#55. Betting To Win

Betting to Win by Prof. Leighton Vaughan Williams

Yep, back to the sports betting but fortunately for those of you who don’t really care for such topics this is the last of them.

This is an odd little book, all things considered. The author is “Professor of Economics and Finance, Director of the Betting Research Unit, and Head of Economics Research at the Nottingham Trent University” and his career in academia shines through. The book has over 50 chapters, each only a few pages long and as such it reads more like a collection of newspaper columns or perhaps research summaries. There is little flow at times so it can all feel rather disjointed. Sure, it makes the book much easier to dip in to, and means one can fairly readily open the pages and look something up that one has read before if you can recall roughly what the subject matter was without having to scan through page after page. But it doesn’t make for a particular pleasing cover-to-cover read.

That said the book seems pretty well researched, certainly if the appendices and bibliography are anything to go by. You get the feeling that like many an academic who has turned his hand to writing a book, anything he says and any statistics he quotes can be trusted and that should one wish to one can check up on the author via the sources listed in the back of the book. That’s reassuring when the book is all about ways in which you can make money from sports betting. You want to be sure that any trend identified in the text is genuine before you put a penny down on it.

Betting To Win starts in the same way as many books on sports betting – with an overview of the main ways in which one can place a bet. Bookies, the Tote, spreads and exchanges are all covered along with a few tips for using each of them. Part two is a collection of 29 short chapters each passing on a small piece of advice aimed to help the reader make a profit. The gambler’s fallacy is introduced, risk and uncertainty are compared and contrasted, and the author discusses whether multiple bets make sense. All of these chapters are designed to get the reader thinking about how they gamble rather than giving specific advice as to what to back. Part three covers the Tote in more detail, including the US system. It’s a pretty short section because the Tote isn’t that useful over here as we have many other options to get a bet on. The same is not true of other countries though so it’s worth knowing about it, in principle at least. Part four covers the spreads in more detail and includes details of arbitrage and what the author has dubbed quarbs (quasi-arbs). Interesting to know about but even now, many years on from when it was first introduced, sports spread betting has yet to catch on in a big way so this section probably won’t be of much interest to many. Part five has more on the exchanges but as this was written back in 2002 it’s a little sketchy and there is a lot more to be said on this subject in other books, some of which I have reviewed recently. The book ends with a look at the 2002 World Cup using England’s opening match against Sweden to compare the various betting mediums (media?) to see which is best. It’s an interesting exercise but little more than that really.

This book will not tell you what to back in order to get rich but it ought to set your mind whirring and get you thinking about ways in which you might make a few quid. It certainly did for me. When I first read it several years back I ended up filling several pages of a nearby notebook with ideas and angles to investigate further. When I read it again recently I made a few more notes, some of which it transpires were almost identical to those I made years back but hadn’t followed up on.

Incidentally, till I got my hands on this book I didn’t even know there was a Betting Research Unit. It sounds ace and I’d love to know more about it but a google search turns up very little of any use. Surely they must have produced loads of reports containing information that sports bettors like myself would find incredibly valuable. Why is it based at Nottingham Trent Uni, why not go independent, start a publishing arm and get these reports out there on sale and make a few quid? I’d really like a better idea of what they do and how often they churn out a report as well as what they have covered in the past.

I’m getting there, we’re nearly up to date now. The pile of books waiting to be added to this blog is a lot smaller than it was a few days back. There’s still four more books to tell you about though, and I am halfway through another so I’d better get on with updating this blog soon or there will be five books in that pile.

#53. Beating The Odds

Beating the Odds by Rob Eastway & John Haigh

I’m still sticking to the sports betting theme but with a slight twist for this one as it’s more about the maths behind sports (hence the subtitle “The hidden mathematics of sports“) than how to actually profit from gambling on sports. It makes for an odds little book but it rather appealed to me and I have now read it two or three times in the last 18 months or so.

The aim of the book is to highlight some of the ways in which maths is hidden in sport and what role it has to play. We’re not talking betting strategies here though. The examples include how to make the roundest football from regular polygons, the best way to take a penalty, how the scoring system in boxing, figure skating and gymnastics can lead to some unlikely results, where best to aim on the dartboard and so on.

