A Colossal Weekend…

I’m beginning to like Colossus Bets. Having spoken about it last week in this ColossusBets review, I then organised a little syndicate for the rollover pool at the weekend. Seven of you joined me in risking £50 whilst chasing a slab of the £340,000 to be shared between those players that correctly nominated four correct scores in World Cup matches.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

At the time of mailing about the syndicate, I was already two successful legs into another Pick 4, where the concluding two legs were the first two of our syndicate pot. Specifically, they were the Brazil-Chile and Colombia-Uruguay games.

Long story short on that early Pick 4 is that a £36 bet gave me this half time offer in the last match. Colombia were winning 1-0 thanks to ‘that’ James Rodriguez goal, and I had both 1-0 and 2-0. I cashed in 10% to return my stake (actually, it was £40.93 against a £36 stake), and eventually decided to let the other 90% ride. A Uruguay goal would have made that look a daft call, with £368.41 on the table.

As it happened, Colombia scored again and then sat tight for a 2-0 win, which returned £1,018.43 for the other 90%. Nice. 🙂

And so to the syndicate. We had a pool of £400, and I played the matches as follows:

I was emailing syndicate members at half-time and between games – each of the ‘cash in’ offer breaks – and below is a chronology of those emails, which might make for interesting reading.

**

SENT SATURDAY 4.49pm

Hi again everyone,

We’re on! Below are the tickets. In the opening game, I’ve not put 0-0, and we don’t want either team scoring three or more, unless they both do! (AOD=any other draw).

It’s possible that we’ll depart on the opening leg of course, but it’s important to try to spread the risk across the four legs. In other words, not to blow our stack on the first match.

In the last leg – Costa Rica vs Greece – I took the view it would be low scoring. If we’re still going by then, we’ll have options anyway.

So, good luck everyone, and I’ll keep in touch.

Matt

p.s. if you told me there would be problems with same day payment, don’t worry. Send the funds, and confirm when sent, no problem. If you’ve sent already, many thanks!

**

SENT AT HALF TIME IN BRAZIL-CHILE WITH THE SCORE 1-1

A breathless first half, and 0-0 was never going to happen, was it?!

Our problem now is that, while we have 1-1, 2-1, 1-2, and any other draw, we don’t want either team scoring two goals or more in the second half.

The way this is going, we might be cheering 6-6 for any other draw!

Anyone else’s pulse racing? 😉

Fingers crossed we get through this one…

Matt

p.s. here are the offers we have:

**

FULL TIME in MATCH 1 – Brazil 1 Chile 1

OK, so 1-1 wasn’t the best result. In fact, a goal either way would have been great:

2-1 Brazil was a A score, meaning more tickets (and more value on them) going through
1-2 Chile was a B score, but far less popular than 1-1

Still, we roll on to leg 2 tonight – Colombia vs Uruguay. Out portfolio is now worth £376 or thereabouts, so neither here nor there. But we’ve got a fair amount of coverage in the next two matches, though again, we don’t want a lot of goals. (Tickets 2 (x2), 8 and 9 in the white image at the top).

Let’s see how we go…

Matt

**

HALF TIME in Match 2 (Colombia 1 Uruguay 0)

Leg 2, and we’re sitting on a target score at 1-0 Colombia. We have 1-1 on A as tickets 2 and 9; and 2-0 and 2-1 on ticket 8.

1-0 would be best because it keeps two tickets alive, meaning we have a couple more options in the remaining two legs.

But, at this stage, we should just aim for ANY of our scores to be hit, and not be greedy!

Here’s the latest offer positions, which is topologically almost exactly the same as before the match (£376)

Matt

**

FULL TIME in Match 2 – Colombia 2 Uruguay 0

Well, it’s a bit of a curate’s egg job here, chaps.

The good news is we’re still rolling. The bad news is that we’re down to one ticket, #8.
I’m a bit frustrated because we could have had both of the first two scores on A, and I actually really fancied Colombia tonight against a ‘toothless’ Uruguay (groan, yawn).
The offer is now £308.85, which is fair enough, but if we can get through the next leg, expect that to improve a good bit. Beneath that, I’ve added the remaining unit allocation in the last two games so you can see how the land lies. I think we’ll let things ride through the Netherlands-Mexico game, as I’d be hopeful we’ve covered the most likely scenarios there; and then we’ll see what the offer is ahead of Costa Rica-Greece if/when we get that far.

