Neil

Perhaps my proclamation of "Cheers Gareth, I'll be £500 richer before Santa even thinks about visiting" was, despite tongue-in-cheek, a tad overconfident. Next target is before my birthday in February. Easy. Ish.

And yes, I realise this Bale bet has started in shambles, mind I said the only reason he wouldn't reach the target was due to injury. If he could stop being injured constantly and fire a few in after the international break, I'll still be very confident. Long season.

Need to click on "all matches" mate. If anyone suspended betting due to my actions, I'd be so proud.

Wonder how marky555 is doing nowadays.

Btw, I feel I should explain: You may or may not have noticed I've posted a lot in this thread recently. Couple of weeks ago I basically sat down and had a look at my past bets from the past couple of months. I had some good wins, had plenty of bad losses. The common denominator though was I wasn't thinking about my bets that much, and more importantly, I wasn't placing enough emphasis on the odds. So, I've been looking a lot more closely at the odds and they're dictating what I'm betting on. If it's good value, then it's usually worth a bet. Instead of willy-nilly going "well, I quite fancy that", I'm looking pretty in-depth at the information. It's all there to look at, make use of it. And match that up with the odds on offer - do they reflect the likelihood of each possibility? If not, there's likely to be some value, and take advantage of it accordingly. Not to say I've wiped out the urge to have the odd daft bet - but if you want to be successful at this betting malarky then you need to take emotion out of it as much as possible. Got a long, long way to go before thinking I'm actually good at this but I don't think it's any coincidence that the past couple of weeks have been, arguably, my most successful gambling period to date. No spectacular wins, but fairly regular wins and a very healthy cumulative profit, and more importantly I'm getting value from the odds on offer (to which end it always helps to have a number of online accounts to exploit this). I'm in no way suddenly any sort of expert on any particular team, league, or whatever. And you'll always have freak results, poor decisions, or sometmes intangible factors where one team just is up for it loads more than the other. That's always going to happen. But if you consistently take good prices for various events, long-term you will win. Tbh I could ramble for ages about it - I find the whole lot of it very interesting, especially how psychological it all is (why do you think places do "BTTS offers"? You naturally want events to happen in a game, as you, as a natural state of mind, don't want your bet to be potentially over at one sudden point, you always want to have a chance - they're just exploiting your brain's default setting.) I realise this is all setting up a decisive Liege defeat tonight.

I was hoping Towelie/some other kind Swede/Scando could provide some more info. As far as I can see: Liege lost their first group game (very surprising home defeat). Won 9/9 in Belgium, often comprehensively too. See no reason they wouldn't play a strong side to try to recover after their first game. Elfsborg themselves have been in poor form as of late. Plus SL are, well, better than Elfsborg. One thing to note is it's an artificial pitch. Not that I think it'll make a massive difference.

Think Valencia are overpriced at 13/8 - 3 wins in a row in La Liga to recover after a pretty shite start. Think they're good enough to overcome a "tricky away game". Might go on the DNB - 19/20 with Coral, really good price that. Lyon I'm just staying well away from barring exceptional value. They may well win but they've screwed me on more than one occasion in the past. Unreliable team.

Shakhtar draw/BTTS in Leverkusen-Sociedad came in at over 5/1 last night (if I could sort out this screenshot I'd happily post. ) Decent chunk of that is going on Standard Liege tonight. Might put some on -1 too.

How do you post an image of an online bet slip? I'm a bit shit with technology sometimes. Re: that bet, Wilson. If I were him, I'd have been gutted and thought the world was against me. Looking at it more coldly, it has to be said, Leverkusen themselves got a 92nd minute winner.

ffs Beren. You're supposed to not realise we have a mint record vs Man City. Now that anyone expects us to win, we're in trouble.

Not to derail the thread, but there was little to do with us "shutting up shop". Everything to do with sheer complacency and thinking the game was won. We actually had a few good chances we made a total pig's ear of.

Very nice. Must say I wasn't too keen on Arsenal. Shows what I know.

