The Academy Awards or Oscars 2008 are to be presented on February 24th and the betting odds already offer good opportunities. Betfair have made all the awards available for betting or trading but 5 categories sum up the vast majority of the bets' liquidity. The Oscars are awarded in 2 weeks to the most talented actors, actresses, directors or film producers and other nominees. We don't have much time ahead of us, so let's take a look at betting patterns, odds and betfair charts. 2008 Oscar Predictions are also included from various websites and blogs.

As the European Championship 2008 Qualifying Stage is approaching its completion, let's take a closer look of the fixed odds of the most important teams at this moment.

First, Germany remain the big favorite for winning the trophy. Their odds began at about 9.0 and they are now traded at 6.0 while they have a large portion of liquidity on them (16%). This trend is expected to continue even after the start of the final stage of the championship unless something unforeseen occurs. Upon examining the market on the Germany's Group winner (Group D), we see a steady downtrend from 2.25 to 1.07. Generally it seems that we can verify once more the downtrend every favorite of big tournaments or championships presents, which can be exploited in betfair.

Upon request, I'll talk a little about arbing in sports. Sports arbitraging occurs when two different bookmakers offering prices on an event with only two possible outcomes and there is enough of a difference in their prices such that you can back both outcomes and make a profit whoever wins. It's very similar to sports trading but the difference is that for arbitrage you are betting almost simultaneously with two books offering different prices. Arbitraging is sometimes described as risk-free betting, this is true in theory, but not in practice.

Let's see a real life example based on the forthcoming 2007 Greek Elections... 

My strategy in sports betting is based on an Excel spreadsheet. I add the games in daily basis and I update the results during the day...

In that way, the spreadsheet keeps tracking of my performance, adjusts my bankroll and calculates my stake size for each game. According to some filters I have applied, the spreadsheet tells me what to back and what to lay and for how much.

I have created my sheet in that way, so I can keep track of my performance, whether I would flat bet, or in case I used the Kelly criterion. Since December, I bet according to the latter, although I started with flat betting, since I wanted to be sure it was a winning strategy.

Up to now (late April 2007), I have placed bets on about 5,000 football games while my database consists of about 6,500 games. Here are some interesting stats:.

Flat Betting Performance