Best case for us would be Netherlands 2-0 or 2-1, and 1-1 in the last game. That would net out to something like 19 winning tickets, each worth £18,000. We’d have 0.1 winning tickets, worth £1,800 or so. In the worst winning case, there would be 29 winning tickets each worth £12,000 and we’d have around £1,200.

There is, of course, a more likely worst case, which is that we blow out on one of the next two legs..!

This was a fairly conservative perm, and on another day, we could be sitting on all our A tickets (1, 4, 7) cheering 0.6 of a ticket for a nice few thousand. At least, I hope you’re enjoying the ride so far?

Matt

**

HALF TIME in Match 3 (Holland 0 Mexico 0)

Well, a penalty to Holland at the death there would have been VERY good news. It didn’t happen and the game remains 0-0. We have plenty of likely scores covered, but 1-0 Mexico would be the danger, plus of course 0-0.

It’s very hot in this match, and I wonder how much energy Holland will have towards the end of 90 minutes. Ideally, they’ll score early in the second half. In any case, we are only being offered £265 for our ticket at this time, so we will sit tight, and do a ‘Holland goal dance’. Fingers crossed they get one.

Matt

**

FULL TIME in Match 3 (Holland 2 Mexico 1)

Well, we somehow got away with that! 2-1 was good for us, and it means we now have a decision to make.

We’ve been offered £751 for our ticket, and we’ll get another offer at half time unless either side score two goals in the first half. I’m personally of a mind to let it ride until half time.

There are roughly 20 tickets on each of 0-0, 1-0, 0-1, and 1-1, meaning a win would be worth £1,700 or so to us. Alternatively, we could take the cash now, which amounts to a profit of £43 or so each.

I suggest staying in until half time. If you disagree, please say before 8.30pm, when I will make a final decision and let everyone know.

Matt

*

Before the final leg

Hi again,

Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed the ride. We have all the combinations of 0 and 1 goals, and this looks like a low scoring game. Of course, it doesn’t always go like that. However, here’s how we’ll play:

We’ve got 1-0 0-1 0-0 1-1, and we’ll take our chances with those at least until half time. If it’s 1-0 either way at half time, I’ll consider pulling our stake out. 0-0 and we’ll bank some profit (hopefully, offer depending), 1-1 and we’ll see what the offer is.

If you want to, you can bet 2-0 (13.0 on Betfair), 0-2 (16.0 on Betfair) and over 2.5 goals (3.0) which would be a stake-saving hedge for about £40. If we get one of our target scores, it’ll be £200 or thereabouts per syndicate member.

Again, I hope that all makes sense. Let me know if not.

Matt

**

HALF TIME in Match 4 (Costa Rica 0 Greece 0)

Hi everyone,

The offer was £1,000 for our ticket, and I’ve sold 40% of it to get our stake out. So, we have £408.19 banked, a free bet now to win something like another £1,000. We saw in the earlier game (Holland-Mexico) how a goal can change a 0-0 after the break, and it would be pretty frustrating to take nothing from this sort of position.

So, we have our cash back, and we’re still cheering for some gravy on top. No big scoop this time, but we all have the option to try again soon! 🙂

Matt

**

FULL TIME in Match 4 (Costa Rica 1 Greece 1)

So that was fun. No big score, largely because of the missed opportunity to put either 1-1 Brazil – Chile, or 2-0 Columbia on A. If I’d done that, we’d have got double, perhaps treble, what we ended up with. Which is…

£1,570.72     🙂

That means we’re each worth £196.31.

Thanks for your company, and well done! 😀

Matt

**

So yes, it was a great weekend with the Colossus. I’m tempting fate somewhat expecting another result, but I currently have the below ticket going into tonight’s pair of games…

If you’re not already getting involved in this brilliant bet, do check out the ColossusBets review here, and definitely thinking about signing up for an account. I’ll be sure to do more syndicates when the domestic season starts. 🙂

Matt