Golf Place
Lifetime: 1937 bets, 25.81% ROI
2021: 512 bets, -0.64% ROI
January to June: 281 bets, 79.45 staked, -11.75, -14.82% ROI
July to December: 231 bets, 41 staked, 11.13 profit, 27.12% ROI
It’s been the most difficult year of four on my place model and I’ve broken the year into two halves to illustrate the poor opening six months. I adjusted in the second half of the year decreasing volume by approximately 20% and stakes by 50%.
Over the three previous years, the place model was my mainstay balancing variance perfectly and particularly in year 3 when golf outright only broke even. The results are the results and all that matters but it’s plausible we had a ridiculously high number of blowups from positions trading at sub1.25+ on the exchanges, and it’s prudent to point out that taking exchange prices were at least 20% bigger on Wednesdays across the board. That said, post-Covid-19, the strengths of the fields changed particularly at the top end so it’s not surprising that the profit was made in the second half of the year when the players’ schedules finally settled back into the previous status quo.
The success in the early years of the model brought me directly into conflict with the major bookmaker we all use and the compiler the golf industry relies on to formulate the initial model. There was a period in 2020 when they had gained access to my tips and were cutting prices in moments post email. Interestingly after 12 months of holding back the place markets until the last few months of 2021, they’ve been going up first again which cynically will be because they had stopped the leak. That may have been to our advantage in recent months and can be going forward.
Variance is a cruel mistress and there’s little doubt we had the worst of it in 2021 but I also made mistakes with volume and staking during the opening six months.
