Back in 2007, I was grinding away struggling to earn a decent living at a chemical plant and whilst the work could be tough, if you've ever workedin such an environment you'll know that the social side of manual work has a lot going for it and I really did enjoy my job

Unfortunately, around September 2007 it became evident that numbers on site would shortly be reduced, mainly due to rising costs but predominantly because of the strengthening of economy in China which had left my firm unable to compete on export.

Unfortunately (or not as it turned out) I was one of the people selected for redundancy on account of years of service.

At the time I was extremely concerned about the normal stuff…. Bills, kids to feed, cars to run, Christmas fast approaching and a longing for something better out of life than this constant switching between jobs that unfortunately is just the nature of short-contract work

Luckily I had managed to accumulate some savings which afforded me some time to really consider my options and my first decision was to undertake a Health and Safety course at some personal expense. I really wanted a shift away from dependency on somebody else for a living and so I originally planned to work in consultancy in this field.

However, whilst I enjoyed the course, a brief stint working at a new firm on the H&S side of things quickly led me to conclude that most employers are only really paying lip-service to the idea of safe working environments. as soon as the pressure is on, anyone raising concerns about H&S is unofficialy seen as a problem and I just was not prepared to work under this fake atmosphere

I actually returned to fitting work temporarily on a power station in the South East and whilst I was glad to be able to replenish the savings, it merely reaffirmed that it really wasn't what I wanted to do anymore either

I had always had an interest in betting, throwing a few quid on a 'tip' here and there and enjoying days out at the races but I had always been of the opinion it was a 'mug's game'. Indeed, I had family members and friends that were borderline addicts and would watch in dismay at them punt away their wages on a Friday on dogs and horses about which they knew absolutely nothing.

However, the mathematical side always held some allure and despite being fairly risk-averse and modest, I was one of those people that 'knew' there was a way to beat them. I just had no idea what it was or quite how long it would take me to work it out.

I'd had an interest in arbitrage and explored this in some detail giving me a much better understanding of the maths involved and how the prices related to probabilities. This was an important step already in place and without this foreknowledge, I have no doubt at all I would eventually have given up and gone back to full time work.

Despite this interest in betting in general, Betfair was quite a mysterious concept to me, mainly because I couldn’t get my head around the “Laying” aspect of bet placement. I had seen the adverts “Best Price at Betfair”, “100% Books”, “Be a Bookie” etc...........and at the time I was really intrigued about the possibilities.

My only ever bet attempt on Betfair at this point was a lay bet on England to win the World Cup in 2006. As always, and certainly in those days, I knew they were hopelessly over-bet and had little chance of winning anything. I learned to my dismay that I needed the £800 in the account before I could lay the £100! .... I never really bothered with it after that for quite some time.

When I finally got to toying with Betfair more seriously, I started (as most do) on the Horse Racing markets.

With an interest in arbitrage, I had been curious as to whether or not I could simply manage my bets over the course of a morning so as to ensure a profit on all runners. This was quite complex and the idea quickly degenerated into just backing the favourite in the morning and trying to lay it at a lower price later on in the day before the race started.

The idea of a guaranteed profit before anything had even happened was very appealing to me and I was firmly of the belief that this idea of mine was a really novel thing that very few people would ever have thought of.

It was a random google search for horse racing stats on prices traded that alerted me to a forum called Geeks Toy. It was a fledgling community at that point but in the ensuing days, I quickly learned that not only was my idea very primitive, there were also many thousands of other people doing much the same things as me and what I had discovered, was not in fact very novel at all.

Despite it being clearly obvious I had little idea what I was doing, there was still a wealth of information available to study and so I set about it with vigour.

Excited by videos and threads explaining how easy it was to just follow the money, jump in front and take the profits I started playing around for small stakes and quickly learned that the reality was very different indeed!

Thankfully I was only using very small stakes and the financial damage was minimal but it did force me to seriously re-evaluate my plans...

What I needed was just a profit on a consistent basis to begin with to help build confidence

I decided that a good starting point would be just to get through a day without losing. I'd then know I was on the right track and could tweak from there and learn from the istakes I had made previously

At the time, Aus racing and US racing was perfectly tradeable and coupled with the UK racing in the afternoons game me a lot of available markets throughout the day to practise on..

