£10,000 Challenge!

I'm an American student currently living in London.  Since I arrived a few months ago I've been fascinated by how easy it is to gamble in the UK, especially on sports.  It's incredibly simple to open an online account at any number of sportsbooks or walk down to Ladbrokes or WillHill to place a wager.  In the US the government has cracked down on it so hard that opening a betting account and funding it is incredibly difficult as many sites won't serve US customers, US banks won't allow transactions, etc and Sportsbooks are few are far between.

I started making a few small bets here and there when I felt like I had spotted an opportunity.  When betting against Murray v Troicki at the French Open I wished I could have closed out the bet when Troicki was up 2 sets to love.  However, I couldn't as I had made the bet at an online sportsbook.  After this I decided that I wanted to find a sports exchange like one I had used several years earlier called tradesports.  This exchange has currently closed and I found that BetFair and Betdaq had filled the space.

I immediately opened up an account and started trading on tennis.  I found tennis to be an excellent sport to trade on because their are swings, lots of matches throughout the year, and enough liquidity in the market.  After trading for a couple of weeks, I decided to give myself a challenge and blog about it because I feel as though I will perform better under the pressure.  So I've decided that I am going to attempt to make £10,000 with an initial bank of £100.  I have a few strategies that I've tried in the past couple of weeks that I will be implementing and detailing in future posts when I have more data.  I will try to post on trading days and will keep a running tally of all my profits and losses starting with trading at the UNICEF Open and Aegon International.  I plan to focus on Men's tennis to begin with, but I have some ideas about women's tennis as well.  They are fundamentally different in the way the play and the the way the odds move.  More on that later.

Depending on how long this takes I will also occasionally trade on other sports when I feel as though I've spotted a good trade.