I need something to do

My life is just ticking over at the moment and lately I've developed a feeling that I really need something to get my teeth stuck into, a project of some kind. The monotony of my work routine just makes every day feel the same and looking back on my last 18 months of employment, it's flown by (no pun intended) and not in a good way. At this rate my life will have soon passed me by.

Stuff I'm interested in doing:

- Playing a lot more tennis and getting to a decent standard (though will be tough as the weather gets worse)
- Possibly being Social Secretary at the club with Alex
- Writing another novel (I nearly wrote a whole book whilst I was unemployed and released it chapter by chapter to the guys, it was an unfinished thriller!)
- Thinking of an idea for a business and pouring all my effort into making it work

The last idea would obviously be the best if I made it happen.

So, what's coming up in the forseeable future? I'm off to Gran Canaria with the boys on Saturday, that will be good fun as always but it will be taxing on the body, soul and especially the liver. I might be going to Austria for a few days at the beginning of October with some people from work. I might be going to the States sometime in November with Simon and Gareth and anyone else who fancies it, but that's all up in the air at the moment. And finally my Christmas party at work might be in Berlin this year. So they are all the possibilities, it will be interesting to see what I actually end up doing!

Until next time.

Untitled

Well, it's been a long time. The lack of blogging hasn't been anything to do with laziness, it's just that my life the last few weeks has been completely lacking in any blogworthy moments. One of my main reasons for doing this blog is to give me something to laugh about in years to come when I look back on the idiotic things I got up to, but I haven't even done anything (too) idiotic lately.

On the gambling front I had a nightmare on the Third Ashes Test and have had a break up until the last couple of days. I've backed Australia in the final Test at 1.83, so of course the Aussies have come out to bat and are having an exceptionally nervy start. Watson's just survived three LBW shouts and the score is 4/0 off five overs. Having said all this, I don't mind losing this bet so come on England. Now that I've written that, this game is almost certainly going to be a draw :-(

Football: I watched Arsenal's first game of the season at the RE Bar with Alex last week. Before the kick-off I said that Arsenal need to get off to a flyer this season and that it would be nice if we got to Christmas without dropping a point. So, off to a flyer we got. 6-1 away to Everton and 2-0 away to Celtic. Couple that with United losing to Burnley and Liverpool losing to Spurs, surely we have the league in the bag??!! Of course, I jest. But maybe...

I'm off on holiday to Gran Canaria with the lads in a couple of weeks so I will do my best to update this blog more often before I head off.

A blog neglected

Well, it's been a couple of weeks. The truth is that I haven't had anything remotely interesting to blog about. I could have done small updates along the lines of "I'm bored" etc etc but I thought I'd leave it for a bit.

At the moment I'm sat waiting/hoping for play to get underway in the third day of the third Ashes test. I've been doing a fair bit of both punting and trading lately and it's been going well. I had a bit on Mark Webber to win the F1 World Championship when he was at 33/1. I've never had an interest in F1 before and have always found it boring. However, it's bloody good fun to watch a Grand Prix when you have money on it. I've also had a bet on Newcastle to finish bottom of the Championship on a handicap market; again this was inspired from Kickingbets.

I've been betting on most of the international and domestic cricket this last month and that's also been going alright. Lots of small wins add up in the end. Having said all this, I'm royally screwing up this third Ashes test. Gambling on the weather is not fun. My position at the moment is a big lay of the draw at 1.38, hopefully there'll be some play today and a few wickets will fall if conditions suit the bowlers. I heard an interview a while ago with Rudi Koertzen though and it doesn't sound too good - apparently the ground is in worse condition than it was on the first day (which was awful).

One last thing, for any other keen gamblers out there there is a new social network where there's a lot of debate and chat about sports and trading etc. Check it out: The Sports Exchange

That's about it for now, I'll keep trying to do smaller updates on Twitter.

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.