Basel DNB Porto/Atletico draw Not a massive stake. Just have a strong hunch on the draw, and I think Basel, at home, are overpriced. Evens on the DNB.

I've made my opinion on Tiote very clear from whenever I've seen him. However, although I don't think he was particularly good last night, it seemed time and time again he was given very few options when he picked up the ball. We did exactly what I wanted us to do against Tiote - close him down and expose him. However, he was given very, very little help.

I'm really confused by this. I bet Baines (who fwiw wasn't very good tonight) couldn't believe his luck when he saw Ben Arfa on the other side. Ben Arfa, on the left, was consistently going to try to get onto his strongest foot, which played straight into the hands of Coleman as it sent him onto Coleman's stronger side - not to mention Coleman's pretty quick himself. Just plain weird. You could also argue Coleman is a better defender than Baines, so for that reason as well why he didn't line up on the right and attack at Baines I don't know.

2 decent ones in. Very good stuff. Glad you took advantage of there being goals. What you get on 3-2? It's classic hindsight but also 4/1 looks crazy value for that bet.

GW7 Man City 2-1 Everton Cardiff City 1-0 Newcastle Fulham 1-0 Stoke City Hull City 0-1 Aston Villa Liverpool 3-1 Crystal Palace Sunderland 1-2 Man Utd Norwich 1-3 Chelsea Southampton 2-1 Swansea Tottenham 2-0 West Ham West Brom 2-2 Arsenal

He was ineffective tonight but I didn't think he was garbage as such. Just like last season, he was the only outlet. Moving Remy into the middle put all the pressure back onto Hatem; they doubled-up on him and countered him easily. Just woeful tactics from Pardew, as usual. (Plus Seamus Coleman had an absolutely sensational performance - he was man of the match by a distance, for all Sky's ejaculating over Lukaku.) the excuses people will make for hba a crap game is a crap game, and he had one. And the one before that. It's really myopic to look at individual player performances in isolation from context unless they are outstandingly bad - which he wasn't. The deck was stacked against him from the get go, tonight. If he'd been on top, top form - he might have got better joy out of Coleman, but that doesn't mean the level he was at was 'garbage'. The team's plan was garbage, and he was spearheading the horrendous plan sadly - and is now taking the flak for it. This: He would have faired much better against baines than coleman. Coleman was absolutely phenomenal, like. More or less a perfect performance. Gouffran got the better of him once, midway through the second half, but other than that he was absolutely flawless. Defended well, attacked well. Coleman was MOTM by a distance, despite Lukaku's 2 goals. Baines was fairly gash by his standards.

Well, hope people got on the goals market. Very predictable. Over 2.5, over 3.5 both came in. HBA bet was way off, he was awful. Thought I'd also take advantage of our alarming complacency by putting a small bet on 3-2 (and yep, 3-3 - I knew we'd let you back in) at HT.

Not really.... and they wasn't fantastic in the first half either. They looked good because we allowed them to be and they looked bad in the 2nd half because we didn't allow them to play. The same could be said vice versa tbf, but the point is let a passing team play and your asking for trouble put them under pressure and they won't like it. As the old saying goes..... any team can look good if the opposition allows them to be. Mole, we couldn't have gifted you a way back into the game any more - just like us being 3-0 was in no small part due to your total lack of defending. Beren's nailed it perfectly - we took our foot off the gas, ground to a halt, got out the car and went for a walk. It was farcical.

Half an hour's very decent showing followed by nearly an hour of total complacency - some of the worst I've seen in many years at Goodison.

Right, well. Should be a good game. Like hell I'm wishing you good luck or owt. Will be back for the aftermath one way or another.

Barkley himself has loved a yellow card recently.

The line-ups have just reaffirmed my belief there'll be goals tonight. Would be surprised if it's under 2.5.

You've come as I and most suspected - to play on the counter-attack. And that's definitely the right way to play us IMO. Osman has been flat-out poor so far this season. McCarthy still settling - they've got a really big job tonight collectively to give a bit of protection when you're breaking.