Some of it just boils down to basic game theory but that doesn’t make it any less interesting as you actually get to see how game theory works in contexts that you are more likely to be familiar with. I have a reasonable understanding of game theory anyway (it’s something I have been drawn to for many years, increasingly so as I got into poker where it can apply heavily) but to see it in the context of a penalty shootout rather than the usual prisoners’ dilemma is somewhat refreshing.

I really ought to stop using “somewhat” as often as I do. For some reason I have found myself using that and “per se” a lot recently and I have no idea why.

Anyway, back to the book. The authors have been careful not to bog the reader down with unnecessary detail such as formulae and complicated maths where it just isn’t warranted and as a result the book is pretty accessible to anyone with a reasonable grasp of even basic maths and an interest in sports. There is an appendix where all the meaty maths can be found, along with explanations as to why some of the answers to the various problems littered throughout the text are indeed correct so if you want all the gory details you can get them.

Who would this book appeal to? Well, me for a start. Anyone else with an interest in sport and a least a passing interest in maths and how it can affect the outcome of various events. Maybe anyone who understands the salient points of most sports and understands GCSE maths too. It’s a nice read, quite a fun read and an interesting one too so if I were you I’d grab a copy and give it a go to see what you think. It has a lot of interesting stuff in there and I think you might get a lot out of it.

#52. The Definitive Guide to Betting Exchanges

The Definitive Guide to Betting Exchanges edited by Paul Kealy

The last book on Betfair (and others, for there is more than one exchange despite what Nigel Paul may think) for now, and I think I’ve saved the best for last. A chunky volume with over 250 pages and despite the page layouts (it uses a column-style layout common to all books in this Racing Post Expert Series which doesn’t actually fill that much of the page with text) there is a lot in here.

The book opens in the traditional manner with a look at what betting exchanges are and how they came about plus an overview of the major players in this market. This book was written in 2005 by which team Sporting Options, gg.com and intrade.com had disappeared but there place had been taken by the likes of Betonbet, Betbull and Parbet. There was no shortage of businessman looking to cash in on the exchange phenomenon by starting their own version of Betfair but as none could really attract the business that Betfair attracted then (and still does) they gradually fell by the wayside as they failed to deliver the profits they hoped for and promised investors. That leaves us with Betfair and Betdaq as the main two these days and even now Betfair is much bigger than Betdaq in terms of promotion, marketing and market share. This is one area of life in which it would be better for punters if there was a monopoly with everyone competing on just one exchange as that would increase liquidity and make the pricing of markets that much more competitive.

But I digress.

After the usual opening chapters comes a number of chapters specific to various sports. There’s one on snooker, rugby (league and union), tennis, cricket and so on. Oh, and horse racing and football, of course, which actually get a few chapters each. These sport-specific chapters highlight what to look for when it comes to betting on or trading markets related to this sport in an attempt to put the reader one step ahead of the average mug punter. For example, the racing section gives an overview of each of the British racecourses with pointers as to the running styles that do well there so you can take an informed view as to which horse to back (or lay) in-running. The football chapters contain a lot of data on how the winning chances of a team vary with how long is left in the match and the current situation, e.g. how often will favourites win if they go 1-0 down in the first half, that sort of thing.

As such there is a lot to get your teeth into and thus a lot around which to build a concrete betting or trading strategy. This certainly isn’t just another “back high, lay low” manual, it has genuine strategy information in it and is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in sports betting on the exchanges.

#51. Successful Matched Betting

Successful Matched Betting by Geoff Harvey

If the cover image on the last book was cheesy this one is just downright confusing. It appears to be a mouse pointer clicking on a star that is going supernova with a circuitboard and Scalextric track background. Quite what that has to do with betting exchanges I have no idea.

Yes, we’re sticking with the Betfair theme for a little bit longer. This 2002 effort was probably one of the earlier books on the subject, and I think the oldest I have on the subject in my library. As a consequence it does at least recognise that there is more than just Betfair out there as it takes in Betdaq (who are still around today) and others such as Sporting Options (effectively bought out by Betfair when Sporting Options collapsed) and gg.com and intrade.com (neither of which survived the early days of exchanges as far as I am aware). The book is quite dated now though with many more markets on offer (albeit at fewer exchanges) and the screenshots included no longer bear a great resemblance to today’s screens but that is always a risk with a book of this nature.

