The Open Championship Preview

Tour: All Tours – a Major
Tournament: British Open Championship
Course: Royal St Georges, Sandwich, Kent
Yardage: 7211
Par: 70
Time Difference: GMT

Lee Westwood is our main selection to win the Open Championship this week and merits a maximum bet. Retief Goosen has a consistent record in the third major of the year and merits support. Padraig Harrington excels at links golf and he can get in contention to win a third Open.

Sergio Garcia has shown decent form following a sabbatical from the game and looks a good bet in the Top Continental European market. Matt Kuchar showed his adaptability at the Scottish Open last week and we like his chances to be top American. Simon Dyson proved his liking for links golf in Scotland and as an outsider he can make the top ten.

This year’s Open Championship is being played at Royal St Georges in Sandwich on the Kent coast. The course is the only Open venue on the current rota that is located south of the north west of England. That region has three different Open venues and the rest of time the championship is played in Scotland. There is a train link from London so there should be healthy crowds due to size of the catchment area.

The Open has been held at Royal St Georges four times since 1981. Two of the champions have originated from the United States, one from Europe and one from Australia. The winning scores have been 4 under, 2 over, 13 under and 1 under. Greg Norman won the tournament with 13 under in 1993 when playing and weather conditions led to low scores.

The only player to break par over the 72 holes of the 2003 renewal was Ben Curtis who holed a putt of decent length on the 72nd to post a score that nobody could match. However, this was a tournament that Thomas Bjorn lost. He took 3 to get of a bunker on the 16th hole and those dropped shots cost him the title. Scoring was relatively high eight years ago and avoiding bogeys was the key attribute.

As with all links courses scoring can be affected by weather conditions. If the wind blows then finding the greens and fairways is of paramount importance. Temperatures are forecast to be below average for this time of year and moderate winds are also expected. This course rarely produces a birdiefest as the fairways allow little room for error and the greens are difficult to navigate.

The Open is the third of the four major championships that take place during the golfing year. The only notable absentee is Tiger Woods who has withdrawn due to a selection of injuries. The favourite is Rory McIlroy who won the US Open last month in some style. However only Woods since Mark O’Meara in 1998 has won more than one major throughout any one season.

Luke Donald is currently at the top of the world rankings. He has contested 10 tournaments in the US Tour this season and made the top ten eight times. He won the PGA Championship in May which is the flagship event of the European tour and last week’s Scottish Open. Despite such consistency Donald’s best finish in a major was a third in the 2005 Masters. In 26 appearances in major championships Donald has finished in the top 10 on just four occasions.

Lee Westwood has risen to number two in the world on the back of great consistency in the majors over the last three years. In that time he has had five top 3’s from 10 championships. He was third in the Open of 2009 when a 72nd hole bogey cost him a place in the play-off with Tom Watson and eventual winner Stuart Cink. He was second a year ago at St Andrews, seven shots adrift of champion Louis Oosthuizen. On his current progression Westwood has a great chance of winning his first major at this year’s Open.

Westwood was interviewed before the final round of the Scottish Open on Sunday. He virtually admitted that he wasn’t overly concerned about winning that tournament. He suggested that his focus was the Open Championship. Tee to green Westwood is an imperious golfer and I believe his time has now come to win his first major championship.

Retief Goosen has made the cut for the last twelve years at the Open. In that time he has had seven top 10s, including in the last two years. In 2009 Goosen was just 2 shots away from a play-off and last year he was 6th, 7 shots behind the winner Louis Oosthuizen. In his last eight rounds in the Open Championship Goosen has beaten or matched par. He was tied 10th at Sandwich in 2003 so knows he can play well on the course.

On current form Goosen deserves our support this week. He made the cut at the US Open in June with a score that in normal circumstances would have been close to winning. The selection is a proven major champion having won the national championship of the United States twice, in 2001 and 2004. He played well at the Scottish Open and may have got closer to the winner if the tournament had not been reduced to 54 holes due to the weather.

Padraig Harrington won the Open Championship in 2007 and 2008 and also has a US PGA Championship to his name. He has mastered the art of links golf and is a perennial winner of the Irish PGA Championship, often played on a links course. He chose to play the Scottish Open last week, probably because it was played on a seaside course. He played three solid rounds in similar weather conditions as those expected at Sandwich.

The selection was 22nd when the Open was held at Sandwich in 2003 but since then he has taken his game to a new level. He is in the top thirty for finding the greens in regulation on the European Tour. He also figures in the top 25 for total putts per round. These skills will be at a premium on the Kent coast. The Irishman will not be fazed by any inclement weather and has the temperament and ability to hold his game together if the wind blows.

