Why do I do this? - Part 1

A while ago someone asked a number of questions as to why I do all this and how I get started. This is my attempt to respond. I'll answer the questions in a series of posts rather than in one long rambling post!

When did your interest in betting begin? 
I've always been interested in betting (well for as long as I can remember of my adult life) but absolutely hated losing money. I was a classic part time punter - maybe going to the races once or twice a year, having a few pints and betting a fiver a race as well as £2 here and there on the football and a bit more on accumulators in the betting shops. Also on occasion you would find me down the local casino betting on roulette with my 25p chips!

I remember being hugely excited when I opened my first internet account with blue square, putting a couple of accas on and seeing potential winnings popping up!!

To be fair sports betting hadn't been on my radar at all as a way to make serious money back then - I was, however, keen to supplement my main income to give me a chance to enjoy a few finer things in life rather than endlessly breaking even month in month out. I'd signed up to a lot of free money making websites and would get bombarded by endless "get rich quick" ideas (scams??) that looked awesome but in the end (thankfully) my cautious nature told me that these were generally too good to be true. Additionally I started selling stuff on e-bay but there's a limit to how much you can buy and sell to make a profit on there unless you have a huge amount of time to devote to it and I ended up buying tonnes of 12" dance records instead!!

Eventually my interest in sports betting was pricked when one of these emails advertised a service called Football Betting Data / Sports Statistician (forgive me if the names are wrong). Looked quite interesting and the cost was minimal - £97 or something for the year. I got the emails through etc and made a small amount of money through the service - but with the Sports Stats service you had to do some work and analysis and I wasn't for that - I wanted to make money without a lot of effort clearly.

My interest in trying to make more serious money out of it was sparked in 2006 when I stumbled across the series of Greg Gordon's (of progambler fame) articles that appeared in The Observer. You can find the concluding article here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2006/jun/04/observercashsection.theobserver1

More to follow in future posts.