SUNDAY .....

I have a little spare time this morning so plan on replying to a few points raised by readers in emails to me over the last month or so, this is normally about the blog, me personally, or my plans for the two of us. If anyone takes the trouble to write to me I always reply, usually within an hour or so, but some questions get asked on a regular basis, so time for a general update.

There is no longer a paid subscription service, I stopped that at the end of last year. That service made huge returns for subscribers who were prepared to take a long term approach to betting. It was not a get rich quick scheme, sports betting simply doesn't work that way.

The blog is similar, whilst previews are somewhat limited in number, it will make you a profit in the long term. I will hit the buffers now and again with a bad run, that is the nature of gambling and it is unavoidable, however, the blog has over a four and a half year period made very consistent returns and is, IMO, far and away the best of it's kind on the internet, but I am happy to be corrected on that.

This is a very tough business to beat, you have to work hard and continue to evolve, in addition to which bets are hard to place, almost impossible with the traditional bookmakers and whilst easier to play on asian markets, the odds makers there are light years ahead of their european counterparts, the exchanges simply do not have the liquidity on many games ....... as many people have said before, this is a hard way to make an easy living !

I have had to change my betting style again over the last twelve months, picking fewer games and doing even more homework than before. I am not going to go into too many details but there are no shortcuts, I almost never read any betting related content from other sources prefering to keep my mind free of outside influences and like to have a starting point from each of the leagues I follow closely. By which I mean having a very solid idea about exactly where one, or hopefully more teams are at the start of the season. This means that I do a lot of research on them, will see them play live once or twice and will probably have even been to a training session or two, it is amazing what you can learn from these. At lower levels there are few if any people watching and teams have nothing to hide.

I write notes every day about the teams/players I am interested in and these form the basis of what I post on the blog, though often I edit content, leaving out something I feel no one else knows (this is what I am. looking for, to know something before anybody else ) .It is hard to justify doing otherwise, when I have spent so much time, effort and often money compiling this information.

In an average week this probably leaves me with circa 12-15 matches worthy of betting, with possibly 4-6 of them proving difficult to get on. There are another 2-3 I do not want to write anything about at all for a whole vaiety of reasons and nearly all of the rest will have shortened, sometimes considerably, even if I am happy to then post them on the blog. Which is why we are down to maybe 2-4 match prevews on here per week, sometimes there will be more, but the average is likely to be around that number and you have to be aware that often the real value, those 6-9 "clicks" really add up and provide the jam for our bread and butter, will have gone. I want to be open and honest about all of this.

Having said all that, I have no plans to stop writing the blog, definitely going to hit the five year mark in the spring, which, with the average life of a blog being more like five weeks I take great pride in. Also closing in on a few other milestones...... would like to hit the 4,000 post mark and not far away from and closing in fast on 1,000,000 hits which would be sweet.......... I like symmetry in all things !

Back later.