Sergio Garcia deserves a major due to an overall level of consistency over the first 10 years of his career. He first made a name for himself at the 1999 US PGA Championship when he beat everyone in the field except Tiger Woods as a 19 year old. The player formerly known as El Nino has an excellent game from tee to green but his woes on the greens have been costly. He was 7th at the recent US Open with four solid rounds at or below par.

In 2007 at Carnoustie he missed an eight foot par putt on the last hole to claim his first major. He was beaten in the playoff by Padraig Harrington despite hitting the pin on one of the extra holes. Twelve months earlier he was in the final group with Woods at Hoylake. Overall he was in the top five in the Opens of 2005, 2006 and 2007. His finishes in the Open have improved progressively over the last 3 years. He is the most consistent performer in the Open over the last 10 years of players from Continental Europe.

The highest ranked player from the United States is Steve Stricker at number five. The former world number 2 was 5th in the US Open in 1998 and 1999. He has recorded 5 top 10 finishes in the 20 majors he has played since 2006. Stricker’s tournament win at last week’s John Deere Classic was his eleventh on the US Tour. He has played in 10 Opens since 1996 and recorded just two top 10s over that period. By choosing to play in the States last week he is at a disadvantage due to the need to acclimatise and adapt to links golf.

In contrast Matt Kuchar decided to play in Scotland last week. He has played in the Open 6 times and his best finish was 27th a year ago. We recommended Kuchar last week as we thought his game would be suited to seaside golf. His bogey free round of 66 on Friday suggests Kuchar has the attributes to score well playing golf in the dunes. He eventually finished tied 10th in Scotland after three rounds below par. At third favourite in the top US market, Phil Mickelson may be supported but in 17 appearances at the Open he has just one top 10 finish and Kuchar is preferred.

Simon Dyson indicated his liking for links golf when interviewed in Scotland over the weekend. He secured a place in the Open field when David Toms withdrew through injury. He was third in the BMW Championship, the tournament that has the strongest field in Europe after the Open itself. He played well in Scotland, beating par in each of his three rounds. The Open has a record of producing big priced players doing well and Dyson looks a good price to make the top 10.

It’s going to be a great championship at Sandwich this week. we’re not expecting a birdiefest but the winning player will have to consistently find the fairways and greens and hole out to avoid bogeys when required. That profile applies to Lee Westwood and we can see him finally winning the major championship that he craves and, in our opinion, deserves.

Trading Recommendations

When betting on golf you should bear in mind that you don’t require a high strike rate to make a profit. The prices available are such that several winners a season can result in a healthy profit. The recommendations initially are all back bets but we will suggest lay trades when applicable as each tournament develops. Last week we recommended a 2 point bet on Steve Stricker on the US Tour and he won at 8.2. He was available to lay at 1.4 before the final round so a profit was guaranteed whatever the outcome.

5 points win Lee Westwood at 13.0
1 point win Retief Goosen at 55.0
1 point win Padraig Harrington at 44.0
2 points win Sergio Garcia Top Continental European at 7.0
2 points win Top US Matt Kuchar at 12.5
1 point win Top 10 Finish Simon Dyson at 14.0 


For more information on trading Golf and other sports visit www.interactivesportsinvestor.com

A great weekend!

Another great weekend for us with our main selection in the John Deere Classic - Steve Stricker, winning the tournament for the third successive year, quite a feat. He is one of the quietly efficient Americans on tour at the moment and he is actually the 5th best golfer in the world according to the World Rankings. A good bet for the Open? - well our golf expert is compiling the report as we speak but the fact that he chose to stay in the States last week rather than take the opportunity to practise some links golf may well work against him.

We also had a decent weekend on the tennis with big John Isner winning the Campbells Hall of Fame Tennis Championships as predicted. An interesting stat for you on this match, it featured the biggest ever height differential with Isner measuring in at 6'9 and Rochus at the other end of the scale at 5'6. Partly as a result of this big John served 22 aces and only faced a single break point and in fact only faced 5 break points all week and was only broken once in 5 matches - great serve stats and therefore the perfect player for the MT1 Strategy.

Roll on Thursday with the start of the Open!

For more information on how to trade the Sports Markets, visit www.interactivesportsinvestor.com. 

To Take or Not To Take That is The Question?

A great question that many sports traders often asked us at ISI is when should I exit my trade.  There is no simple answer to this question as each sports trader will have his own trading plan, edge or niche and therefore a different exit point.

So how do we go about answering this very important question, well if we take a quick look at it from the many different points of view, hopefully we can unravel the mystery.