Does it tell us anything new? Are there strategies in here that aren’t in any other book on the exchanges? Basically, is this book worth buying if you already have a book on the exchanges or understand how they work and how to trade on them? Hang on while I just check as it was a couple of weeks ago at least when I read this…. actually, yeah, there may be. Towards the end the author looks at some statistics and digs out a few trends and figures that are quite interesting, more so than in other similar works anyway.

For example, he compares the record of favourites of horses at a couple of racecourses, using made-up data most likely but that’s not really relevant as he’s trying to prove a point. And that point is that favourites may have a better winning record at one course than another but may not when average odds are taken into account. If favourites at one course start around evens on average and have a higher strike-rate than favourites at another course where the average starting price of the favourite is more like 2/1 then all you’re really saying is that shorter-priced horses win more often – and that’s nothing new. The author is encouraging the reader to think about stats in context. It’s no good opposing favourites at a given course or in a given race without knowing more about the strike rate compared to the average odds and so on.

There’s also a quite nice piece on the difference between the median and the mean and what this means to gamblers. This is something that is often overlooked in simple texts.

Given this is a pretty slim volume and is now around eight years old I’d suggest only bothering with it if you can pick up a copy cheap. I wouldn’t pay cover price for it these days as there are better books out there, one of which is coming up shortly…

#50. Lay, Back and Think of Winning

Lay, Back and Think of Winning by Nigel Paul

Continuing the matched betting theme we come to a book I bought around five years ago according to Amazon, which means I have probably read it at least twice before this latest viewing. Which is interesting, as I couldn’t recall much of it when I read it this latest time.

It’s subtitled “Guaranteed winning systems for the betting exchange” which makes me chuckle for a few reasons:

1. Betting exchange – singular? Yes, even back in 2005 when this book was written Betfair was the dominant exchange but it was by no means the only one. And nothing in here is specific to Betfair, at least not in terms of strategy, so would apply equally to Betdaq or any of the other smaller exchanges so why isn’t the subtitle in the plural? If the author thought the strategies worked only on Betfair, not only is he wrong but why not replace “the betting exchange” with “Betfair” in the subtitle?
2. Guaranteed – oh, really? So if I lose money you’ll give me it back will you? Pfft! Nothing is guaranteed when it comes to gambling
3. It’s just so incredibly cheesy, even more so when you look at the image on the front cover of cash literally raining down on some cheesy actor/poseur in a suit.

So what are these guaranteed strategies that will see you showered in money? And why is the money shown in the front cover image American currency when the book is aimed at the British market? Is it because the publishers have just used a standard image off the internet and didn’t really care what currency it showed as long as it was cheesy?

I’m going to give away the book’s secrets now: back at a higher price than you lay a selection for and you’ll make money. Yep, that’s about it. Nothing there that you couldn’t get for free all over the internet and common sense for gamblers anyway. If you back at horse at 10/1 and let someone else back it with you (i.e. you lay it) for 5/1 for the same stake then if the horse wins you win more from the back than you lose on the lay and if the horse loses then the stake you win from the lay covers what you lost on the back. You have, in effect, a free bet at 5/1 (or whatever the difference between your back and lay prices is). And if you vary the stakes between the back and lay you can ensure a profit whatever the result. That’s trading – and this book – in a nutshell.

The front cover promises strategies for a variety of sports, from horse racing to golf, tennis, football and cricket. What you actually get is general strategies (along the lines of back high, lay low) with specific examples from various sports including numerous Betfair screenshots to show the markets at different points to illustrate how the trade was made. All this book really has to offer is a big advert for Betfair, an overview of trading and a bit on how weight of money shifts prices about on the exchanges but you could pick all that information up for free on the internet if you Googled about a bit.

So not a great deal to recommend about this book, certainly not at the £14.99 cover price, but if you can pick up a cheap copy on Ebay or somewhere and are interested in sports trading on Betfair then it may be worth investing in a copy but otherwise I wouldn’t bother.

#49. Game, Set And Matched

Game, Set and Matched by Iain Fletcher

Let’s see if we can’t get back on track shall we? My computer has been a bit poorly sick the last couple of weeks as I picked up a malware infection and needed the help of the good people on the Geek Police forum to help clean it up. But I’m all ship-shape now and ready to catch up with the books I have read since I last updated this blog, oooh, ages ago now.

