mathare's gamblog

[mathare]

5th October 2009
I have decided to resurrect my gamblog and figured that here is as good a place as any in the forum for it to reside. Now that I have given up poker (at least for now, see my poker diary (http://www.win2win.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?p=511971#post511971) for details) I need somewhere to keep all my thoughts and so on. I find that keeping some sort of diary/blog really helps me focus my thoughts. I get so much more out of something when I write things down. Putting things into words such that others may understand them too helps me understand them a lot better; I am forced into unravelling uncertainties so that it all becomes clear in my mind. Hopefully there will be odd snippets in here that will be of interest to at least some of you.

For those of you that don't know me or my circumstances that well let me start with a brief introduction. I came to gambling 6 or 7 years ago with a keen analytical mind and that's the approach I have tried to continue ever since. I barely know one end of a horse from the other but knowing I am a gambler I still get friends asking me for racing tips. That's not my specialist subject at all. I'm more the type of person to analyse stats and staking plans to try and get that extra little bit out of a system. I couldn't design or build you a car but I could retune the engine to make a car more powerful if you want an analogy for what I do. I gave up my job as a software test manager back in August due to a combination of ill health (which continues to dog me to this day but which I don't plan to discuss here) and boredom/frustration. I am currently unemployed with gambling as my only source of income so if that makes me a professional gambler then that's what I am. However, what I make from gambling isn't anything like a living as I am still a small stakes punter. I experience daily swings of about £100 meaning a good day can see me win around £100 and a bad day can see me lose that sort of amount. I am trying to build the banks and increase the stakes to increase the income from gambling but I am naturally risk-averse and prefer banks to grow organically rather than being artifically boosted as I always fear that when I boost a bank and increase the stakes a losing run will wipe out the profits I had previously accumulated. However, I am starting to recognise that you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs and am preparing to start taking a few more (controlled) risks to build the banks I use for the systems I follow.

My betting portfolio at the time of writing consists of:
5 x flat win systems
2 x flat lay systems
7 x NH win systems
2 x NH lay systems
4 x mixed racing code win systems/methods
5 x mixed racing code lay systems
7 x football systems
1 x darts system
1 x NFL system
2 x general sports systems
I have dabbled in spread bets, trades, poker, dutching, multiples, exchange games and casino games over the years but these have all been dropped from the portfolio at this stage. I plan to reintroduce poker to the portfolio at some point in the future but I'm not sure when although it won't be for a while yet.

I am the type of person who picks up a nugget of an idea and runs with it for a while until something more interesting comes along. While working on something though it becomes almost like an obsession for me but my hard drive is littered with half-completed ideas and projects I have been working on over the years. I'd like to revisit some of those if I can as often they are good ideas that I just haven't see through far enough to reap the benefits of. Knowing this weakness of mine I tend to have plans that I try to stick to but often revise on a regular basis. I rarely put dates or deadlines on these plans as I don't like to put pressure on myself, and I know there is little point as I will often change my mind and the plan long before any of the tasks on that plan are due. You'll probably see throughout this thread my plans changing left, right and centre but I'd like to think I won't change them too much as I know some of the things I am planning are great ideas that I should see through.

As an unemployed bum I need a source of income that isn't my girlfriend's salary. Any money I win from gambling stays in my betting banks so I am not drawing an income from that. This isn't so much of a problem at the minute as I don't actually have all my betting banks in my bookies/exchange accounts - quite a bit of it sits in my current account and I spend it as necessary. But as far as I and my betting spreadsheet are concerned the betting banks are all present and correct and I can call on them at any time I need to. But it is better that the 'float', the portion of a betting bank that isn't invested on a regular basis, sits in my current account earning me a few pence in interest rather than being lodged with a bookmaker where it is earning him interest. Anyway, I am trying to get to the point where my betting banks are such that I can keep them pretty much constant (or growing slowly) and use them as capital which effectively earns me an income from being invested (gambled). I want to be able to make a proper income from gambling and to do that I need bigger banks, successful systems and a balanced portfolio.

Why a balanced portfolio? I'm sure you know the saying about having all your eggs in one basket and gambling can be like that too. Sometimes the NH form just goes out the window and your NH systems won't hit a winner regardless of how much you pray for one so it is important that you have other systems you can rely on to see you through these bad times. I picked NH as an example there but the same applies to flat racing, football and so on. Balance is important so that if performance in one area drops off other systems can pick up the slack. I admit now that I don't know a lot about balancing a portfolio. I think I have the mix of horse racing systems about right but there is room for one or two more win systems as I have quite a lot of lay systems and they tend to lead to regular small profits punctuated by some killer losses at times so lay banks rise steadily and undramatically. It's win systems that provide the big winners and the large jumps in bank balances so I am looking to add some more of those to the mix at some point.

I have 25 horse racing systems and 11 other sports systems. I like racing systems as there is racing every day so there is always something to bet on, which isn't always the case with football unless the systems you have cover lots of obscure leagues, which mine don't. But there is English football on most days - certainly 3 or 4 days most weeks so there are plenty of opportunties for bets to be struck there and this is an area I plan to focus on initially. I am good with stats and numbers and feel confident that I can find a few profitable football systems that I can add to my portfolio so that is where I plan to start. I have a lot of data to work with a a lot of ideas on what to do with that data. There is an international weekend coming up in the football calendar so my short-term aim is to have a profitable Premiership football system ready to go by the time the Premiership starts up again after that international break.

In my mind I have rough parts of a short-term, medium-term and long-term plan developing but as I don't have timescales for any of these plans I can't really say what is short-term, what constitutes medium-term and how long long-term really is. As an aide memoire and a line in the sand though I will say my plans currently include the following:
football systems (short-term to medium-term)
portfolio balancing (short-term to medium-term)
poker (medium-term)
horse racing system development (long-term)
greyhound systems (long-term)
forex trading (long-term)Those last couple of items on that list may never come to anything but they are potential revenue streams I have considered in the past and ones I would (probably) like to investigate in the future, even if it is just to rule them out as not being suitable for me.

So there we have it. The start of a very open, very honest gamblog. I plan to update this on a regular basis with news of my progress to date and any changes to my plans for the future. Feel free to chip in with any comments or thoughts at any stage and to ask any questions. I will do my best to respond in a timely manner and to help out where I can. But right now I'm going to start crunching football data...

[MattR]

Best of luck with this Mat, hpoe it goes really well for you. I'm sure with your statistical nous and excel skills that you'll be able to come up with some profitable football systems too.

Are the football systems you are currently running profitable? I've looked at a few over the years but most of them seemed to be fairly obvious ideas. I've used the football data site to work on ideas in the past as well. I keep meaning to get back onto my ht/ft idea as well as that showed promise but with one thing and another haven't had time to yet. That really does seem a market that is based on the match odds rather than recent results and scoring trends and as such I think is one that could be open to a good system. The main problem I had was deciding what to go with, best value, most likley outcome, dutch lowest two odds, etc etc.

[mathare]

Best of luck with this Mat, hpoe it goes really well for you. I'm sure with your statistical nous and excel skills that you'll be able to come up with some profitable football systems too. Thanks. Although I am experiencing a very slow start to things at present. I had some great ideas for under/over systems but they aren't turning out too well just yet, which is disappointing.


Are the football systems you are currently running profitable? Absolutely! Some of them are tipster services more than systems I suppose but they are profitable. There are some systems in there too, one running at around 29% ROI in fact but it's only good for the first half of the season really. It was designed for the Premiership but I have extended it to the SPL this year as a trial with small stakes and while it is still early days really it is currently running at a ROI of 41%.

[mathare]

6th October 2009
Progress with the football systems has been mixed shall we say. I have been focusing on a single aspect of football betting (under/over 2.5 goals) to start with and have been crunching the numbers for the Premiership in the quest for a profitable system. Have I found one? I've actually found a few but they are barely profitable and I am looking at ways to increase the ROI even if that means reducing the number of bets slightly. For example this afternoon I found a system that prduced just under 25pts of profit from 1009 bets, a ROI of 2.44%. That's a good number of bets bearing in mind I have the required odds for 2713 games so there's a bet in 37% of games - 3 or 4 each weekend in other words. A manageable workload but a disappointing ROI. I haven't set a target minimum ROI or got one in mind but to me that one slips under the minimum. It's a lot of work for a return of just 2.44%. And those 25pts were acheived over around seven and a half seasons. A system that produces just 3pts profit per season (on average) isn't worth much is it? Still, it's a start and work in this area continues.

One thing I will say that horse racing has over football as a betting medium, other than the frequency of events in the sport, is racing has an SP. Football has more markets that horse racing but no SP. This evening while walking into town to pick my missus up from work and go shopping for tea I had a cracking idea for a clean sheet system but I don't have any odds recorded for teams to keep clean sheets in past matches, and without an SP (or some form of odds archive) I won't be able to get those odds. I have archives of past match result odds and some under/over odds but little else so it is these markets I need to focus on. I may develop systems for other markets but if I do they will need to be paper-tested as back testing won't be possible due to the odds. Ho hum. Perhaps I should try harder to understand horse racing and analyse that data more instead. But no, I said I'd aim for a profitable football system and that's still the plan. The system I have found at present is a start but it doesn't count really as I wouldn't bother with it due to the low ROI. I want something I can usefully add to my portfolio.

[MattR]

Mat, a thought on getting or at least approximating your clean sheet odds so you could back test it. Are you using goals for/aga as a basis for your under/over system ideas? If so could you not got the correct scores also and from this all the 1-0, 2-0's etc to get odds for a clean sheet. Then you could also get match odds from the correct scores and then get rough guide of what the clean sheet odds would be when corresponded to a certain odds range. Then with that you could maybe back test it. It won't be a hundred percent accurate of course because some winning teams concede some don't, like Arsenal compared to Chelsea for example but you could take the lower odds and test with that.

[mathare]

I'll be honest here Matt and say I'm not really sure what you're suggesting.

