Bahrain Grand Prix

Fastest Friday Practice	Price	Fastest Saturday Practice	Price	Fastest Qualifying	Price
Lewis Hamilton	4/7	Lewis Hamilton	2/7	Nico Rosberg	10/11
Amount won/lost on a £1 bet	£1.57	Amount won/lost on a £1 bet	£1.29	Amount won/lost on a £1 bet	-£1
Amount won/lost on a £10 bet	£15.71	Amount won/lost on a £10 bet	£12.86	Amount won/lost on a £10 bet	-£10
Season Total £1 bets	-£0.43	Season Total £1 bets	£5.29	Season Total £1 bets	-£0.17
Season Total £10 bets	-£4.29	Season Total £10 bets	£52.86	Season Total £10 bets	-£1.67

This is interesting.  At this point, admittedly only 3 races into a 19 Grand Prix season, only one of these betting strategies is in profit.  Possibly this is both because of Mercedes's dominance (and therefore the poor odds offered by the bookies) and the small size of the difference in performance between the two Mercedes.  If Nico Rosberg had beaten Hamilton in qualifying at Malaysia, the last column would look very different.  Obviously, the old 'if ifs and ands were pots and pans' applies, but I think the table would be very different in a team with a clear number 1 and number 2 driver.

Malaysian Grand Prix

Fastest Friday Practice	Price	Fastest Saturday Practice	Price	Fastest Qualifying	Price
Nico Rosberg	2/1	Nico Rosberg	7/2	Hamilton	5/6
Amount won/lost on a £1 bet	-£1	Amount won/lost on a £1 bet	-£1	Amount won/lost on a £1 bet	£1.83
Amount won/lost on a £10 bet	-£10	Amount won/lost on a £10 bet	-£10	Amount won/lost on a £10 bet	£18.33
Season Total £1 bets	-£2	Season Total £1 bets	£4	Season Total £1 bets	£0.83
Season Total £10 bets	-£20	Season Total £10 bets	£40	Season Total £10 bets	£8.33

Australian Grand Prix

The betting pool is back.  In my continuing quest to earn @Tiberius_Jolly some easy money, I'm still trying to see what the best F1 betting strategy is.  Last season, betting on the racer who was fastest in Saturday practice came out ahead, slightly, from betting on the winner of qualifying (work on whether it was statistically significant or not is on-going).

The results of this for this season could be less clear cut, because of the changes in technical regulations.  For the last few seasons, it's been "who can challenge Red Bull?" while this season no-one knows what's going to happen, especially given Renault's engine troubles and the way something about the Red Bull (and Lotus) aero designs seems to exacerbate them.

That being said, Vettel was still 4th on Friday practice, even if he was nowhere in practice 2 or qualifying.

I'm also going to start using the William Hill betting calculator (http://form.williamhill.com/betcalc/EN/calc.html) to work out the winnings.

Fastest Friday Practice	Price	Fastest Saturday Practice	Price	Fastest Qualifying	Price
Hamilton	15/8	Nico Rosberg	4/1	Hamilton	5/6
Amount won/lost on a £1 bet	-£1	Amount won/lost on a £1 bet	£5	Amount won/lost on a £1 bet	-£1
Amount won/lost on a £10 bet	-£10	Amount won/lost on a £10 bet	£50	Amount won/lost on a £10 bet	-£10
Season Total £1 bets	-£1	Season Total £1 bets	£5	Season Total £1 bets	-£1
Season Total £10 bets	-£10	Season Total £10 bets	£50	Season Total £10 bets	-£10

The price for the Saturday practice may be slightly less than it could have been as I was only able to get it after qualifying had finished due to time zone difference.

Obviously, it's too early to draw any firm conclusions, but so far (1 race within what is likely to be a crazy season), it looks likely to be like last year where the fastest guy after Saturday practise is a good bet.

Euro 2016

I really can't complain about the results of the draw (full results here) because Austria's pool is reasonable.  They're in group G so that's Russia, Sweden, Austria, Montenegro, Moldova and Liechtenstein.  Third should be do-able.

But I wondered what the the groups would look like if they'd gone by the FIFA rankings.

Group A	Group B	Group C	Group D	Group E	Group F	Group G	Group H	Group I
Spain	Germany	Portugal	Switzerland	Italy	Netherlands	Belgium	Greece	England
Serbia	Slovenia	Sweden	Russia	Denmark	France	Ukraine	Bosnia-Herzegovina	Croatia
Armenia	Czech Republic	Romania	Scotland	Turkey	Austria	Hungary	Iceland	Wales
Bulgaria	Poland	Republic of Ireland	Finland	Norway	Israel	Albania	Slovakia	Montenegro
Belarus	Macedonia	Northern Ireland	Estonia	Azerbaijan	Lithuania	Georgia	Moldova	Latvia
Gibraltar	San Marino	Andorra	Faroe Islands	Lichtenstein	Malta	Kazakhstan	Cyprus	Luxembourg

I, personally, prefer the random draw :)  I couldn't imagine why.  (Also I appear to have added a country somewhere)

The World Cup Draw Palaver

Providing the BBC aren't lying to me, apparently, the World Cup draw can now cost up to £10 million.  Which might go some way to explaining why these things are so damned expensive.