And we start with another book on sports betting, this time by former professional cricketer Iain Fletcher. This particular book focuses on betting exchanges (primarily Betfair) and follows Fletcher’s journey as he learns about the exchanges, matched betting and tries to make a profit spending a year on the exchanges.

The back cover blurb says the author was subbed £5,000 by Betfair and given a year to see what he could turn it into. Which is interesting, as nowhere in the body of the book does the author give the impression that the money is anything but his own. It makes for a more interesting read when you’re 100% behind the author in his quest for profits and to think that he’s actually playing with someone else’s cash and doesn’t have his life (OK, not literally) on the line when it comes to a mid-table rugby league match spoils the illusion somewhat. It’s odd though that the tone of the main text and the back cover blurb differ so much on whose cash Fletch is risking.

What you have, in essence, with this book is part diary and part strategy manual. There is a lot one can learn about matched betting , about the betting exchanges in general and about Betfair in particular from this book. The less you know about these subjects the more you can get from these pages but even for an old hand such as myself there are a few snippets that make it all worthwhile. But it’s also a journey through a year as a professional (sort of) gambler, seen through Fletcher’s eyes. The book mixes an interview with Betfair founder Andrew ‘Bert’ Black with advice on trading horse racing, cricket, tennis and so on. In mixing the gambling with what is going on around him Fletcher has come close to creating sports betting’s equivalent of Anthony Holden’s seminal poker work, Big Deal I suppose.

But is this book any good? It’s given me a few ideas, and shortly after reading it I was trying my hand at trading on the exchanges again, after a few vaguely successful forays into this area many years ago. However, a few days later I was running for cover with the trading long behind me as I remembered why I stopped trading all those years ago. It’s hard work for little return, basically. Your reading of markets has to be spot on and you need to be able to predict price movements with great accuracy. You also need the right tools (basic internet access and a Betfair account are not enough these days) and the right mentality. I had the tools I thought I needed (and indeed the helped) but what I didn’t have was all the right know-how to get the best out of these tools (where should I set my stop-loss? Should I be using a trailing stop-loss instead? Should I just be looking to scalp odd ticks here and there? etc.) and consequently the right mentality as I hate not knowing how to play the game perfectly. To be a successful trader you need a lot more than this book could ever teach you. But it’s a step in the right direction.

#48. Spread Betting – A Football Fan’s Guide

Spread Betting – A Football Fan’s Guide by Brett Arends

A slight move away from the fixed odds stuff now but still with the football betting theme. I used to dabble in the spreads a while back and have no plans to go back but I figured this book would have some useful ideas in and get me looking at football from a more statistical viewpoint since the spreads are all about numbers.

Do I need to explain spread betting? I suppose I’d better, just so it all makes sense later on, if need be. Spread betting rewards you with a bigger payout the more right you are in your opinion and penalises you more heavily the more wrong you are.

Suppose you think a game between Arsenal and Chelsea will have more than 11 corners. You can put a bet on with a bookie who may be offering evens on their being more than 11 corners. You put a tenner on at that price. If there are 12 corners your bet wins a tenner. If there are 18 corners you win a tenner. If there are 10 corners you lose a tenner. If there are 4 corners you lose your tenner. All very simple.

But with the spreads it’s a bit more complex. The spread firms may quote the number of corners in the game as 10.5-11.0 so if you think there will be more than 11 corners you buy at 11.0. Let’s say you buy for £10 a corner. If there are 12 corners you win a tenner as there was one more corner than the price at which you bought. If there are 18 corners you win £70. But if there are 10 corners you lose a tenner and in the case of 4 corners you lose £70 as there were seven fewer corners than the price you bought at.

You could also have sold at 10.5 in the above example in which case you’re predicting the resulting number of corners will be less than that figure – the fewer corners are taken the more cash you make.

That, in a nutshell, is spread betting. And now the book, which is where I started several paragraphs back.

It starts by explaining what spread betting is (as I have just done) and outlines the major markets (which I couldn’t be arsed to do as this is not a blog about spread betting). All very informative and interesting I suppose, if you don’t already know it. The author then goes on to talk about trading each of these markets, starting with the goal-based markets before moving on to cards (bookings), corners, shirt numbers and the more esoteric markets such as the indices and the hot-shots markets.