In order to properly back test a system I need the actual odds that were available for the bet at that time. This is easy with the horses as the SP is recorded with the results but nowhere I know of records the odds for Chelsea (or whoever) to keep a clean sheet in every game they have played over the past few seasons. As I said before I have a few seasons worth of over/under odds and around 8 years worth of match odds from several different bookies so I am focusing on those markets. It's fine for now. I can think more about the other markets at a later date and try to work out how best to test any systems I devise. I can work out value odds for each system and then get a rough idea of whether it would be profitable from that.

[MattR]

I must admit it didn't read back very well :laugh

Ok, I'll try to explain better what I mean.

Are you using for/against goals to produce odds for unders/overs for the system you were working on? If so you could get odds for correct scores and therefore also odds for a clean sheet.

So...

Let's say for arguements sake your clean sheet idea involves home teams who are generally around 1.20-1.40 to win the match.

If you run through upcoming games over the next week or so that fall into the category you are looking at you could get some data on what the clean sheet probabilities are for those games. If they generally fall into the same smallish range of odds then you could use that to backtest.

This depends of course if the match odds are relevant to your clean sheet idea though.

[mathare]

Are you using for/against goals to produce odds for unders/overs for the system you were working on? If so you could get odds for correct scores and therefore also odds for a clean sheet. I am looking at goals for/against (partly), yes. But I don't see how that then leads to the odds for correct score and clean sheet odds. I can calculate value odds for each score and thus clean sheets but I don't have any actual odds against which to test the system. If Arsenal win 10% of their home games 3-0 then one could say you want odds of greater than 9/1 to back that scoreline but what I don't have is anyway of telling how often such a scoreline is on offer.


This depends of course if the match odds are relevant to your clean sheet idea though.Ah, they're not. At least not initially.

[mathare]

7th October 2009
I have been playing with the system ideas I had yesterday, in particularly those that looked marginally profitable, to see if I can improve on them and I thought I was getting somewhere. Just over 30pts profif from around 600 bets - still not great but better. The graph was looking promising too, a rocky start but then the trend was very much upwards. So I threw this season's data in to see how that would perform under the same test conditions - argh! A loss of 13.23pts from just 42 bets - that's BAD!

I have tried tinkering with all sorts of variables on the system but nothing I do to it seems to make a significant amount of difference. As with all systems it is a case of trying to balance profit, ROI, number of bets and the complexity of obtaining the selections in the first place. The rules need to make sense too. For example, I can improve the profitability of the system by ignoring Arsenal, Man City and Sunderland home games but why should I? What sense does that make? What makes those team different to the others? I am looking at general trends and why should those three teams buck that trend? There is nothing significant that means they shouldn't follow the same rules as all other teams so what I am seeing is just a statistical blip - something that shouldn't influence the rules in any way.

So my best system at present has a ROI of 2.57% and produces 16.91 profits in four and a half seasons. Not good enough to be worth bothering with really. I have ruled out lots of ideas in doing this exercise though, which is always useful.

Hmm, just as I was writing that I had another thought and have found a tweak that improves the profit to 31.7pts over 479 bets for a ROI of 6.62% - that's better. It's still only an average of 7pts a season or so but it's better. The thing is that 05-06, 07-08 and 08-09 are profitable, a small loss is made in 06-07 and this season (09-10) still shows a significant loss - just over 6pts so far - so I can't shove this system live into my portfolio right away because I simply don't know if this season is a blip or a change in the trends. It needs paper trading for a while, perhaps the rest of the season to see what happens and also to bring some live odds into the equation. I'd better set about creating a spreadsheet to pick out the qualifiers nice and easily...

[MattR]

Mat, can I ask where youre getting your data from. Is it football-data?

[mathare]

Mat, can I ask where youre getting your data from. Is it football-data?Sure is

[Ada]

Hi Mat,

I too am trying to come up with a couple of reliable & profitable football systems.

I am/have been working on an 'over 2.5' goals system which I originally put together early this year, & to my surprise churned out a small profit by the end of last season.
It's strike rate was a bit erratic though.......I'd get 5 or 6 winners on the trot, making me think it was a brilliant system......& then get a losing run of about the same if not more, thus prompting me to start tweaking it, but not actually improving it at all.
It was mainly based on goals for/against, recent home/away form & previous meetings of the teams involved.
It's still a major work-in-progress project as I just can't achieve a consistent strikerate/performance with it.

I rely on data from numerous sites......obviously they all provide the SAME data......they just display/present it in varying degrees of 'easy reading'.
Maybe I need to be a bit more selective of the data I use as I tend to spend ages crunching numbers from countless sites & invariably come up with the same end-result.....a LOT of effort all for very little, if any, monetary reward at the end.

Another system I'm looking at, basically, is to be able to (correctly) predict half-time results, ie Win or Draw.....NOT actual scores.
If I can get this bit consistently right then a couple of 'insurance' bets at low stakes ensures a profit on the game regardless of what happens in the second half of the game.
Again, towards the end of last season, based on match odds rather than form, goals etc., it seemed to work quite well.
Different story this season so far......extremely erratic success rate causing a small loss thus far.
I know the % of matches at the end of the first half which sees the teams drawing is higher than one team winning.......but I just can't seem to grind out a system that provides even a modest return.......all part of gambling......I know.

I would love to make my football betting more successful.....so....

......any guidance would be greatly appreciated.

(By the way, due to my failings in the world of football betting is a major reason I'm not playing the Football Result Prediction Game. :) )

:thumbs

[mathare]

I too am trying to come up with a couple of reliable & profitable football systems.And you've come to me for help -pressure's on now :yikes: :laugh


I am/have been working on an 'over 2.5' goals system which I originally put together early this year, & to my surprise churned out a small profit by the end of last season. I'll be honest and say that surprises me too, not that you of all people have found a (potentially) profitable system but that it's an over 2.5 goals system as all the profitable systems I have found over the past few days (and they have only really been marginally profitable) are for unders rather than overs. I did some thinking about why this was and think there's actually a full article in it so I won't go in to too much detail here as I will post up my thoughts elsewhere on the forum if that's OK.


It's strike rate was a bit erratic though.......I'd get 5 or 6 winners on the trot, making me think it was a brilliant system......& then get a losing run of about the same if not more, thus prompting me to start tweaking it, but not actually improving it at all.How did you develop the system in the first place? How much data from the past have you used and what have you tried to do with it (in general terms if you'd prefer)? What I am trying to get at is why it needs tweaking as more data becomes available.

Take a system I have been toying with as an example. I look at the number of times a team has had a game go under 2.5 goals and the number of times their games have gone over 2.5 goals and use those figures to derive value odds for each outcome. I can then compare these to the actual odds on offer and decide whether to bet or not. The more back data I have the more accurate the value odds can become (unless for some reason a team has a major change in playing style, which can happen under some managers admittedly) so there is no need to tweak the rules in the future. I have what I consider to be value odds for each outcome and then it's just a case of seeing whether those odds can be bettered or not - no tweaking required.


I rely on data from numerous sites......obviously they all provide the SAME data......they just display/present it in varying degrees of 'easy reading'.
Maybe I need to be a bit more selective of the data I use as I tend to spend ages crunching numbers from countless sites & invariably come up with the same end-result.....a LOT of effort all for very little, if any, monetary reward at the end.What sites are you using and for what data? The one MattR mentioned earlier (www.football-data.co.uk) is brilliant for loads of data. It doesn't have goal minutes recorded or anything but it does have all the FT and HT results plus odds and various other things going back several years. It's possibly the nearest football has to things like the data in the Raceform or ProForm databases.


Another system I'm looking at, basically, is to be able to (correctly) predict half-time results, ie Win or Draw.....NOT actual scores.
Again, towards the end of last season, based on match odds rather than form, goals etc., it seemed to work quite well.
Different story this season so far......extremely erratic success rate causing a small loss thus far.I have found that this season has thrown a lot of the systems I have looked at way off kilter. Consistent profits to the end of last season and then chaos this year - I don't really know why. This season has seen more goals than normal and fewer draws but is that really enough to cause the systems to go crazy?


I would love to make my football betting more successful.....so....

......any guidance would be greatly appreciated.If I can be any help I will try. Have you read Paul Steele's book (Profitable Football Betting I think it is called)? It's outdated now but highlights some interesting angles that I have tinkered with in the past.


(By the way, due to my failings in the world of football betting is a major reason I'm not playing the Football Result Prediction Game. :) )So you've picked the person at the bottom of the league table for said game to help :splapme:laugh

[MattR]

Mat, just remembered another useful site I came across. You do have to register and pay to get full access to it but you can check it out for free and run any of the parameters but you can only used data from scottish division 1 from 2000 to march 2009. It's pretty handy for testing theories on. I did subscribe a year or so ago now and it was useful but I didn't have time to use it too much at that time so i let the subscription drop. It's £10 for 3 months or £30 for the year.


The site is studysoccer

[mathare]

7th October 2009 (part two)
Interesting. I seem to have stumbled across a simple system for under/over 2.5 goals that works well for the Championship even though it didn't work for the Premiership. Hmmm.

The system is showing stats of 1920 bets, 963 winners and a profit of 115.84pts (ROI of 6.03%). Now 115pts profit over four seasons is worth bothering with. But how does it look for this season? Add that data in and the profit decreases to 102.01pts, i.e a loss of 13.83pts so far this season. The graphs don't show an obvious downturn over the past couple of seasons so this could potentially be nothing more than just a natural variation in the system but it is enough to set a few alarm bells ringing and for me to put the system on a paper trade watch for a while to see how it goes in the real world. But it's promising all the same

[mathare]

Mat, just remembered another useful site I came across. You do have to register and pay to get full access to it but you can check it out for free and run any of the parameters but you can only used data from scottish division 1 from 2000 to march 2009. It's pretty handy for testing theories on.Thanks Matt, I'll check it out :thumbs

[MattR]

Mat, something just crossed my mind that would be interesting to see if it pans out as the under/over 2.5 does. What about 3.5 goals? Should be easy enough to get the 3.5 odds as they'll no doubt correlate to what they are on 2.5, so a quick check on betfair/daq should mean you can back check that with your data.