I understand the purpose of the draw, it's to add a bit of excitement to the proceedings and to make sure Italy fans suffer*.  But at the same time, it does seem like a lot of fuss.

I fence, and the draws for our group stages are done from the rankings.  If there were eight groups, the top ranked fencer attending would go into group 1, the second into group 2 and so on, then the ninth ranked fencer would go into group 8, 10th into group 7 again with the so on, until the 17th ranked fencer goes into group 1, 18th into group to and so on and so on.

Doing this with the October FIFA rankings (here if anyone wants to check my maths) gives the following groups (respecting the max. 2 European teams in a group, max. 1 team from another region.  This was done by skipping teams until they fitted and then putting them in.)

Group A	Group B	Group C	Group D	Group E	Group F	Group G	Group H
Spain	Germany	Argentina	Columbia	Belgium	Uruguay	Switzerland	Netherlands
Bosnia -Herzegovina	Chile	Greece	Portugal	Brazil	USA	England	Italy
Cote D'Ivoire	Croatia	Russia	France	Ghana	Algeria	Ecuador	Mexico
Australia	Cameroon	Korea	Iran	Honduras	Japan	Costa Rica	Nigeria

Okay, I had to swap Cameroon and Australia for it to work, but you've got 8 reasonably solid groups, and even the apparently expected horrible group for Italy.

Even if you change it around so that Brazil are automatically Group A team 1, you instead get:

Group A	Group B	Group C	Group D	Group E	Group F	Group G	Group H
Brazil	Spain	Germany	Argentina	Columbia	Belgium	Uruguay	Switzerland
Bosnia -Herzegovina	Greece	Chile	Portugal	USA	England	Italy	Netherlands
Cote D'Ivoire	Ecuador	Croatia	Russia	France	Ghana	Mexico	Costa Rica
Australia	Cameroon	Korea	Iran	Japan	Honduras	Nigeria	Algeria

I've had to swap Cameroon and Australia again, but we once again end up with some nice balanced groups, although less balanced IMO than previously, and Italy still end up with a horrible group.

Now I haven't done this just to prove that Italy are cursed, or to show that it doesn't take £10 million to do a draw (really, FIFA, I'm very cheap).  It's more I don't get why they don't do it this way.  Surely it would be easier for the various federations and their fans to know where they're going about 2 weeks earlier, when the qualifiers finish.

I know the FIFA rankings are all kinds of crazy (see also, Italy's ranking dropping because they played a friendly against San Marino or Austria's ranking dropping despite beating the US in a friendly) but they might as well use them throughout and not just for the top teams.

* Austria are out, if Ireland are also out I default to Italy for footballing reasons.

Brazilian Grand Prix

Fastest Friday Practice	Price	Fastest Saturday Practice	Price	Fastest Qualifying	Price
Nico Rosberg	18/1	Vettel	1/4	Vettel	1/4
Amount won/lost on a £1 bet	-£1	Amount won/lost on a £1 bet	£1.25	Amount won/lost on a £1 bet	£1.25
Amount won/lost on a £10 bet	-£10	Amount won/lost on a £10 bet	£12.50	Amount won/lost on a £10 bet	£12.50
Season Total £1 bets	£6.24	Season Total £1 bets	£17.46	Season Total £1 bets	£15.82
Season Total £10 bets	£62.59	Season Total £10 bets	£174.61	Season Total £10 bets	£158.29

Rugby League 101

This was originally written to introduce some American friends to rugby league, as their rugby league team qualified for the Rugby League World Cup quarter-finals, hence the slightly American slant to this.

As the mighty US Rugby League team has managed to qualify for the quarter-finals of the rugby league world cup, I felt it might be an idea to briefly cover the basics of the game for any new fans watching. The information is taken from here and here.

Somewhat worryingly, both of the rules pages start with the information that you're trying to score more points than the other team, but I'm going to assume that you can guess that.

The very basic rules of the game are that each team is given six chances to score. Each chance ends with a tackle (a tackle is a completed tackle when the referee calls "held"). If, after six tackles, they have not scored, the ball is handed over to the other team who then get the chance to score with their six tackles.