Earlier we touched on the point that the decision to exit should be based firstly on the trading plan you have set yourself and secondly the way in which you trade.  For example (name edited to Cassini after accidently calling Cassini, Paul - Sorry not sure how that happened) Cassini could not have said it better in his post over on his great blog Green All Over.  In a nutshell Cassini is a value trader and therefore his exit point is when the price you are trading no longer offers value.  Cassini has been trading on Betfair for a number of years and has created his own edge by working out whether he thinks a price on offer is value.  He does this with a combination of his own odds compiling and a great understanding of the games he is involved in and the phases they go through both on and off the pitch (the Betfair traders).  His edge seems to be very successful and he is passionate about his hobby that also makes him money.

However value trading is only one of the many methods available to sports traders.  You have sports traders nowadays using charting and pattern spotting as their preferred method of sports trading.  So your exit points should be in line with the re-occurring pattern formations.  Meaning if your style is to swing trade certain sports markets using advanced charting software like QuantSports.  Your exit points may be based on Candlestick pattern formations and or with certain technical indicators.  Or your sports trading style may be based on a particular market behaviour and its effects on the price such as football markets where in the right market we know that a price will decrease by 82 ticks in the first 45 mins if no goal is scored or in other words roughly 18 ticks every 10 mins.  In this scenario your exit point is based on your trading plan and style again.  Lets say with further research you decide the first 10 mins of certain games have the highest chance of staying goalless. Your trading plan may be based on exiting at the 10 minute mark once again nothing to do with value but more to do with patterns or behaviours.
 
So the key to assessing the correct exit point comes down to two key elements, your trading plan and the strategy you are going to adopt.  Once you have these in place, the final and most important part is match or race selection i.e. if you have chosen the correct match or race for your preferred strategy and your trading plan is a sound one, the question of exit is no longer a question.

As with all sports trading or trading as a whole a major factor in becoming successful and ultimately profitable is discipline.  Yes we may sound like a broken record but we cannot emphasise enough how incredibly important discipline is to your sports trading.  If you become too greedy or do not accept loses when they happen, you will never make it as a sports trader no matter how good your strategy or trading plan is!

For more info on sports trading please visit www.interactivesportsinvestor.com

Today's Tennis Selections

The matches we have selected for today are:

Isner v Clement - start time 2000 GMT
 

Rankings are 46 and 169 and starting odds are 1.34 and 3.64 respectively, Isner leads the H2H’s 2 - 0. 

Isner’s stats are as follows, he has held serve over the last year 90.2% of the time and his opponents have held serve 88.8% of the time. He has won 4 of his last 10 but generally been beaten by top players, he lost a 5 set thriller against Nadal at the French Open and lost to 15th seed Almagro at Wimbledon in a tight match.

Clement stats are: he has held serve 74% of the time over the last year and his opposition have held serve 79.1% of the time. He has won 7 of his last 10 but all his wins have been against players outside the Top 100.

We think Isner’s serve will be too much for Clement, he served 10 aces yesterday in 9 service games and won 76% of points on serve. Follow the MT1 Strategy on the Isner serve and green up every time he holds.

Llagostera Vives v Martinez Sanchez - start time midday GMT

Rankings are 88 and 62 and starting prices are 1.39 and 3.34 respectively, MS leads the H2H’s 2 - 0.

LV’s stats are as follows: she has held serve 63.7% of the time over last year and her opposition have held serve 60.7%, she has won 7 of her last 10 but the highest ranked player she has beaten in that time is Cornet, ranked 78.

MS’s stats are; she has held serve 65% of the time and her opponents have held serve 67.6% of the time, she has won 5 of her last 10 but all her wins have been against top 50 players.

MS didn’t face a single break point in the first round and won 80% of points on serve whereas LV struggled through against Lim (ranked 240) and won in 3 sets but faced 10 break points and only won 51% of points on serve.

Follow the MT1 strategy on the MS serve and leave stake open for LV service game to try for the early break or if LV serves first follow the WT1 strategy on the LV serve. Green up when MS breaks serve.

For more information on trading tennis and other sports, visit http://www.interactivesportsinvestor.com/

Possibly the Best Opportunity Around.

I read an article about Betfair in the Business section of The Daily Telegraph last friday, it was actually talking about how the Chief Executive was leaving and that shareholders weren't happy with performance since the company went public.

However, what stood out for me were the numbers quoted, they said that the number of active Betfair users had grown by 15% over the last year and the number now stood at 950,000 active users! How many businesses can say that they have grown their customer base by 15% over the last year, not many I would guess.

Now when you consider that the vast majority of this growth has come from punters moving away from traditional bookmakers to Betfair, but they are still essentially punters, putting bets on the outcome of an event. You can see the opportunity for Sports Traders, as liquidity improves so do the opportunities to create win/win situations regardless of the outcome of the event.

Not surprisingly, football is now the sport most bet on, on Betfair with it accounting for over 40% of revenues just slightly ahead of Horse Racing. Football is now big business in every respect but you can bet that most punters betting on football are doing it with their hearts and not their heads - this again gives those of us with the know-how to make big profits.