[mathare]

Mat, something just crossed my mind that would be interesting to see if it pans out as the under/over 2.5 does. What about 3.5 goals? Should be easy enough to get the 3.5 odds as they'll no doubt correlate to what they are on 2.5, so a quick check on betfair/daq should mean you can back check that with your data.I can get current and future 3.5 goals odds but once again I don't have odds for past matches so can't back test. Also the 3.5 goals markets are limited to the exchanges so the competition for prices is less (and the markets are low liquidity) whereas the 2.5 goals markets are priced up my pretty much every bookmaker in the land so there is scope for competition on the prices

[crazybadger]

I have 3 football systems that I ran for around the last 1/2 to 1/3 of last season that were profitable. These were based on finding value in different markets (Half Time, Full Time and HT/FT). I havent started them this season as they use stats from the current season only so need a few games played first. I'm hoping the still stand up even with the more active season we're seeing.

Using the data from football-data.co.uk I also came up with a Half-Time lay system this season. I posted here in test mode for a bit but forget to update when I got too busy. It was simple - take the favourite from the FT market and lay them in the HT market as my previous stats said they only are leading at HT ~ 35%. Last update here it was +2.25pts but the following weekends were vey good with lots of favourites going down so it would have gone up a fair bit.

Finally with a little smart excel work (or write a little extraction program) you can find the odds for any betfair market in the past. Check out data.betfair.com. You can download spreadsheets of all markets which have every price that every runner was matched at and the 1st an last time these prices were matched. Very nice for back testing. :wink

[mathare]

8th October 2009
I realised last night that I have made a few fundamental errors in calculating the figures for the systems I have been looking at and will need to revisit them. In short I have been using the wrong odds - I was using the maximum available odds for each bet so what I was actually looking at was a best case scenario. What I should have done instead is use the average available odds to get a more representative profit/loss figure. I ran a quick test last night to see what difference it makes and it is quite significant. The average maximum odds figure is around 0.1 bigger than the average average odds figure, quite a difference when you're dealing with bets around evens.

The odds figures I use have come from Bet Brain which uses 30+ bookies. I reckon this means that the max odds are likely to be from some of the more obscure European bookies rather than the mainstream UK bookies I tend to use, and that's why I need to re-evaluate the systems using the average odds. I reckon I should be able to beat the average odds in the long run but am not sure I will always get the maximum odds so it doesn't make sense to base a system (and my expectations of its performance) on odds I won't be able to acheive long term.

I'll be working on the systems again this morning - I will let you know what sort of difference the change on in odds makes.

[mathare]

8th October 2009 (part two)
I definitely jumped the gun with news of these under/over 2.5 goals systems as they are nowhere near ready to go live. They might not even work yet, I haven't done anywhere near enough investigation to prove they are worthy of even paper testing. I have sat and had a think about what I am trying to achieve and how to go about it. I now know what needs to be done and have set about some further work on the lower leagues as they are playing this weekend and there is an outside chance I could have some system qualifiers to paper trade this weekend. I'm not holding out much hope for that although I have this morning recorded under/over odds for all League 1 and League 2 games being played this weekend so that I can start to check back how the systems would have performed on real odds that I can verify.

I have also been thinking a bit more about why some of these ideas seem to work for the lower leagues but not the Premiership. I reckon the Premiership is effectively a solved puzzle as far as the odds compilers are concerned. There is little that is not know about the Premiership teams and players. Various stats services maintain all sorts of information archives - I was sent some info the other day proving that Alan Wiley displayed excellent fitness and performance in the recent Man Utd game despite what Sir Alex Ferguson claimed - and the bookies will no doubt have access to these. The Premiership is perhaps the best league in the world and I would be amazed if it wasn't the backbone of most bookies's football betting operations in this country at least. I don't know how much more is gambled on the Premiership than the other leagues but you can bet your bottom dollar that more work will go into the Premiership markets than those for the lower leagues. It's best to get your prices right in markets that will see a lot of turnover but if you're slightly out in a low liquidity market then it won't matter too much. And that's what I think is happening in the lower leagues. The Premiership under/over markets are so well researched that there is little value to be found but further down the league pyramid that's not necessarily the case meaning there may be prices we can exploit if we are prepared to dig down in to the lower leagues, which I most certainly am.

I hope to be able to report back in the next couple of days with some real news about potential systems for under/over 2.5 goals

[mathare]

10th October 2009
I'm slightly hesitant about saying this but I think I have found an acceptable under/overs system for League Two. I'm still tinkering slightly with slight modifications to the rules to improve the ROI but I am basically there. I hope to go through the same sort of steps for League One and the Championship later before trying the Premiership one more time just to make sure I had the numbers right before.

The systems I am looking for have to meet certain criteria. None of these are hard and fast rules for me selecting a system but I am looking for it to produce a decent number of bets per season (at least 100) along with a suitable profit level (~10pts per season) and not rely on longshots which means it needs a good SR. Obviously with under/over systems that last criterion is met automatically as you don't get longshots with under/over markets so if the other two criteria are met then the SR will also be acceptable. It's also important that the profits seem to accumulate steadily, i.e. a graph of the profits against time (or bet number) shows a steadily increasing trend rather than an erratic up-down sort of trend. I think I have a system that meets all those standards but I will continue to tinker and investigate to double check. Either way, I have already checked and it doesn't select anything for League Two today.

More details as I have them

[mathare]

11th October 2009
My hesitancy yesterday was justified for while I have found a League Two unders/overs system that on the surface of it seems quite good, a little digging shows worrying aspects to the figures.

Since the start of the 05-06 season (which is as far back as I have suitable data) the system has generated 31.94pts of profit to average odds and 64.25pts of profit to maximum odds. If we assume I can beat the average odds (which ought to be possible with a bit of shopping around) but not achieve the maximum odds in all cases (they could be with obscure European bookies after all) then we're looking at around 40pts profit over 4 seasons so meets my profit level criteria. Depending on exactly which set of odds we use (average or maximum) we're looking at around 600 bets so approximately 150 a season and a ROI around 6%. Sounds good so far, right? But let's break these numbers down on a per season basis, using average odds as the kinda worst case scenario. Now we see virtually all the profit came from one freakish season (06-07) which generated over 31pts of profit with the other seasons pretty much breakeven. Not so good now is it? This trend isn't apparent from the graphs though. I have attached the relevant graph for this system showing the profit to max odds in red and to average odds in blue and the trends seem upwards. You can't see that one season is doing all the work from that.

So where does that leave us? It actually leaves us where I expected to be - with a candidate system that would benefit from some live paper trading on this forum. So that's what I will do. I will post qualifiers as they crop up and maintain a profit/loss figure (along with other suitable summary data) and take another look at the end of this year (not season) to see how things are going before deciding whether or not to add this system to my portfolio.

[mathare]

12th October 2009
Over the weekend I did all sorts of number crunching and analysis of League Two data and pulled out a potentially promising under/overs system that I said I will paper trade live on the forum. I have just completed the same sort of analysis for data from League One and have come up with a couple more systems of interest.

The first system, which is known as 1a (30) at present but will no doubt be rebranded at some point, produced 25.26pts of profit over four seasons when settled to average odds and 57.44pts when settled to maximum odds. I did a quick check this morning and by shopping around on Oddschecker (which covers most of the bookies I have accounts with) I am able to get prices that in general beat the average odds but aren't always up to the maximum odds (as I suspected) so the average odds case is basically a worst case scenario for me. So if we assume I will hit a middle ground I am looking at something like 40pts profit which averages out to the 10pts a season I was looking for. The ROI should be over 5% too, with probably around 650 bets in that period (the average odds produced 524, the max odds produced 813) so I am good on both of those measures too. The only slight concern is again the seasonal breakdown of those figures, as it was for the League Two system. This time three seasons are profitable with 07-08 resulting in a loss of 16.34pts. 05-06 generates a lot of the profit weighing in with 20.34pts (a ROI of 26.08%) but 08-09 shows an excellent recovery from the 07-08 disaster with a profit of 12.91pts (8.84% ROI). So it could be one of those systems that when it's good it's very good and when it's bad it's very bad. And that's sort of what the graph of the profits for this system shows. Again, profits to max odds in red and to average odds in blue. The drop off during 07-08 and the subsequent recovery are very obvious in the average odds line. This is one to monitor so I will paper trade this one live till at least the end of the year and see where we go from there.

The other system has an equally catchy name - 3a (50), but again that will change in time. To average odds this produced 23.54pts of profit from 439 bets over four seasons giving a ROI of 5.36%. If we look at the maximum odds we see figures of 75.53pts profit from 746 bets or a ROI of 10.12%. I'd day we're looking at around 50pts on average here from maybe 600 or so bets, perhaps fewer so a ROI of around 7-8%, which is just what I was after. And better than all of that is the fact that the profits from this system are pretty consistent (despite what the graphs may show) which each season showing a reasonable profit, the first system I have found which generates seemingly steady profits so this is brilliant! I have attached the graph and if you look at the blue line (profit to average odds, as always) and you can see what I mean about it not looking like it produces consistent profits but it does based on the seasonal breakdown. The drop off at the end of the 08-09 season is more pronounced on the blue line than the red but this trend doesn't seem to continue into the 09-10 season based on the analysis I have done since this graph was produced. This is one system I have considered going live with straight away but the cautious side of me has reared itself and I will instead paper trade live on the forum but with a view to adding it to my portfolio unless disaster strikes this system before the end of the year.

So I set out to find one profitable system and inside a week I have found up to three and I haven't really put that much effort into it :thumbs

[MattR]

Interesting stuff Mat. Are those systems using both unders and over bets? Or just one or the other? If both does one perform better than the other?

