cam of Murray doing the fist-pumping, or shouting! For God's sake, at least use the tornado cam to show him doing an actual tennis shot!

Some notes on Andy Murray

• I hardly know anyone who likes him, yet the BBC this year is acting like the country is in love with Andy Murray. This is definitely incorrect and it's a bit embarrassing to be honest. Some of the ridiculous questions Sue Barker asks the other pundits are cringeworthy. Example, to John McEnroe: "how do they regard Andy Murray in the US?"...... what an idiotic question. Imagine it the other way round, an American presenter asking Tim Henman what the UK thinks of Andy Roddick. It's just a meaningless, trivial and stupid thing to ask. What is she expecting him to reply? Mac always looks as though he's struggling to think of a diplomatic answer, when inside his head he is obviously thinking something along the lines of what I've written above. In this case he replied that in the States they show Andy Roddick on primetime, but Murray definitely gets featured. What a waste of time for everybody watching, and for John McEnroe. Why not ask him something proper instead of that crap?
• Why is there such abundant footage this year of Murray's mum? Who gives a shit about her? I find her more annoying than I do Andy himself. Get her off my bloody screen. Unless.... they start showing footage of her when Andy has lost a big point, rather than her doing that gut-wrenching cheer she always does when his opponent nets a volley
• Is anyone else thinking that Murray hasn't really done much to impress in this tournament? Yes, of course he has played well to get this far. But Wawrinka, an average opponent, took him to five sets. Wawrinka also had a number of break points (can't remember the actual total but it was over ten) - if Murray is struggling to hold his serve against this kind of opponent than how is he going to stand a hope of facing up to Federer? I also found it laughable that as soon as Wawrinka started to play well, the commentators all started saying that he had the best single-handed backhand in the world. Come on - REALLY? Yes, it was very very good. But is it seriously better than Federer's? Or Gasquet's? I doubt anyone who saw Gasquet destroy Roddick in last year's tournament would say that Wawrinka has the better backhand. On the day, Wawrinka let himself down by not taking his chances on the huge amount of break points he had. If this was against a better opponent, Murray could have been gone in straight sets. Likewise today against Ferrero - yes Murray won in three, but he was struggling out there in the first two sets. The third set was a breeze because Ferrero gave up the ghost and was putting in shitty second serves which Murray could hammer back with interest. Hopefully Roddick will give Murray his first true test.