I, Punter

Happy Halloween! Almost. Before I begin, please accept my sincere apology for the unexpected break in your weekly betting entertainment, but the life of a sports analyst (sounds better than degenerate gambler) is sometimes not their own. Last week I spent a couple of days in Birmingham on a work trip.  Birmingham is a big city with big buildings and more canals than Venice.  The conference I was attending was located on the sixteenth floor of a hotel offering panoramic views of England’s second city, but we live in strange times and at street level Birmingham had a shabby feel to it that I wasn’t expecting.  A round in the hotel bar cost £145, which tells you everything about the state of the country at the end of the first quarter of the 21st century.  A conference highlight was looking out of the window at a nearby hotel and seeing a naked man climb into bed.  There are usually a couple of perks to be had on a work’s jolly, but full-frontal male nudity was no...

In last week's blog I made two mistakes.  The first was saying that the Barnsley game kicked off at 3 pm.  The second was thinking that Barnsley would actually win the Barnsley game.  The Tykes’ trip to Blackpool was a lunchtime kick off and, unaware of this, I checked Sky Bet at 3.15 pm to see how they were winning by, only to discover my betting fate had already been sealed. The game was effectively a repeat of the West Brom dabacle from the weekend before, with Barnsley monopolising the game to no avail and Blackpool sneaking a goal late on.  My other selection Gillingham won like the good team they are.  It’s early days. The last two losing weekends could just be down to variance, but going forward it may pay to avoid betting on top versus bottom clashes where the bottom side is playing at home.  Terrible teams seldom become great teams over the course of a season, but they do get better at defending and are more likely to park the bus in the hope of ...

As part of the day job, I had to scan a photo that included Nottingham Castle into ChatGPT.  Don't ask.  If you are familiar with Nottingham Castle, you will agree it looks nothing like a castle.  It's almost a case for Trading Standards.  There was a proper castle on the site, with turrets and everything, but this was razed to the ground in 1651.  The current building is a Stuart Restoration-era ducal mansion which has been disappointing visitors to the city since 1679.  However, ChatGPT knows what a castle looks like, and, without prompting, did this to the photo. Amusing as this was, I just wanted the original photo, so I asked ChatGPT not to alter it in any way. I asked ChatGPT why it was doing this.  "I am genuinely mortified," was the touching response.  You know the world is screwed when you want to put your arm around an AI and tell it everything's going to be okay. *** On Tuesday, an e-mail informed me that a work colleague had died....

At times this week, it has felt like I’ve been carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders.  In desperation, I reached out on my socials for a bit of love and the late American singer, songwriter and dancer Michael Jackson got in touch.  He suggested that I should straighten up my act and boogie down.  I was in Tesco the next time things began to get on top of me, halfway through the weekly shop, but people just thought I was mental when I pushed my trolley to one side and started doing the Moonwalk down the biscuit aisle.  With advice like that, no wonder they called him Wacko Jacko.  It makes me wonder what other crazy stuff he got up to. Before I turn to matters of financial speculation, for this week’s AI slop I asked ChatGPT to give the moonwalking man a Notts County shirt and it found an unintentionally funny way of doing this, presumably for reasons of copyright.  In addition to being "The Oldest (professional) Team" in the world, last Saturday’...

Welcome back.  I did say I would see you in September, I just forgot to say which year. It’s been so long in fact, I no longer have to rip off actual people for my illustrations.  If I want to open the blog with a picture of a racehorse balancing a football on its nose, I just ask ChatGPT and hey presto!  We are living in the future, people.  On the downside, it’s not a great time to be an artist trying to earn a humble crust, but that’s a small price to pay for a racehorse balancing a football on its nose, I’m sure we’d all agree. Last time, I ended the 2023/2024 football season £162.87 up.  I had placed 27 bets of £20, a total investment of £540.  Of these, 13 had won returning £702.87 for that profit of £162.87.  That’s an ROI of 30.16%.  Donald Trump would sell his family for that kind of return. This time, I don’t want to beat my 2023/2024 profit, I want to smash it.  To quote Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, “To live without hope is ...

Welcome to I, Punter, in which the author muses on life (health permitting!) and recommends a weekly bet. Where was I? When the journalist Jeffrey Bernard was off on a bender and unable to provide his weekly column for The Spectator , the magazine would merely print the following apology on an otherwise blank page: Jeffrey Bernard is unwell .  My absence from Blogger has not been due to a bender, but I have been unwell, albeit not to such an extent that it has required me to take time off work or retire to my sick bed.  But I have been taking it easy, and I still am, so this will likely be my last blog entry of the 2023-2024 football season.  At least I will end it in profit.  And what better time to bow out than the weekend of The Grand National? (Winner below.)           On Monday, whilst child #1 (birth order) was at Alton Towers with her friends, we took child #2 and child #3 (the dog) to Vicar Water Country Park for a gentle strol...