I would think part of the problem finding a consistently performing system for these leagues is the fact a quarter of the teams change year on year, but like you mentioned in an earlier post that can also play into our hands because it also makes it much harder for the bookies to be accurate too.

[mathare]

Interesting stuff Mat. Are those systems using both unders and over bets? Or just one or the other? If both does one perform better than the other?All three of the systems I have come up with to date are actually just unders systems as I haven't been able to find anything profitable on the overs. I might have a sniff of one for the Championship though if my early analysis is anything like.


I would think part of the problem finding a consistently performing system for these leagues is the fact a quarter of the teams change year on year, but like you mentioned in an earlier post that can also play into our hands because it also makes it much harder for the bookies to be accurate too.While it's true that the line-up in these divisions can change significantly each season most of the time the teams being relegated/promoted are going into a division they have some recent(ish) history in. So a team from League One may make a brief appearance in the Championship but will probably slip back to League One in time. There are exceptions of course, but unless a team has sufficient history in the division in question they aren't selected by the system. And I'm not going to quantify what sufficient history is as it varies by system.

Out of interest I have just run the League One systems over the results for last weekend. 1a (30) would have picked three matches to back under 2.5 goals in (Southend v Southampton, Carlisle v Norwich and Yeovil v Brighton) which would have given us just the one winner, Carlisle v Norwich going under at 19/20 so a loss of 1.05pts. System 3a would have picked the Carlisle and Yeovil matches so would have lost 0.05pts. I won't be including these in the official figures when I start posting qualifiers on the forum though.

[mathare]

12th October 2009 (part two)
I have just been revisiting some of the conclusions I drew about the League Two system and am now considering running an unfiltered version of it alongside the filtered version I mentioned yesterday. Why? It's simpler for one but also the filters affect the max odds bets reducing the profits slightly so it's not clear what they would do to the middle-of-the-road odds I expect to get. The worst case scenario is better for the filtered version but the best case scenario is better for the unfiltered version so it might be worth running the two side by side in a live test when I am not sure where on the scale my odds will lie.

I also did a season-by-season breakdown of the unfiltered system to average odds and both the filtered and unfiltered version to maximum odds. When looking at the unfiltered system to average odds we see 06-07 is still a freak year providing all the profits with two years showing slight losses (05-06 and 07-08). But switch to maximum odds and all years show a profit. Not only that but while 06-07 still provides a lot of the profits, 08-09 weighs in with a good chunk too giving us two good seasons and two not so good ones. The same is true for the filtered system viewed in terms of maximum odds, although now 07-08 is actually a slight loser. So if we're getting closer to the maximum odds than the average odds we are probably better off using the unfiltered version and for that reason I will run both systems for League Two in the live test so we can see if there is any difference over the coming months.

[MattR]

Will be interesting to see how these pan out 'live' Mat, look forward to seeing it progress.


A thought that just crossed my mind concerning under overs is that the Premier with a current average of 3 goals per game will probably with pretty reasonable 'certainty' (if that isn't a contradiction :D ) come back down by the end of the season to around 2.5/2.6. With that in mind you would think that unders would have to start coming in with much greater regularity than they have been. Much in the same way that we had 5 draws from 10 games on the last set of fixtures after just 4/66 previously. In other words can we take advantage of statistical correcting?

[mathare]

In other words can we take advantage of statistical correcting?I'll be honest and say I'm not sure. I ought to look at seasonal goal averages in the Premiership and how they have changed throughout the season to get a better idea of this but you can be sure the bookies will be doing the same. But this could go one of two ways - the goals could keep coming and we could have a record season for overs or there will be a correction and things will revert back to normal with more unders than we have had so far to bring that average back down. The bookies can't price up both eventualities on a weekly basis so it will be interesting to see whether they start to lengthen the unders odds expecting the goals to keep flowing or trim them expecting a correction. What we have seen so far this season amounts to little more than a statistical blip though as not many games have been played. It would be interesting to see how other seasons looking in terms of goals per game at this stage and what they settled down to eventually. A job for tomorrow that one I think

[mathare]

A job for tomorrow that one I thinkI've cracked and done it now!

I've attached the stats as images to keep the tables looking nice. I have calculated end of season averages and also the averages after 76 games, which is the number played in the Premiership so far this season.

This season's goals per game ratio is high at 3.013, especially in the light of last season's 2.479 over the whole season. That is the second lowest average number of goals the Premiership has seen with 06-07 being the lowest. After 76 games this season is still by far the highest average goals per game figure but if you look at those seasons were the average number of goals after 76 games is greater than the overall average since the start of the Premiership (94-95, 95-96, 97-98, 99-00, 00-01, 03-04 and 08-09) all of these bar one (99-00) ended up with a lower average at the end of the season than they had after 76 games. Therefore I'd say the average number of goals is going to go down between now and the end of the Premiership season but I don't know how much. It was 2.592 before the start of the season so let's assume it drops back to that long-term average. That means we'd be looking at another 756 goals this season (or thereabouts) giving an average of 2.487 goals per game, not a lot below the 2.5 line offered by the bookies so how much value can we expect there? Not a lot I'd say.

So really I think all we can say is that the average will come down but how far down no-one knows and I'm not sure I'd be looking to back a glut of unders as that average could drop slowly over the course of the rest of the season without seeing huge clumps of unders.

[MattR]

Interesting Mat. Like you say the probable reduction could be gradual.


Just checked the 4 seasons I have saved on my hard disk and interestingly both home and away teams are averaging more to date this season. Not sure what betting use that would have anyway, asian handicaps perhaps, but I guess it's kind of what you'd expect to see given the higher % of home wins. Would imagine that would translate across most leagues.

2009/10 1.75-1.25
2008/09 1.40-1.08
2007/08 1.53-1.10
2006/07 1.45-1.00

[mathare]

15th October 2009
I've been feeling a bit rough the past few days so haven't had time to analyse the Championship under/over data till now. But here are the findings anyway, and it's nowhere near as promising as for the lower divisions.

There are two systems of interest, one of which I have selected despite the fact that in it's basic form it doesn't produce a profit when settled to average odds. So why have I picked out a system that makes a loss? Because when you settle the bets to maximum odds it produces over 60pts of profit so there must be something in it. Bearing in mind that the odds I expect to get will lie somewhere between the average odds and the maximum odds and there ought to be a profit in the system but how much remains to be seen. So let's take a look at this system in a little more detail.

System 2a (10) is a system for backing over 2.5 goals, unlike the lower league systems which were all unders. As I said it makes a loss (-13.75pts) to average odds in it's raw form with a ROI of -2.00% but to maximum odds we see a profit of 62.38pts with a ROI of 6.18% - much better. Average that out and we're looking at something like 25pts over four and a bit seasons which is only something like 6pts a season, less than I was after from a system but still not too bad I suppose. Anyway, the raw system isn't the best form for this system - filters can be added to cut out some of the losing bets and improve the profit levels to -11.75 (-1.87% ROI) for average odds and 69.95 (8.72%) for maximum odds. That increases the midway profit to something like 30pts with an approximate ROI of around 3.5%. That's maybe 7pts a season which is getting a bit better. The system will produce around 150 bets a season too I reckon, on average. Unfortunately though the seasonal breakdown doesn't look too good. The graphs don't show this very clearly at all but the best years for this system seem to have passed with this season (09-10) and last (08-09) being pretty much breakeven and all the profits coming in the first three years. Because of that I want to monitor this one to see how it goes and as such is will be paper traded live on the forum until the end of the season as I simply don't trust the figures to be reliable enough to add it to my portfolio before that point.

The other Championship system, 4a (30), is again an overs system. In terms of profit there is little to choose between the system when settled to average odds and the maximum odds version with both producing 15-20pts of profit but when we use maximum odds we nearly half the ROI indicating we're picking a lot more losing bets. Indeed the SR for the max odds system is 4% lower than that of the average odds version. But it doesn't make sense not to take the best odds on offer so clearly we need to add some filters here to improve the basic system. When we do that things look better, increasing the profit of the max odds to 50.79pts (8.56% ROI) while to average odds we have a profit of 19.49pts (9.28% ROI). Fewer bets with this one but we might still squeak somewhere around 80 or so each season. Again, not really up to the standards I was looking for from a football system but the profits are there or thereabouts again averaging around 8pts a season if we assume the odds will be midway between the average and maximum odds I have recorded. As with the previous system the seasonal breakdown indicates the early years (05-06, 06-07 and 07-08) were best but the downward trend observed earlier isn't quite as pronounced here. Even so, this is another one to paper trade on the forum till the end of the season where the trends will hopefully start to shine through a bit better and I can decide how to proceed with this system.

I have attached the graphs again, blue is the average odds line and red the max odds line as always.

Things are certainly progressing with these systems and I will be starting a new thread on the forum with any qualifiers for this weekend as and when I pluck them out, which will probably be tomorrow when the odds are out.

[mathare]

15th October 2009 (part two)
As I thought a few days back, there is nothing doing with the Premiership for under/over systems. I have just looked at the data again, in more depth than I did a week or so back and in a more systematic manner and the systems just aren't profitable to average odds and only produce a few points profit each season to maximum odds. I reckon the odds compilers have got these markets sewn up pretty tightly and there isn't much value to be had most of the time. I think the lower leagues are where it's at for profitable football systems, at least for under/over 2.5 goals anyway

[mathare]

16th October 2009
I have now set up a thread in the English football betting area of the forum to hold the system qualifiers for the various under/over 2.5 goals systems I have found over the past week or so. You'll be able to follow the progress of these systems in that thread.

I have considered applying the same lines of thought as I used on the English leagues to the Conference and the Scottish leagues as at least a few of the big bookies have priced up these markets it seems but I'm not sure I am up to any of that today. It can wait till the weekend or early next week.

[John]

Have been following this thread with a lot of interest Mat, as I really the idea of football systems, more-so at the minute than horse racing systems due to my greater interest in football. Plus I think there are less parameters in football to fiddle with when creating systems. You don't have as much stuff to tinker with.*

I'll be watching your footy systems to see how you're doing.

