Shireen Vakil
Shireen's question is the one people ask last: over a season, what does this cost? A single bet can win. A hundred bets at the same kind of price have an average, and the average is something you can work out in advance.
Before the first ball
The stake desk
The page on winning at cricket betting is hers, and it deliberately starts with arithmetic rather than advice. Sixty bets of ₹500 each, a five per cent margin, and a figure at the end — about ₹1,500 — that most readers had never seen written down. She thinks a person who has seen that figure bets differently from one who has not, whatever else they believe about the game.
She also checked the figures on the welcome pack page, which she reads the same way: not as a percentage on a deposit but as a number of rupees that has to pass through a market with a margin, inside a fixed number of days.
Before the first ball
The ledger
She keeps a ledger of every bet she has ever written about as an example, with the price, the stake and the break-even rate beside it. It is not a record of winning. It is a record of what each example assumed, so that any page quoting one can be checked against the original.
Before the first ball
What she will not do
Describe betting as a way to earn money. Suggest raising stakes after a loss. Call anything a system. If a reader wants to know whether they have an edge, the answer she gives is always the same: keep a record for fifty bets and compare it with the break-even column.