There’s some useful information in these pages (and at 200 of them for under six quid it’s much better value than the previous book) for budding football spread bettors but these days it’s probably all a bit out of date. Pointing out that players such as Freddie Ljungberg often pop with a goal for Arsenal so are good value on the goal minutes is all well and good but for the fact the information is now eight years out of date and useless. I suppose one can apply the principle still, if players fulfilling a similar role for other sides can be identified. Similarly, the discussions (and tables of data in the appendix) on home advantages for top-flight teams around Europe is only any good at the time it was written as teams change. I bet Southampton’s home advantage isn’t 0.19 goals these days, but it was back in 2002 apparently.

Read between the lines and take away the general message rather than the specifics and this is a useful little book. It served its purpose anyway as it got me thinking about a few angles on the goal stats that I had been working on that I had previously overlooked, and that’s really all I was after from it. As I said, my spread betting days are (probably) all behind me now but this was still a useful little re-read.

#47. The Football Betting Science

The Football Betting Science by Gary Christie

Come on, this is taking me far too long isn’t it? I still have a pile of more than half a dozen books on my desk that I have read but not added to this blog. The pile has become something of a feature that I will miss when it’s gone but I owe it to you to keep you up to date, and I read some of these books two or three weeks back. So let’s gone on with it and see if I can’t rattle through two or three of them now shall we?

Fortunately this first one shouldn’t take too long, and in reviewing it I will probably write as many words as there are in the book itself. Less than 100 pages of 12 and 16 point text for a tenner – a bit of a con this one, to be honest. It might be OK to pay that sort of price for what is little more than a pamphlet if the information inside were any good but it’s not really.

The author is, according to his blurb, a “successful horse-racing gambler” who has “turned his attention to the rapidly growing football betting market” and also a “professional sports writer”. It’s a good job he’s a successful gambler because his writing is crap! Still, he managed to find someone to publish this pap so fair play to him on that front I suppose.

So what’s wrong with this book then? The title for a start: “The Football Betting Science“, which implies the contents will teach you techniques you can apply to help with your football betting rather than just being an airy-fairy load of old toss. Oh. Arbitrarily rating players as being of international-class or world-class and assigning teams points based on how many of each type of player they have doesn’t count as science to me, not least because the classification of the players is incredibly subjective.

A match between Blackburn and Aston Villa from March 2006 is given as an example. The author classes Blackburn’s Friedel, Pedersen and Bellamy as international class which are worth a point each but found no such players in the Villa side. The starting XI that day included Thomas Sorensen, Gareth Barry and Milan Baros. The same Baros who won the golden boot at Euro 2004 – but he’s not international class? See what I mean about it being subjective? He does find a few players on each side who are playing well as a unit so they get points, two each side as it happens. And still within this group of ‘also-rans’ Christie doesn’t see fit to mention quality players such as Barry and Baros. I really don’t get it. He also thinks Blackburn’s togetherness and coaching is superior to that of Villa so that’s worth another point, as is home advantage making it 7-2 to Blackburn on the points front. It’s this that the author uses to set his staking so it’s rather important to get it right one would have thought.

Perhaps it’s just differing opinions and me not agreeing in the slightest with the author’s assessment of the two teams but opinions shouldn’t have a place in scientific method.

And this is not the only point at which I disagree with the author. He suggests never betting on the draw, the argument being that you may research a game and come to the conclusion that it could be a draw in which case you should avoid the game completely. Don’t talk cock! If you look at any game you can make a case for it being a draw but what matters most is the chance of each result occurring (in your opinion or according to your calculations) and how that compares to the odds on offer. Christie goes on to back up his position on the draws with some evidence – from a massive seven games in which he would have made a slight loss backing the draw. Seven games – steady on with that huge sample there, Gary. Where’s the science is using such a small number of games to ‘prove’ a point?

And it gets worse. The law of averages gets mangled and misunderstood, tantamount to a crime in a gambling book. Advice is given and then openly ignored (e.g. employing multiple bets, checklists etc) when the author describes what he actually does. It’s a case of ‘do as I say, not as I do’.

Oh, this book’s just crap and a waste of money. Don’t bother with it.

Hmm, that’s over 750 words so as I said earlier, almost as long as the book itself.