*Note the very technical language of this post.

[mathare]

Thanks for the interest John. There are fewer parameters in most of the football markets I'd say, at least fewer important parameters. With a horse it's not clear (to me at least) how much weighting one should give the weight, jockey, trainer, ground etc when trying to assess how a horse will perform in a given race. Plus a football team is playing one other team so the possible results are fewer compared to a race that will have a field of around 10 runners or so. Football teams also have a lot more 'events' than a racehorse. A horse generally runs only a few times a season whereas a football team will play around 40-50 games giving you much more data to work with. The one thing football lacks compared to horse racing though is an SP, I really miss that. But there are mroe markets for football so more opportunities to look for value while still keeping things pretty simple.

[John]

I've had a bit of a thought with regard to your under/over system ideas as well. As it's a very simple idea of mine, chances are you will have probably tried it out already. But how does backing under 2.5 goals fair with teams playing each other in the bottom half of a league? Or even reducing it further and say the bottom quarter of a league? Teams in the bottom half who play each other doesn't always produce a very exciting game, and by the same token they sometimes/frequently (trying to choose my words carefully here...) have fewer goals in them.

First thing's first though are the exceptions to the rules you have to deal with. Let's suppose Pos. 14 (H) plays Pos. 22 (A) one could argue that Pos. 14 would win the match. This could still be a dodgy qualifying bet though, since Pos. 14 could be a much stronger team/in a good run of form, compared to the team sat in Pos. 22. They could win 3 or 4-0. So you could rule this out of your criteria. However, if Pos. 22 are the home team (against Pos. 14 (A)) one could again argue that the teams are in closer proximity ability-wise to each other so there's more chance of a deadlock. So then this could be a more justifiable betting proposition.

But just going back to my initial point, let's say Pos. 17 play Pos. 18, one could argue there'd be very few goals. Assuming that both teams are in poor form, morale is low, neither team are really setting out to win the game. 0-0, 1-0, 1-1 could easily be a very likely scoreline.

A (possible) drawback for this is that there would be less matches to bet on. Not really a drawback, depends how you look at it I guess... plus you would also have to investigate previous meetings between clubs A and B and how they've performed against each other in the past. You could use a percentage rule here whereby supposing they've both met 10 times previously: if 5 or more of those matches resulted in the scoreline total being <2.5 goals then it could qualify as a bet.

My English is rubbish today but I hope I've made clear what I mean.

[mathare]

I've had a bit of a thought with regard to your under/over system ideas as well. As it's a very simple idea of mine, chances are you will have probably tried it out already. But how does backing under 2.5 goals fair with teams playing each other in the bottom half of a league? Or even reducing it further and say the bottom quarter of a league? Teams in the bottom half who play each other doesn't always produce a very exciting game, and by the same token they sometimes/frequently (trying to choose my words carefully here...) have fewer goals in them.First off I'm not sure I agree with your hypothesis here (are the teams down in the depths of the league because of poor attack or poor defence? If the latter there could be a lot of goals if both sides have a tendency to concede too easily) but then it's an idea that could be tested, but for the fact it involves a lot of work.

How do you know a team is in the bottom half/quarter of the league? To automate the back-testing of this you need to effectively calculate a league table after each set of matches, compute a position for each team and then match them up according to your criteria. Way too complicated for the systems I am looking at right now.


First thing's first though are the exceptions to the rules you have to deal with.The best thing to do is start simple and look at filters (exceptions) after that. But the basic system itself ought to look reasonable before considering tweaks to it.

[John]

If both teams' defences are poor though, it doesn't automatically mean that their attack is going to be good. It all depends if the poor defence is a comparison to the attack or not, or whether the forwards are just as bad as the defenders.

My point about back-testing the scorelines was less geared to their league positions at the time, and more geared towards the sum of the scorelines. If 7 from 10 matches between Teams A and B resulted in less than 2.5 goals being scored, then that alone could be a good enough qualifier for a bet without even taking their respective league positions at the time into consideration.

But then as you say, that'd be more like you using your opinion and not adhering to a set of rules which takes it away from a system and starts to turn it into a method.

[MattR]

Don't want to hijack your thread Mat, so just a quick one here

John, why don't you test that on the forum, the basic idea of under 2.5 for all games between the bottom (half or quarter you decide) of the league. Take it from the current league position. I would suggest waiting at least 6-8 games into the season, so now's a good time to start. On the face of it there's some merit to it as a weak defence could be the fact of playing the better teams although a weak attack could be down to the same reason

[John]

Certainly an idea that I'd like to test at some point Matt, but I don't know if I have time at the moment to do it. I'll see...

I'm not sure which league(s) to go for either. On assumption, the lower league teams would be more profitable because the teams are a lot poorer. But then it's proportional/relative to two bottom Premiership/Championship teams playing against each other.

[mathare]

21st October 2009
It's been a while since I had anything to say in here. I haven't got that much to say today but I thought I ought to make another entry anyway.

The under/over systems have started up now and had their first few games. It was a fairly inauspicious start to the live paper trade but there is plenty of time to turn it round. And of course it's not real money that is being lost - that's the whole point of a paper trade. I'm confident that things will pick up in time as the work that has gone into these systems stands up to scrutiny. I am confident that they will come good despite a losing opener. There will be no big winners to boost the numbers though as under/over bets are for prices at or around evens so it will be a steady climb back to profitability I should imagine.

I have taken a few days off from the football systems to let my brain (and body) recover somewhat. In fact I have dug my PS2 out the loft, bought Gran Turismo 4 second-hand and have been playing that. Awesome game. I enjoyed GT3 but didn't realise how much better GT4 was!

Today I am back to gambling related activities though. I have started to realise recently that the spreadsheet that I use to record all my bets in could do so much more for me than it does already so I have set about updating it to get this information out of it. When discussing results on the forum it is much easier to talk about things in terms of points won or lost rather than actual cash amounts as everyone stakes differently so one of the things I have set about doing is working on getting the spreadsheet to output that kind of data in a nice format to make posting my results easier. It's complicated slightly by the fact that sometimes I don't get the full stake matched when using the exchanges. If my system stake is £10 and I only get £8 matched on a 2/1 winner then I have only won 1.6pts not 2pts and I need to have that reflected in my data. I'm getting there but I need to work out how best to display this data in the current structure of my workbook. I am also looking at simplifying some of the sheets I have in there and combining some of them to reduce the overall number as a few of them are so similar in structure that they could easily be combined. None of this really matters to anyone other than me of course but that's what I am up to. Plus it's keep my brain active and concentrating on gambling matters. I hope that once I am armed with the information I desire I can better decide whether anything should be dropped from my portfolio.

[John]

I haven't got that much to say today but I thought I ought to make another entry anyway.

And you still manage to write 500 words... :D


I have dug my PS2 out the loft, bought Gran Turismo 4 second-hand and have been playing that. Awesome game. I enjoyed GT3 but didn't realise how much better GT4 was!

I love car racing games; GT4 is awesome, I'll agree with you there. Have you played 5? I don't have a console, in fact I've never owned one and the pleasure I get out of playing on other people's (consoles, that is) makes me think I should perhaps buy my own.

[mathare]

I love car racing games; GT4 is awesome, I'll agree with you there. Have you played 5? I don't have a console, in fact I've never owned one and the pleasure I get out of playing on other people's (consoles, that is) makes me think I should perhaps buy my own.It was only the adverts on TV for GT on the PSP that made me think about getting my PS2 out. I bought the GT3 edition so the console came bundled with GT3. I had planned on just playing that (GT3) but I can't find it - I may have traded it in years back when I used to play my PS2. So I ordered GT4 from Amazon marketplace instead. It was less than a fiver with postage so I was happy to pay that. And it's amazing. The B-Spec mode is an ace feature; it's like having the Stig driving for you.

Never played GT5, nope. Never even played on a PS3, or an XBox. And I've only played a Wii once or twice. I'm not a big gamer as I don't have the co-ordination to use the controllers that well. I have to use digital acceleration/brake on GT4 as I can't get that right in analog mode although I use analog steering. But things like Grand Theft Auto etc are beyond me as you need to use most of the buttons at once for some of it and I can't do that. Similarly I can't use keyboard and mouse together for PC games

[John]

I must start using Amazon Marketplace more, you can pick up some great bargains as you rightly have done. I'm in a similar situation to you as far as modern consoles go. I've only played on a PS3 a handful of times round a friend's house. Mainly FIFA 2009 [which is so realistic it's unreal] and some sort of boxing game which I kicked his ass at... you're repeatedly pressing buttons and trying combinations in boxing games and it's quite exhausting to play... achy hands!

I can't say I suffer from the mouse/keyboard combinations you mentioned. An example of this being playing Battlefield 1942 and Battlefield 2, both great war games where you use the keyboard to run/strafe and the mouse to pan around. It does take some getting used to though.

[mathare]

Y'see I can't play those footy games as I can't master any of the moves. I can't switch players, tackle, get the ball and then drop my shoulder to beat a man before putting a cross in and getting the striker's head on it. It takes way more coordination than I have so I end up fouling the opposition and when I do get the ball I kind of run at the other side and get tackled really easily so resort to longshots that never go anywhere near the goal. I don't have the deft touch required. I'm better with simple controls like point and click games such as Championship Manager, although I haven't played that for years now.

[scoobydoo]

Y'see I can't play those footy games as I can't master any of the moves. I can't switch players, tackle, get the ball and then drop my shoulder to beat a man before putting a cross in and getting the striker's head on it.

It sounds like I need to play you instead of the computer then Mat! :D

[John]

Y'see I can't play those footy games as I can't master any of the moves. I can't switch players, tackle, get the ball and then drop my shoulder to beat a man before putting a cross in and getting the striker's head on it. It takes way more coordination than I have so I end up fouling the opposition and when I do get the ball I kind of run at the other side and get tackled really easily so resort to longshots that never go anywhere near the goal. I don't have the deft touch required.

