Thursday, December 14, 2006

Rocket Ronnie melts down

Daily Result: £248.73

I guess Rocket Ronnie and fireworks have long gone hand in hand but even by his own increasingly bizarre standards O'Sullivan's walk out today was pretty incendiary stuff. Just upped and left mid match muttering something about having had enough. Amazing Scenes as some on Betfair might say. :-)

Ronnie was 4-1 down and on a break when he missed a red that he was frankly taking the piss by taking on after running out of position the previous shot. He then walked over to Hendry, shook his hand, shook that of match referee Jan Verhaas, and walked out. In doing so he conceded the match - which wasn't even half way through.

Hendry later revealed that after missing the pot O' Sullivan had said to him:"I've had enough" before going on to say of O' Sullivan's behaviour: "It's just bizarre".

All of which naturally caused carnage on Betfair as the markets tried to make sense of what was going on. I was playing the outright and frame market at the time. Had a small all green position on the outright but was green Ronnie and red Hendry on the frame market when it all kicked off.

At first it was unclear what had happened. But with trading software I was using refreshing the prices several times a second I could see the market was yoyoing all over the place. A great opportunity to get involved so I placed a back of Hendry in both markets. One got matched, I layed some of it off at a lower price and after more confusion from the commentators it was announced the match was over.

The whole episode reminded me of the market uncertainty surrounding the Oval test between England and Pakistan earlier in the year. I'm sure people made a lot of money out of this too. And no doubt others got badly stung. And for those people Ronnie's apology will ring pretty hollow. It was a pretty harsh way to lose money.

Fortunately I came out on top of the situation and made £180 on the frame. I realised there was an opportunity to trade a very volatile market, even if I wasn't sure what was going on, and the software made it possible to get into the market fast enough. 3 clicks and I'd placed two bets and switched market views in around a second. Wouldn't have had a chance to do that using the traditional interface and the software once again paid for itself many times over.

Anyway, guess that was just a bonus. I've come out badly in similar situations before. This time I was one of those who got to benefit. And grateful I am. The rest of today's profit came earlier in the game. Again, like yesterday, I was playing for small stakes and continuing to learn about the markets. Was around £60 up before Ronnie's walkout having made a small profit in each of the previous 5 frames. So progress on that front is good and hopefully I can keep the consistency up long enough to start increasing my stakes on these snooker events.

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