There are 4 ways of scoring:

1 - A Try - A try is worth 4 points. Similar to a touchdown in American football, except you actually have to touch the ball down with control and downward pressure. I've highlighted those last words because if you don't do them, the try will not be given to your team.

2 - A Conversion - A conversion is worth 2 points. They can be scored only after the team has scored a try. The kick is taken from a position perpendicular to the goal line where the try was scored. The ball must pass between the goalposts and over the crossbar. If the team scores a conversion after a try, it is referred to asa converted try.

3 - A Penalty Kick - Also worth 2 points. Often just referred to as a penalty, this is one of the two options a team captain can take when the referee awards his team a penalty. The other option is to get another set of 6 tackles with which to try to score.

4 - A Drop Goal - worth 1 point. This is scored when the ball is kicked between the goalposts and over the cross bar in open play.

A match lasts 80 minutes, split up into 2 halves of 40 minutes. The time is kept by a separate time keeper who sounds a hooter to signal the end of each half. If you're really unlucky and playing at one of the French stadiums, it sounds like an air-raid siren.

Both teams will have 13 players on the pitch at any one time. These will be the team you are cheering for. These will be the opponents. As in ice hockey, there are rolling substitutions with no need for a stoppage in play. There is a limit on the number of these interchanges, with a maximum of 12 per team per game.

When passing the ball, it must go level or backwards. If the ball goes forwards, this is called a forward pass and the referee will award the other team a scrum and give them the ball. The rugby league scrum is formed of 6 players from each team. The scrum half puts the ball into the scrum, and the hooker from his team hooks the ball backwards to gain possession of the ball for his team. 

Scrums are also awarded for knock-ons. A knock-on is when the ball is dropped forwards by a player and hits the ground or another player.

Don't worry if you're not sure whether that's happened, because the referees wear microphones and have a set of hand-signals that they use to indicate what is going on.  This has been handily summarised 

The offside rule does nothing but cause everyone headaches but basically, the defending team have to be 10 meters away from the attacking team when they play the ball after the tackle, and the person on the attacking team receiving the ball from the play the ball must be directly behind their team-mate.

Obstruction is when one of the attacking team runs across the line of a defender trying to tackle their team-mate.

Tackles are not allowed to be above shoulder height. Above that is a high tackle. 

For something like that or other foul play that is deserving of more than a penalty to the opposition, a referee can give one of 3 punishments:

1 - A yellow card - the offender has to spend 10 minutes in the sin bin. Their team has to play the 10 minutes with 12 players.

2 - A red card - the offender is sent off and cannot play for the rest of the match. Their team has to play the rest of the match with 12 players.

3 - The player is put on report - while better for the team in the short run, the player gets to stay on the pitch and carry on playing, it means the disciplinary panel will look at the offence and decide what punishment is appropriate. This can be anything from nothing to a 4 match ban.

I think that covers the important things.

For your interest and delectation may I also recommend this article which explains why everyone that loves an underdog will be rooting for the US.

US Grand Prix

Fastest Friday Practice	Price	Fastest Saturday Practice	Price	Fastest Qualifying	Price
Alonso	22/1	Vettel	1/4	Vettel	1/4
Amount won/lost on a £1 bet	-£1	Amount won/lost on a £1 bet	£1.25	Amount won/lost on a £1 bet	£1.25
Amount won/lost on a £10 bet	-£10	Amount won/lost on a £10 bet	£12.50	Amount won/lost on a £10 bet	£12.50
Season Total £1 bets	£6.24	Season Total £1 bets	£17.46	Season Total £1 bets	£15.82
Season Total £10 bets	£62.59	Season Total £10 bets	£174.61	Season Total £10 bets	£158.29

Abu Dhabi Grand Prix

Fastest Friday Practice	Price	Fastest Saturday Practice	Price	Fastest Qualifying	Price
Vettel	4/11	Vettel	8/13	Webber	5/2
Amount won/lost on a £1 bet	£1.36	Amount won/lost on a £1 bet	£1.62	Amount won/lost on a £1 bet	-£1
Amount won/lost on a £10 bet	£13.63	Amount won/lost on a £10 bet	£16.15	Amount won/lost on a £10 bet	-£10
Season Total £1 bets	£7.24	Season Total £1 bets	£16.21	Season Total £1 bets	£14.57
Season Total £10 bets	£72.59	Season Total £10 bets	£162.11	Season Total £10 bets	£145.79

Korean and Japanese Grand Prix

Sorry I didn't do my usual betting thing for the Korean Grand Prix or the Japanese Grand Prix.  I was busy fencing for the weekend of the Korean Grand Prix and I spent yesterday at the Nottingham Beer Festival (http://www.beerfestival.nottinghamcamra.org/).  Lots of delicious beer, but I've really got to recommend Flipside Brewery's Russian Rouble.  It's rich and delicious.