Does that remind you of any current managerless football teams? :laugh

[mathare]

Saturday 24th October 2009
Since I last made a proper entry in this gamblog I have spent some time tidying up and reformatting my betting records. I now have all profits calculated in both cash terms and a number of points. What's more my stats macros now pull out the profits in points too so I know how many points profit I made on any system, in any given month, in a particular year etc. I have also cross-checked all my stats figures to make sure they add up properly and I am pleased to say they do. This has put me in a very positive mindset. I've not finished the work I wanted to do on this spreadsheet but the work I have done so far has put me in a good position to add in the other features I had planned, which is nice. I think the new structure is much better too and am feeling very positive about many things now, despite recent downturns in my general wellbeing (but I don't want to dwell on that here).

Depending on how I feel over the next couple of days I should be able to finish off the improvements I had planned and will then be able to get much more meaningful information out of my spreadsheet, and get it easily too. Maybe some of that will find it's way in here as I will be able to analyse my portfolio much more readily.

Hopefully, once all that is done, I will find the self control to continue with some other projects I have been working on from time to time, one of which is very exciting but I don't want to reveal too much at this stage as it's still embryonic and will take quite a while to reach the stage where I am happy to announce any details.

[mathare]

Saturday 24th October 2009 (part two)
Nothing definite here but after an initial glance I'd say W2W lays and the Nine Or Less system will soon be dropped from my portfolio. The lays have been terrible recently and I have never really got the bank off the ground so it's a prime candidate to be dropped. Nothing official yet though but watch this space

[mathare]

25th October 2009
After yesterday's disastrous performance on the W2W lays, this one system accounting for around two-thirds of my loss on the lays, I have set about analysing the data to decide whether or not the system deserves a place in my portfolio. Have the recent results been a 'one off' as it were or are they a sign of a significant downturn and I should cut my losses and run? I have done much of this analysis manually but this is the sort of thing I want my spreadsheet to be able to produce automatically (well, at the push of a button) and I am well on my way towards that with the new structure but I haven't written all the code yet and I wanted to get this particular system checked out.

I started the system with a £200 bank back in November 2008 so it has had just shy of a year. The staking I used is my standard staking plan of 1% fixed stake working in 50p stake increments, rounding down, with a £2 minimum stake. So my initial stake is £2 and remains as such until the bank exceeds £250 at which point the stake increases to £2.50 where it remains till be bank is over £300 when I increase to £3 and so on. My bank peaked at £344.67 on the 11th April this year and reached a low of £117.18 yesterday.

The headline stats are:
1149 bets
983 winning bets
85.55% SR
-£80.82 profit
-25.71pts profit
-0.51% ROI
9.15% overlay

So you'll see my overlay is right where it should be, below 10%, so I am getting decent enough prices on the lays but the SR is just too low to achieve a profit.

I have created graphs of the SR and total profit (in cash and points terms) against time in an attempt to try and spot trends. This is difficult with any SR graph as it takes a while for the SR to settle down to anything like a true figure. That said, the graph does show a peak in the SR around March/April of this year and has fallen away since with a noticeable recent slump at the end of the graph. As one would expect this peak in the SR coincides with a peak on both the profit charts and as the SR drops so does the profit. Of course, these profit graphs are somewhat spiky as is the nature of lay betting but the overall trends are still quite visible and recently they are downwards.

So, has the worm turned for this system or is there a chance it could bounce back? I guess there is always a chance it could bounce back but I honestly don't see it doing so in the short-term based on the performance over the last six months and because of that I think I have to ditch it. As I said previously, I have kept the system going despite the recent rocky run because it adds to my turnover and so helps to reduce my commission but the gain from a slightly reduced commission isn't offset by the losses the system is suffering and so it has to go. My own False Favs system has made enough profit (in cash terms as I started it with a bigger bank) to counter the losses made by this system so overall I haven't lost out in a sense, but I could do without drains on my Betdaq account at present as I am topping that up far more regularly than I am happy with at the minute. I usually maintain quite a small balance in all my bookies and exchange accounts so that any unused balance sits in my account rather than theirs but I am still depositing into Betdaq more than I would like to have to do at present. Dropping this system will hopefully help on that front too.

[mathare]

27th October 2009
Why do I do this to myself? Why do I have to be so curious about various systems and tipping services? I always want to know if a system/service that keeps being plugged is profitable or not as I am always looking to improve the bottom line of my betting portfolio. And is is this curiosity that has put me in the position I am in now - reading through a couple of years of blog entries trying to extract the suggested lays for a lay service I have seen promoted quite heavily recently. I won't name it here as I don't wish to provide free advertising but I do want to know if it is profitable as I have been sent promo literature on it for months now, and not from the usual affiliate sources either. Some of it is from sources I trust, but obviously I don't trust them enough to take their word for it which is why I am manually entering thousands of lays into a spreadsheet for further analysis. And if that wasn't enough the prices given for each lay are just guideline prices - I want to see how profitable (or otherwise) the lays are to Betfair SP which is just creating more work for myself as I will then have to go back through the list of all the lays recording the BSPs too.

At least at the end of all of this (which will take several days) I will have satisfied my curiosity and will know once and for all whether this service that is being promoted so heavily is worth considering or not.

As well as this I am continuing the development of my own betting records spreadsheet. That's going rather nicely and I am really proud of some of the code I have written for it. Soon I expect it to be fully functional and to be able to analyse systems in seconds, automatically producing all the pertinent stats and information as well as creating the sort of graphs I attached when I analysed the W2W lays. Then I can really get a good look at how some of the systems/services I am following are doing...

[mathare]

27th October 2009 (part two)
I'm now wondering if I am wasting my time. I spent an hour or so surfing the web idly earlier, taking a break from monotonous data entry, and found plenty of people with bad things to say about the lay system I am looking into and the people who publish/market it. Hmm.

I may redirect my efforts elsewhere, focusing on improving my portfolio with the addition of systems recommended by people I trust and also looking at more ways in which I can add cash to the bottom line myself...

[mathare]

27th October 2009 (part three)
My curiosity is pretty much sated now, which is nice. I have copied out around 1000 bets from a blog and added that to the data I already had for this service (although the provenance of that data is potentially questionable) to give me a picture extending from the end of June 2007 to the present day.

The figures aren't great, I must admit. The SR is 76.43% with 3457 losing selections (winning bets) from 4253. The ROI using the recommended staking plan (fixed stake varying the percentage stake with the odds) is 1.13% and to level stakes is 0.57%. So it's profitable IF the prices they have given for each bet (as guideline prices) are anything like. If the attainable prices are higher then the ROI is obviously reduced. But the main question I wanted to know was whether the profit generated from a £500 starting bank would cover the £500 a year costs for the system. In the two and a bit years I have looked at the system generates a profit of £1066.27 from a £500 starting bank (which is what I would use for a new lay system) and using their guideline prices. As you can see that only just covers two years worth of subscriptions to the service so not the length of time I have data for so we're not covering costs with that starting bank. And that's using the suggested staking plan too, whereas I prefer to use levels, which produced a profit of around £787.

So to cover costs I'd need a larger starting bank, which I am not prepared to do for this service anyway. And in working through today's little exercise I noted a few other points about the service, mainly the lack of professionalism. For example:
the selections are in a blog rather than on a dedicated website
days have been missed due to other commitments - for £500 a year I expect the owner of this service to deliver every day except in emergencies
there are no results to SP/BSP
no dedicated website - for a £500 a year system I'd expect it to have such a site with a URL reflecting the service name
it's difficult to find anything official on the web for this service, no SEO considerations
the profits quoted on their website, which as I say is not easy to find, exclude commission
analysis is provided for some races but not others due to time commitments indicating this service isn't top priority for whoever runs it
some horse names are not as per the racecard suggesting they aren't using software that downloads official racecard info
The one thing I wanted to do but haven't is examine the data using BSP. But I don't think it's worth it given it's not sufficiently profitable to their guideline prices.

As I said earlier I won't name the guilty service as it's not fair but I am pleased I have gone through this exercise now. At least I know now what the service is like without having to part with a penny.

[buddhabee]

Mat. I hope you don't mind me butting in, but that £500 system doesn't sound good to me. If I were you I would try something Merlin alluded to here http://www.win2win.co.uk/forum/showpost.php?p=506741&postcount=20

I have tried a couple of times with a bank with one lay a day and on both occasions the bank rose very nicely for the 3-4 months I was doing them. The first one I tried started with £70 with a FL of £50. That bank rose to £800. I lost it all after losing my discipline (greed) and tried some really stupid big lays. The second one I started with £1000 with a stake of 2% of the bank. That bank more than doubled before again I lost my discipline and the profit disappeared.

But I proved that strategy can work and I'll try it again sometime.

Pick out one lay from your False Favs for a one-lay-a-day bank. I'm sure that with your discipline you could make it pay. I'd rather try that than hand over £500 a year to someone for lays I could work out for myself. Best of luck for the future whatever you decide.

[mathare]

Mat. I hope you don't mind me butting in, but that £500 system doesn't sound good to meI don't mind at all :) And I agree that the system doesn't sound good but I am a naturally curious person (which is probably what led me into a career as a software tester - always looking for ways to break software) and wanted to assure myself that it wasn't worth it. I spoke to the guys at the Secret Betting Club about this particular service a few months ago and they were fairly neutral about it but for all the reasons I gave above I am now rather negative on this service. It's simply not value for money.


Pick out one lay from your False Favs for a one-lay-a-day bank. I'm sure that with your discipline you could make it pay.Fair play to you for making it work previously but I'm not sure of the rationale behind it. If you have a number of quality lays why pick one for a one-a-day system? Why limit yourself to one a day if there are many equally rated lays? I don't have the concept of a ranking when picking my False Favs so it would be very difficult to pick out the most likely loser from that lot for a one-a-day system so why not lay them all as I am doing (quite successfully) at present?