All in all, a great time to be a Sports Trader, with the rest of the economy stalling, sports trading is going  from strength to strength.

For more information on How to Trade the Sports Markets, visit www.interactivesportsinvestor.com

Tsonga Comeback

What an amazing match yesterday, an incredible comeback from Tsonga which very few people would have predicted - he was playing against possibly the best player ever and Federer has never lost in a Grand Slam after being 2 sets up.

The beauty of trading on Betfair is that you can trade in play so as the match unfolds the odds change so as you can imagine the odds on Federer had shortened from around 1.15 before the match to 1.01 when he was 2 sets to love in the lead. This meant that if you backed Federer with a stake £100 at 1.01 that if he went onto win you would win £1. No sense in that I hear you say, well you'd be amazed at the number of people that will be backing at this price as they see it almost as free money as surely there was no way Federer would lose from 2 - 0 up!

The other great thing about Betfair is you can act as the bookmaker so in effect betting against things happening so if you Layed Federer at this stage with the same stake of £100, you would only actually be risking £1 of your money if Federer went onto win but you would win £100 if Tsonga won.

However, the beauty of trading is that you are not actually betting on the outcome of the event as such, just the movement of the odds. Now in this scenario, the odds could only go one tick lower if Federer won so you would lose £1 if that happened but what would happen if Tsonga made a fight of it and won the third set, well this happened yesterday and you would then have been able to back Federer at 1.06 and green up for a guaranteed profit of £4.80, big deal I hear you say, yes but remember, the maximum you could win by backing at 1.01 was £1 so this is 4.8 times more and this is guaranteed regardless of who goes onto win.

Consider then what happened when Tsonga won the 4th set to tie the score at 2 - 2, by now Federer's price was trading at 1.5 so you could have greened up for a guaranteed profit of £32.70 regardless of who went onto win.

So you can see that most traders that Layed Federer @ 1.01 probably didn't actually think that he would lose and most wouldn't have made 100 times their stake but every one of them would have made a profit and this %profit would have been much larger than any of the backers @1.01 would have made had Federer won.

The key to successful tennis trading is putting yourself in situations where the upside is much larger than your downside and not being too greedy with profits. Yesterday's situation certainly met that criteria.

For more information on how to trade Tennis, Football, Horse Racing and Golf please visit; http://www.interactivesportsinvestor.com/
    

Trading Tennis Matches with Hot Favourites

When we look at the Men's Quarter Finals today, all 4 matches have the favourite priced at under 1.2 and in the case of Murray as low as 1.11. What is interesting is that the starting odds on 'The Big Four' don't seem to rise at all as the tournament progresses, if they have risen it would only be by a couple of ticks. The player whose price has risen in this round is Nadal but that is mainly due to a slight doubt over his fitness after his ankle problem in the last round.

So are the Big 4 just as likely to win in the Quarter Finals as they are in Round 1? Well I guess you could argue thats what makes them the Top 4 players in the world; they raise their games as tournaments come into the business end but the flip side of that is the players they are playing against must be in great form to get to the quarters so surely they will provide stiffer opposition than their opponents in the early rounds. Its a difficult one though because you will often hear commentators say that if a player like Federer is going to be beaten its more likely to be in the early rounds when potentially he's not quite as focussed.

Another observation is that media frenzy seems to impact prices, the player out of the Big 4 whose price is shortest is Murray. Surely logic says that he shouldn't be priced shorter than Djokovic who has only lost one match this year and is playing a player ranked 158 in the world or indeed shorter than Federer, a serial winner of Wimbledon!

So this is an opportunity for the canny tennis trader and the question people should really be asking themselves is whether Lopez will mount a decent challenge today because if he does then Murray's price will drift giving traders an opportunity to guarantee profits regardless of who wins. We are not suggesting that Murray won't win as we think he will but what are the chances of Lopez taking the first set to a tie break or having a break point in the first set to go a break ahead or indeed winning the first or second set? Is one of these scenarios more likely than a straight sets victory for Murray with no period in the match when Lopez gets on top or even threatens to get on top. We would suggest that given Murray's propensity for drama, this match will have a few twists or turns.

As tennis traders, we are always out before a match finishes and often we are finished trading a match after the first few games. So, whilst its good to have an idea of who will eventually win the match, its also important to think which direction the odds are likely to move during the early part of the match and the downside if it doesn't go as predicted, as this is the period that traders make their money in.

Click here to see how one of our Members following our daily trading advice managed a 17% return in the first 3 games of Kvitova match yesterday, this profit was locked in regardless of the match outcome. 

For more information on Sports Trading visit www.interactivesportsinvestor.com