2013 season review: betting



This year was weird, in all kinds of ways. The most obvious and irksome was that after two good years this one was red overall. Not to an enormous degree, but still. Another oddity was that untipped bets (typically due to lack of liquidity, instant regret or backing something unusually early) were generally green (the reverse is normally true), so I actually finished ahead.

Another weird feature was that I lost almost all the time on Betfair, and won almost all the time with Ladbrokes. So, one of my accounts is diminished and feeble, and the other is overly large.

The season got off to a great start. Solely to avoid voluntarily missing a bet on the first race I backed Ferrari to top score at 5.5, and they did. Given my seasons usually start with 2-4 races of redness before I get my eye in I thought this boded well. How wrong I was.

Every other race in the first half of the season was red (excepting a 45p profit in the UK).

The second half was similarly poor, although good results in Japan and Abu Dhabi meant the second-half loss was just over £1. 



In both halves my race bets were green. The reason the overall result was red was because my qualifying betting was woeful. I recognised this and reduced my qualifying bets in the latter half, but if I’d made none in H2 then that half would’ve been green.

My records are ropey for 2009 and 2010, but in 2011 and 2012 my qualifying bets were green. However, they were much less positive than the race results for those years, perhaps suggesting this is a general trend rather than something new.

It’s also worth pointing out that my race bets were much less positive (about a third or so) than in 2011 to 2012.

In the first half of the year it was a fairly competitive grid, with about four teams vying for victories. The latter half was a tedious Vettel procession. In 2014 I think that qualifying and race pace may diverge slightly, according to power and efficiency ratings of the so-called power units. We’ll see.

Later, I’ll write a single post looking ahead to 2014, including consideration of the drivers and the new regulations. It’ll probably be a rather enormous piece, so I’m not sure if it’ll be this year or next. Next week: an article about the five years of F1 betting to date.

Morris Dancer

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