[buddhabee]

Keep your current False Fav bank going with all your lays, but open another bank (with some of that £500 they want to take off you!) and just pick out one of them each day to lay in that bank. You'll still have your full quota of lay banks +1. :thumbs

With a one-lay-a-day bank you'll find the strike rate increasing allowing you to increase the liability with more confidence. :)

[Street cry]

I don't see any benefit in taking one lay from the main batch per day. If all are under the same criteria like Mats false favs there is nothing particularly beneficial about it.

Why would strike rate improve ???

[mathare]

I don't see any benefit in taking one lay from the main batch per day. If all are under the same criteria like Mats false favs there is nothing particularly beneficial about it.It's not just me then - thanks SC

[mathare]

28th October 2009
I have just about completed the planned updates to my betting record spreadsheet and I must say that I am mightily impressed by what I have been able to get it to do now. And in adding these new features I have cleaned my data up too, which is always good news.

Not that this will mean much to any of you because the format of one's betting records are very much a matter of personal preference and I doubt any of you have yours structured in exactly the same way as I have mine but I want to describe the new features I have added. If nothing more maybe they will inspire some of you to think about your data in more detail and perhaps look at ways of extending your own records to be able to obtain the same information as I now can.

I have my betting records split across a number of sheets. I have one for systems, one for lays, one for sports bets, another for trades, another for spreads etc etc. On each sheet I record the details of each appropriate bet. I wanted a way of quickly analysing a given system or bet type. For example, all the Jumping for Profit system bets I have made or the W2W lays, or all sports bets from a particular tipster. I could always get a list of the bets using the filtering functions in Excel but I also wanted things like the ROI, overlay, longest losing run (LLR) and longest winning run (LWR) and in the case of poker/casino betting to know my win rate. I also wanted to see how these thing change with time so I can more easily review the performance of a system/service. The new VBA code I have written does all this, and more!

I simply select the sheet, system and bookie/exchange combination I am interested in, click a button and a few seconds later I have all the information at my fingertips. On one sheet I have a copy of all the bets with total profit, SR etc calculated after each one. On another sheet I have all the main stats (number of bets, winners, SR, profit, ROI, LLR, LWR, overlay, average odds etc) and graphs for some of these main stats all automatically created for me. Using this I can quickly and easily compare systems, see when systems I have dropped from my portfolio started to go wrong and use that to guide whether I should tighten up my bank barrier settings on other systems, compare my cash and tourney poker win rates and so on. I can compare my ROI at Bet365 with that for William Hill, for example. If I do that for all the backing systems I have since dropped from my portfolio I see my ROI at William Hill is -18.40% while at Bet365 it is -4.07%. I have known for ages that I do MUCH better at Bet365 than William Hill but now I have quantitative evidence of that rather than just raw profit figures. I'm not saying I would turn down a good price at William Hill in favour of a worse one at Bet365 but it reinforces some ideas I already had about which bookies I do best at. I can look at any trends in the SR, ROI etc for the Lay'em system (or any other system). I can see where the bank for any system reached a new high and where it hit new lows. And all this at the push of a button and in a few seconds.

Information can be very powerful in this game. It helps me optimise my portfolio to make sure I get the best out of the good systems and lose as little as possible on the poorer systems.

I have also resurrected and spruced up some old features I had started to write months back. As well as the normal stats breakdown I have for every system on a summary page (separate to that mentioned above) I have a monthly breakdown too so I can see which months of the year are best for me in terms of SR and profit (in cash terms and as a number of points). Plus I now have a daily breakdown of my bets, showing the number of bets, winners, SR and profit on each and every day since I started my betting records over 5 years ago. That is also split into W2W Systems, W2W Lays and Other. As this is the W2W forum it makes sense for me to be able to quickly and easily share with you how I have done on the W2W systems and lays on any given day, plus summarise my other (non-W2W) betting activities. For example, to the end of yesterday I am down 36.70pts on the W2W systems, that includes the eBooks and members' systems that I follow (which is not all of them) by the way. I am down 48.46pts on the W2W lays this month but that includes a period following the main W2W lay system which I have since ditched so that performance should improve.

I am really pleased I have got my records into the state they are now. I feel much better equipped to tackle life as a semi-pro gambler, armed with all the information I could possibly need.

[mathare]

31st October 2009
I don't know if it ever happens to you but I experience what I experienced late last night several times a month I'd say. I had gone to bed a bit later than normal, watched a bit of telly and read a few pages of a magazine before deciding it was time to sleep. So light off and I'm getting ready to doze off. My mind is steadily being cleared of all the things I had been thinking about during the day and then BANG! I was wide awake and I didn't really know why at first. There had been no noise outside or anything like that. My brain had been steadily processing thoughts and data for ages and out of nowhere came up with something that jolted me awake. An idea that on the face of it seems so stunning that it possessed me and prevented me from sleeping until I had thought it all through properly and worked out how best to act on said idea. It made me want to bound out of bed, fire up the PC and start testing this idea but I knew that wasn't the best thing to do. But all the same I couldn't let go of this idea. I wanted to know more, do some research and start testing it but I knew I needed sleep. My body said it was tired but my brain was firing on all cylinders and wouldn't submit for hours. Would I still remember all the details in the morning? Eventually I did get a few hours sleep but woke early with this idea still buzzing round in my head.

So what was this idea that kept me awake for so long last night? Another idea for a football betting system and one that seems so pure it's hard to see how it can fail. Now I just need to put in the effort to test this idea using some real data and see if it does indeed have legs or whether it's just another good idea that doesn't work in practice.

[MattR]

Intriguing Mat, will watch developments with interest! As a teaser, can I ask what market it is?

[mathare]

Intriguing Mat, will watch developments with interest! As a teaser, can I ask what market it is?It could extend to several markets, for the major leagues at least where more bookies prices are available, but initially I am looking at the match result (H/D/A) markets. It's the main market for any football match and one I am keen to crack if at all possible. That said it may eventually lead to me looking at other markets such as clean sheets, win to nil, correct scores and perhaps even handicaps or the supremacy spread markets

[mathare]

5th November 2009
The football idea has been put on hold for a little while as I really haven't felt up to giving it the attention it requires. I had a quick play with it in Excel and the basic system isn't profitable for draws (which was the easiest case to look at so that's where I started) but there are many variables I can tweak that will affect the ROI so I need to draw up a proper VBA-based workbook to test the idea out fully and logically. I think there is going to be at least one profitable system in there somewhere, I just need to put the work in to find out.

I had another of my moments of clarity too the other day. It was while I was in the shower (where I have a lot of my best ideas it seems). Remember I mentioned the system analysis function I had added to my betting records spreadsheet? I plan to extend it to show me more stats including the max/min values the bank reached along with when these figures were attained plus a complete breakdown of the profits by year, month and day of the week. These breakdowns will only be meaningful for systems with lots (1000s) of selections but I want to see if there are particularly good or bad months, days of the week that are better/worse than others and also to see how the ROI, SR etc changes year on year. All the information I need is in the spreadsheet I just need to write a few lines of code to bring it all together. As you know, I love my stats and this is precisely the sort of information I want at my fingertips.

Finally, I wanted to give my own False Favs laying system a bit of a plug. It's on a hugely profitable run at present and the qualifiers are being dished out for free on this forum for all to follow. You could do worse than give them a look. I have made over 80pts profit to Betfair SP in under 500 bets. I started following them myself with real cash on 21st August this year with a £500 bank, which now stands at just under £800 using a steady, sensible staking plan (more details on request). That's a 60% increase in a little over 2 months! I use Betdaq rather than Betfair but my recorded ROI on these is 3.98% which is damn good for a laying system. I have attached a graph of the profits to both SP+10% and BSP against number of bets so you can see how things have progressed. It's a system I am very proud of and want as many people as possible to benefit from it.

[mathare]

7th November 2009
I have those yearly, monthly and daily breakdowns now and they look good. I have already spotted a few interesting things, although it must be noted that the samples are a but small for some systems to draw any really significant conclusions. That said, the following statements look reasonable based on my data:
The Mark Johnston system does best between June and August with the performance outside this period fairly poor, with the possible exception of November actually.
The Michael Stoute system has weakened from a strong showing in 2007 and performs best in August/September
NH Media runs at a negative ROI on Saturdays and Mondays but shows a ROI around 30% Tuesday to Thursday
Double Top's SR is lowest midweek (Wednesday to Thursday) with Wednesday actually showing a loss. The overall SR seems to be improving slightly year on year though
The Lay'em system is least profitable on a Saturday. It also shows a drop in SR (and a loss in actual fact) in April and September, presumably as this is roughly where we start to see a changeover from flat turf to winter AW.
NH Profit Machine lays show a loss on a Wednesday (I really don't understand why) and for the month of June (weaker summer jumps?)

Remember, this is all based on the data I have accumulated through my betting records and as such should not be taken as gospel. Nor am I suggesting anyone should not follow a system at certain times of the year or on certain days of the week but I provide this information for any people who have recently started these systems so they have an idea of what to expect.

[mathare]

14th November 2009
I have recently become consumed by ideas for football betting systems, rating systems and so on. My brain is always ticking away, even at night when I am trying to sleep and it is has got to the point where it has started to keep me awake so I have succumbed and started to get some of these ideas down on 'paper'. I have various Notepad files on my PC full of various notes plus numerous spreadsheets in various states of completion. I'm pretty sure I am going back over some old ground I covered a few years back but I am doing so with a definite purpose this time and a real sense of knowing where I am going with this and what I am looking for, something I may have lacked last time I started down these routes.

