After an interesting debut into the England Premiership Series A Soccer, Obafemi Martins has been helping Birmingham to improve their standings in the leagues.  He has been included in the full squad for the first time. This was after a visa was secured from the Home Office. Alex McLeish is making a decision whether Martins will be on the substitute bench or whether he will be a fulltime player. There are some problems with the placement because Martins has not been able to play competitively for two months.
A combination of injury and immigration issues
After the challenges of joining the team, McLeish has decided that Martins will join the full team. This is after Scott Dann and James McFadden were put out by injury. With the luxury of a full squad, the sky is the limit in terms of what can be achieved within the season. Of course there is the longstanding issue of Ben Foster who has been taken away from play due to a thumb injury. He was also not able to play for England in their friendly against Denmark. The problem for some of these clubs is the fact that they spend fortunes on players only to discover that they are too injured to play the game. That represents a loss that will eat into the team budget. It is also not fair to other players that are seated on the substitute bench. The Home Office can be obnoxious in its attempt to enforce colonial style immigration rules against players who are never going to endanger any real competition in the home country.
In case one can only hope that Martins will be well enough to join the full spectrum of activities on the England Premiership Series A Soccer. It is a longstanding issue that has to be handled within the setting according to the rules of the game. The idea of developing home grown English players has been popular in the past but it dangerously borders on outright xenophobia and the sports authorities are afraid of attracting the wrath of the PC police. It might also not make any sense from the perspective of looking for the best talent. If the best player you have is from Nigeria, it would be extremely foolish to leave them aside just because they are not English. The recruitment in these sports is in a bit of a mess and it will take years to correct all the problems.

Horse racing along with football are the two biggest betting mediums in the UK at this time and it is hard to see either of them being displaced from being the top two in the future. But in this article I want to relate the techniques that an associate of mine uses to gain an edge over the market. He basically sits and watches race after race either on the Racing UK channel or on “At The Races”.

Having not spoken to him for a while I cannot remember of the top of my head just which types of races he specialises in but I do know one thing, he makes a living and that is more than good enough for him and for me. His method is simple but yet very powerful. He began several years ago and he basically didn’t make any money for the first three months.

In that time, when he wasn’t playing online bingo he slowly but surely began to build up a feel for the horses that ran in a certain class or sector. He got to know how they liked to run, on what conditions they were best suited, what tactics favoured which horse and how certain jockeys liked to ride them. He knew what length lay offs suited which horse and after about a year of doing this, he had an immense dossier on about three hundred horses.

I have sat in his living room and watched him re-run the same race no fewer than twelve times. Each time he noted something different that he had missed the time before. To him, it is more than just a job, it is a hobby, a job and a passion all rolled into one. If you can be passionate about something that also makes you money then you are a very lucky person indeed.

The thing is that my friend does not even view what he does as work and that really is the secret to not only making money in sports betting but also being happy in life. He basically gets this information with the goal of using it in running as he basically forms a tissue of prices in his own mind for what a particular horse should be in running based on how it is running at the moment. I have watched amazed at how he has laid horses as short as 1.03 that have been in the lead in the final furlong and been correct to do so after they have got beaten by a short head or a nose.

He analyses races and then feels how they are going to be run based on the conditions and how the horses like to run. This feel that he has built up has been developed by simple hard work and perseverance. He has given himself the best chance to make money by homing in on certain types of races and getting to know them better than the professional odds compilers and other punters that he is in direct competition with.

He has told me several times how he started out without any intention whatsoever of trying to make money. But his knowledge base became so powerful that he started to perform better than the market and that really does take some doing. What I like about him is that his methods and personal qualities have basically mirrored my own. The only difference is that he does what he does in the field of horse racing and I do what I do in the field of poker.

This article was produced by Carl “The Dean” Sampson