And so, always persistent, I'd start at 5am with the Aus racing, trying to pinch a little bit out of each race... go through the day on the UK racing and then into the evening on the US races, all the while just trying to make small profits and just get a hang of how the markets work.

Despite the long days, I kept at this for quite some time until I found myself just exhausted and lacking focus all through the day

I've always been an early riser but the sheer amount of time I was spending focusing intently did absolutely nothing at all for my mindset and I found myself increasingly reluctant to enter trades due to over-thinking.

Even at the height of my early success, after many months of this unmaintanable lifestyle, I was still only averaging around £250 a week which just wasn't going to cut it. This wasn't even really a lot of money back then either and in my previous line of work, I could comfotable pull that for a single 10 hour day

We weren't exactly living the high life and something had to give

You can read more about my horse trading journey and the development of the strategies I use today here

I had a very primitive bot setup on marketfeeder that was pulling me in around £60 a week. I was happy to leave this running and consumed by thoughts of the need for 'diversification' (as though I was Warren Buffett or something), I began trying to elarn how to trade football

And of course, I made all the same mistakes as I had made previously!

It all looked so easy on the videos and whilst some of them were just not at all what I was interested in (staying ahead of the score on CS markets etc..), it was easily my favourite sport and we are prone to over-estimating our own knowledge levels. And so it was with me

I never was and still am not a major lover of trading on football as the market dynamics are just completely at odds with everything else that I do. However, the sheer volume of matches and liquidity available meant it was something I really did have to focus on.

Weeks and months went by whilst I made zero progress and lost money. I got caught with open positions a few times when a goal went in and this is something else I hadn't really given a lot of thought to until it happened. Whilst other sports markets suspend, you can often limit your damage but with Correct Scores, it's just all over.

It wasn't until I started focusing on the binary markets (Over/Under) that I began to make things work for me but I lost a lot of money in the process of getting there.

With the season was coming to an end, I was concerned about the 2/3 month spell through the summer months where I wouldn't have anything to trade.

I should have been grateful for this really since I wasn't winning much at football and needed the break to think more seriously about what I was doing.

I got there eventually though and you can read up on it here

One random afternoon I saw somebody throw their thoughts on a tennis match in the chat box on Geeks Toy forum.

I had always enjoyed Tennis and had a good appreciation of it having played at a decent standard and watched since I was a small child. But I had never really had any interest in trading it due to the insane volatility in the markets

Having read up on some typical strategies for tennis, I chanced upon a men's match on clay (Zeballos vs Isner).

I had the match up on Bet365 and my approach was to just stick £5 on the player I thought was going to win the point and then trade out for profit/loss.

With £5 stakes, in about 15 minutes, I'd made £5 profit and was utterly convinced I had it cracked!

Looking back, I know this was entirely luck. I was about 5 seconds behind real-time action and it just so happened that the majority of the points in a short interval had gone the way that I had guessed they would.

Excited and quickly forgetting how disastrous rushing into things had been for me previously, I ramped quickly to £50 stakes and did £20 in a few minutes.

Now I was convinced I'd' make millions at this... promptly upped to £100 in the next game and lost £70 inside 10 minutes!

It's always the way it goes and whilst it was inevitable at some stage. The psychological aspect of rapidly increasing stakes cannot be under-valued.

Over time, having dropped back to £5 stakes, I managed to develop much more sensible approaches to tennis and it became the main source of my income (accounts for 70%+ alone). I was also able to apply the same theory to other markets like Cricket and Darts and finally, whilst even to this day I'm not a huge fan, Football.

You can read about the approaches I came up with for tennis here

It's important to remember that whilst this quick overview looks all short lived and up/down, this initial learning curve took around 3 years and it wasn't until 2010 that I started making consistent profit out of my trading.

Even now, 15 years on, I am still constantly adapting to the market and revising my strategies.

Throwaway thoughts on the mistakes I've made and lessons I've learned are worthy of a book in their own right (and in some cases got one!) but the best lesson of all is - stick at it!

Be persistent not stubborn and be sure to accept you're going to make mistakes. Nobody is inherently good at anything and so don't be too hard on yourself if it takes you a while to get to where you want to be.

Accept that the odds are against you in the beginning and that competency is widely held to require 1000's of experiences … only then will you know how to react in certain circumstances.

The only real trick when you start out is ensuring you're still in the game when you finally understand what you're doing. Don't bust out before then and you have half a chance.

Good luck out there!