10:00 NZT Thurs 23rd

The very warm sunshine has gone. As I write it is pelting down with rain outside. Seems like ideal blogging weather. I have already been here for one week. Where did it go?

I’m considering a minor makeover and might go out later for a haircut and a little bit of casual clothes shopping. This may not be entirely unrelated to the lingering Itch, which of course remains thoroughly unscratched.

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Wednesday. I put a shocking effort into my run round Hagley Park in the morning and very nearly dogged out. Shameful. I had better beat 36m 34s by a minute or more next time out. Were all those nights plodding round Battersea Park and along the Embankment in vain?

Despite the world and his weather forecaster predicting floods and plagues of frogs for Queenstown Sky NZ crossed to the ground at 10am where there was bright sunshine and the captains were ready for the toss. I had to drop everything and get the trading screens set up.

The ground at Queenstown is in the most incredible setting; on the edge of fjord, surrounded by towering, jagged mountains (the Remarkables) and right next to an airport.

NZ won the toss and bowled. The wicket was evidently slow, spotted with crowns of grass (these are bogeys since they can cause the ball to do funny things on impact) and generally unhelpful for batting.

The Windies plodded along scoring runs intermittently and losing wickets rather more frequently. After ten overs the score was 10/2 and little old contrarian me was beavering away laying 1.07 (about 1-13) about the New Zealanders.

Note: When betting, be it on cricket, horses, flies crawling up a window pane or poker, my aim is to find bets where the odds (which represent a reward/risk ratio) I am taking diverge from the aggregate probabilities of the possible outcomes. When people talk of 'value' in betting they mean this divergence - finding something you can buy for less than you perceive it be worth.

Without resorting too much to stereotypes and oversimplification I hope that the average person tries to think in terms of “what will happen” – picking a single, linear path of reasoning/guesswork. In a simple sense the human brain is wired to reason things through in terms of stories and cause-and-effect.

I attempt to step back from that and consider the fuller spectrum of possibilities. In cricket all manner of events can occur which will determine the outcome of the game. The probabilistic basis is very fluid and can change quickly. I then guess my way towards an estimate (couched as a percentage which can then be translated back into odds) of all the possible paths towards one side winning. It is all massively subjective. At heart I make educated guesses, try to be more right than everyone else and hope to get lucky.

As it happened I considered that New Zealand were going to win the game nine times out of ten from this point. The market said thirteen times out of fourteen, so there is a small potential profit margin in opposing the Kiwis at this price, if I am arrogant enough to think that I somehow can outperform the rest of the world aggregated together as a market.

Wavell Hinds scored a fluent 76 in the lower middle order and the Windies scraped their way up to 200.

This wasn’t a challenging total but the market still made NZ too short. I have some theories about why that is but can’t begin to outline them here. I need coffee, forty minutes and a whiteboard and neither of us want that, do we? Loath as I am to throw money away I had topped up. The overall position, including a small side bet, was close on -10k NZ + 112k WI.

You can imagine my excitement when the Windies reduced New Zealand to 13/4 in the fourth over of the Kiwi innings.

I did something quite filthy when Scott Styris fell with the score at 49/5 and laid 1.90 about the Windies for 30k, to bring my net position to +20k NZ +85k WI. Filthy because I laid odds that were a fair bit over my estimated probabilities just to lock in a profit. I am weak and want to go back to the office showing a decent return on the jaunt.

In the long run giving away these small clips of value here and there adds up. There will be many, many occasions where I lose the money staked on the initial lays. In the long run doing what I did is cutting back my profits, whilst my losses would probably run unchecked. Hedging in this way looks great in the short term but fundamentally doesn’t do profit and loss that much good in that all-important five year timeframe. The real Amos Mantra is “It’s A Marathon, Not A Sprint.”

There are caveats to this, relating to money management and the psychological well-being of the trader him or herself. It’s a great boost to win, not least because it normally means not losing. I have read references to studies where psychologists say gamblers register the pain of loss at two-and-a-half times the intensity that they feel the pleasure of winning, assuming that you can somehow quantify emotional feeling. I'll ask the expert.

Brendon McCullum, Peter ‘Lucky Fish’ Fulton and Daniel ‘Get Out Ya Fucker’ Vettori steered the Kiwis home. I won small, if you can call 20k small, and it looks like a great trade. I caught the top and the bottom of the market on the Kiwis and will probably return to London in the black now. But for forty minutes I had the scent of six figures in my nostrils and it was very, very sweet indeed.

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Maybe I’ll get my hair shorn and dye the stubble blonde to celebrate. The one thing I will do is remove Poker from the interests listed in my Profile. Horrid game. I haven’t played seriously for months and have absolutely no desire to do so anymore.