#46. Gambling On Goals

Gambling on Goals by Graham Sharpe

I’ve got a few spare minutes in my busy schedule so let’s see if we can’t knock at least one title off the pile of books on my desk that are waiting to be blogged. And we start with a book by William Hill’s PR man, Graham Sharpe. This is the fella you hear from in the papers when someone wants to bet on their kid to play for England in the next 20 years or when some nutter wants a tenner on Elvis winning the Grand National on Shergar. Y’know, all the silly bets that bookies don’t have any idea about but Sharpe is the man from William Hill who will always quote you a price.

And he’s written a book. He wrote it over 10 years ago in fact and it’s supposedly about a football betting through the years. And in some respects it is but in many ways it’s typical of what one would expect from a PR man as a lot of it is about punters who have got big payouts from small stakes. Barely an opportunity to promote a bet is passed up, although to be fair Sharpe does cover big winners with other firms and even with the pools companies too so it’s not entirely a promotional vehicle for William Hill.

A lot of the book is crap and can be ignored, or at least taken with a big pinch of salt. We know people win big with stupid accumulators – and that when it happens the bookies love to crow about it in a “look how much we’ve had to pay out to some lucky so-and-so” sort of way so that it gets media coverage and more mugs put their money down trying to repeat the feat but end up doing little more than lining the bookmakers’ pockets. Because we know it happens there is hardly a book in it but that doesn’t stop Sharpe trying, for somewhere around half the pages anyway.

The first half of the book is quite interesting though, in a weird way. It’s a history of football betting and how various firms adopted it and how it evolved, plus how it was seen to affect the game of football itself. We learn of rigged matches and dodgy ways bookies used to avoid the law in this country. And in doing so we see the origins of the laws that banned one from betting in singles on football, unless a match was televised. Of course these archaic rules are long gone now and thus the book seems very dated but if you can remember the ‘good old days’ when football betting involved trebles at a minimum, unless you included a home win in which case it was fivefolds or greater, then you may wish to read about how these rules came about.

This book isn’t going to teach you how to win a penny. It’s for information only really and probably has a pretty small target audience, truth be told. I only picked up a copy because it was a couple of quid on Ebay a few years back (and this was the second time I’d read it) and at the time I was commuting to and from work so needed books to read on the train. But as I said before, one soon tires of “punter wins big from small stakes” stories and even the odd “punter cocks up but still wins” and “punter just misses out on big payday” story don’t really make things much more interesting. I enjoyed reading the history of football betting and the old attempts to fix matches but I shan’t be rushing to pull this volume back off the bookshelves in the future.

#45. Football Betting To Win

Football Betting to Win by Jacques Black

Because who’d buy a book called Football Betting To Lose or Football Betting To Do Alright, I Guess.

This book was published in 2000 and now seems quite dated. 2000 doesn’t seem that long ago but it was 10 years back and while in many areas of life that may not be a long time it is in the world of modern gambling. Betting tax has been abolished, online gambling has really taken off, the betting exchanges have come along and us punters can now bet in singles if we do desire (which we do, trust me). Football betting is now a world apart from the scene that was around when this book was written so we need to take that into account.

The book opens with an account of England v Germany in the Euro 2000 championships, including the jingoistic press coverage so how apt that I should be reading this when I did, around the time England got humiliated 4-1 by Germany at the 2010 World Cup. It’s a while before the author (who is writing under a pseudonym that makes me think of School of Rock and Tropic Thunder) gets to what I would call the good stuff. He explains the history of bookmaking, pool betting (e.g. the Tote) and spread betting along with a bit on arbitrage before getting down the meat of things. And by that I mean the chapters on forecasting results and developing ratings systems and how one can measure success (and it may surprise some of you to learn that it’s not all about how much money you make).

When it comes to predicting who will win a given match the author looks at differences in goal-scoring rates as well as recent form and points accumulation. Ratings based on these factors are plotted against actual results with best-fit lines drawn and correlation coefficients drawn to show the effect each variable has on things. This the good stuff, and probably the best bit of the book even though it’s somewhat sketchy on detail and only a few pages long. But it lays the foundations for my work into optimising ratings, when I eventually get round to it. It reminded me of what I should be doing (I have tried to go down this route before but gave up long before I got there) and how. And what’s more it was all in print several years before Pullein put his vague methods into that disappointing book of his.

Overall the book is pretty light on decent content for experienced gamblers but it certainly set a few synapses firing and stirred up a few ideas that had laid dormant in my head for a few years since I first read this book. And now I am going to take a break from blogging to investigate a couple of those ideas while they are still warm…