I'm trying to concentrate on the simple markets and using fairly basic data to accomplish my goals. I figured the only way to make a profit from betting is to have a different opinion to whoever is setting the market prices (be it another punter on the exchanges or the odds compilers at the bookies) and for my opinion to be right and theirs to be wrong more often than not. OK, that's not strictly true as once a bookie has put his line in the sand he may move it based on market forces rather than changes in his opinion. For example, a bookie may feel a match is more likely to go over 2.5 goals than under so sets his lines at evens for unders and 4/5 for overs. If he is inundated with unders bets at that price he may shift his lines to 9/10 for both sides. Now that makes it seem as though he has no idea whether the match will go under or over but the odds compiler probably still thinks it will go over - it is the weight of public opinion (backed my their cash) that has forced him to rethink his market prices but perhaps not his opinion. So I need to either swim against the tide or disagree with how the bookie sees the match playing out. I'm sure they have more stats and software at their disposal than I do but that doesn't mean we can't make a fair fight of it if I can apply my thinking in different or better ways than they can.

Maybe at the end of all this data crunching and analysis I will come up with nothing. Maybe. But I think there'll be something in all of this that will make it worth me spending the time on it. In fact I actually see a very bright future for all this work in some form or another :wink

[barrelmaniac]

A very thought provoking post regarding the bookies price, opinions and market forces. I can see exactly where you are coming from.

[mathare]

Sunday 15th November
It's not taken long but already I have lost my way with this football betting stuff. I have devised a rating system and applied it to a load of data (14 seasons worth of data from the English leagues) but now what? I thought I knew what I was doing with it but it turns out that I am no longer so sure. My brain is still rather muddled on all of this and it is taking some time to get everything in to order.

I have started to keep an A5 notebook by the bed for thoughts that occur to me as I am trying to drop off to sleep and last night I made over three pages of notes on ideas for football systems and lines to research. Whether any of these lead to anything remains to be seen. Whether they actually make much sense in the cold light of day also remains to be seen if I am honest. But none of this gets me any closer to working out what I am doing with these ratings I have put together. However, I am not going to be defeated. I have books on football betting I have read in the past. Recently I dug them out and put them near the top of my 'to read' pile so perhaps I need to get round to those sooner rather than later. I feel as though I just have a hurdle to get over and then I can gallop on with this for miles.

[mathare]

Monday 16th November
I am starting to get back into it now. Yesterday I have a brief moment of clarity that allowed me to get over one of the hurdles I mentioned previously and now I am running with a particular idea to see where it takes me. It's taking my CPU to new heights as it is involving quite a lot of number crunching so while my PC is busy doing it's bit I am reading more and more about football betting, and making more and more notes. I now have numerous pages of notes in that A5 notebook of mine and need to find a way of collating these notes into a more useful form as well as categorising and prioritising them. I think many of these notes I have made will lead to ideas that blossom and bloom into a potentially massive area of investigation so I need to be sure that I do things in the right order as some will surely unlock data that I can use in later research.

I need to find a way of focusing my mind better too. I find that when I write things down I get them clearer in my head so maybe that's what I need to do here. Perhaps I need to start documenting the full approaches I am taking with each line of investigation such that my brain can process it properly, spot any flaws in what I have done and also identify areas into which I can extend the research.

I have to admit though that I am amazed at the number of ways in which I reckon I can slice and dice the raw data I have to give a new angle on betting markets. It's surprising what can be done with a few match results and betting odds.

I will update this thread with summaries of my findings as I have them. At present I am still working on some rating system ideas and looking into ways of optimising the raw rating system as it uses several inter-related variables. It's testing my brain as well as my CPU! :laugh

[mathare]

Wednesday 18th November
OK, now I am confused. I have my head on straight when it comes to where I am going with all this football system research and I have a plan for examining all this data that will probably take me several months to work through, even if I work on it full time (which I can at present, pretty much but I may be under pressure soon to get a 'proper' job :rolleyes:). But this morning I tested an idea using matches from the 09/10 season so far and seem to have uncovered a system with a ROI of around 30%! :yikes: But it only works for home teams even though the model I created should apply equally to home and away teams given the way it was built. :doh So why does it only work for home teams? Is the model flawed or are we seeing a significant imbalance in home and away odds from the bookmakers? Is this the home advantage coming into effect through the odds? I must admit I don't know at this stage but I will be doing all I can to try and work it out.

The headline stats for this system though, if it holds up are 97 bets (out of 692 matches played this season in the English league) of which 37 were winners netting a profit of 30.19pts which is a ROI of 31.12%. Looks too good to be true doesn't it? The data sample used is a bit small for this to be a truly meaningful test, and I need to try to find out why the away side of the system runs at a ROI of nearly -23%, but it's an early glimmer of hope that the work I am putting in to this project may eventually pay off handsomely. If I can't find any obvious flaws in this system for home teams I will probably start another live trial here on the forum, perhaps till the end of the season, to see how things stack up. Maybe we've just been lucky with the results so far this season and things will normalise over the remainder of the season but we'll see...

[MattR]

Interesting Mat. Can you check it on another couple of leagues from the football data site, perhaps la liga and serie a (or just check the 08/09 season for the English leagues) to see whether what you are seeing pans out the same there? My thinking is that if it does come out similarly then you're more likely to have something there of substance and it's the odds that are the imbalance.

[mathare]

Interesting Mat. Can you check it on another couple of leagues from the football data site, perhaps la liga and serie a (or just check the 08/09 season for the English leagues) to see whether what you are seeing pans out the same there? My thinking is that if it does come out similarly then you're more likely to have something there of substance and it's the odds that are the imbalance.There is nothing to suggest the model would apply exactly as it is to any foreign leagues but what I can do is, as you suggested, move some data out of that used to build the model and into the data set used to test it, which is what I am looking at now. The original model was built using all data from the 95/96 to 08/09 seasons and then tested on the 09/10 data but I am investigating now models built on the 95/96 to 99/00 data and tested on 00/01 to 08/09, models built on 95/96 to 00/01 and tested on 01/02 to 08/09 etc. I obviously can't test the model with data that was used to build it in the first place as that won't give me an independent test. It takes a bit of computing time to rebuild the models and then test them though. I might have some answers later on this afternoon though.

Each test I have done so far picks out many more away bets than home bets though and I have yet to really fathom out why. Suppose there is some inbalance in the odds - why is it there? Why am I finding so many more away teams at value odds? Are the chances of an away win being underestimated by the odds?

[MattR]

So if I'm getting this right Mat, it is selecting a lot more value away bets but the ROI is significanty worse and indeed negative. Hmm, without knowing how you are coming to a decision of value I'm not sure. Is the model you are creating analysing just home data to get value home odds and vice versa for away, or is all the data being used to arrive at a value odds decision? It could just simply be the fact that there are far fewer away wins than home wins so, value or not, it's harder to pick away wins than it is home just by the sheer numbers alone. % wise how are the strike ratesof winnerson the system regarding homes v aways?

[MattR]

Each test I have done so far picks out many more away bets than home bets though and I have yet to really fathom out why. Suppose there is some inbalance in the odds - why is it there? Why am I finding so many more away teams at value odds? Are the chances of an away win being underestimated by the odds?


Just thinking on this Mat.

The fact that it's picking so many away bets would lend itsef to being very hard to show a profit I would have thought due to the significantly fewer away wins there are in a season.

[mathare]

So if I'm getting this right Mat, it is selecting a lot more value away bets but the ROI is significanty worse and indeed negative. Right.


Hmm, without knowing how you are coming to a decision of value I'm not sure. Is the model you are creating analysing just home data to get value home odds and vice versa for away, or is all the data being used to arrive at a value odds decision? Each team in every match is given a rating. These ratings are then split into a number of bins. I then count how many teams with a rating in that bin have won, drawn and lost. Repeat for all bins. Graph the data, add a best fit line and you have a chance of the team winning, drawing or losing for any given rating. Use that information to work out value odds for each team in the test data winning their match. If the available odds exceed the value odds then we have a bet. So all the data, home and away, is being used to form the value decision, in effect. I have thought about splitting it home and away though, but that's more effort at this stage. One for the 'to do' list.


It could just simply be the fact that there are far fewer away wins than home wins so, value or not, it's harder to pick away wins than it is home just by the sheer numbers alone. % wise how are the strike ratesof winnerson the system regarding homes v aways?You could be right. In terms of SRs they are fairly different. The home SR on the original test (over the 09/10 data) was 38.14% with the away SR coming out at 21.37%

[mathare]

The fact that it's picking so many away bets would lend itsef to being very hard to show a profit I would have thought due to the significantly fewer away wins there are in a season.Perhaps, yes. But it's why it is picking so many away bets that is puzzling me most. Why would there be 4 or 5 times as many value bets for teams playing away than at home? That suggests to me there must be some factor in the odds I am overlooking.

It's worth noting that in some of the other tests I have done the away ROI isn't always worse than the home ROI although the ratio of home to away bets remains around the same.

[MattR]

. I have thought about splitting it home and away though, but that's more effort at this stage. One for the 'to do' list.




I think that would be interesting to see the difference it would make but like you say, one for the to do list given the extra work involved setting it up. Personally I seperate home and away records for my systems but that's just me, not saying that is right or wrong. The one's I use from the goals for/aga probabilities for example uses the home teams home for/against and the away teams away for/against.

[mathare]

18th November 2009
I have put the hours in on this one today and concluded that what I saw earlier was indeed a fluke :(

Let me briefly describe what I have done to show this as someone may spot a flaw in it, and it will help me mentally arrange my work and understand it better.

I have data from 14 seasons (95/96 to 08/09), plus whatever has been played so far of the 09/10 season. I have an idea for a model built around a ratings system. I want to test this model. Obviously I can't test it with data that was also used to build the model as I am then testing the model against itself, in part at least. So I need to split the 14 seasons of data into some for building the model and some for testing. I could randomise which seasons are used for which part of this but I chose instead to keep the systems in order and use the first X seasons as inputs into the model and the remainder as test data.

As I said earlier the model revolves around a rating system. Basically I rate every team in every match, divide these ratings into a number of bins and then for each bin I look at how often a team with a rating in that bin wins their match. This data is graphed and best fit lines added. The equation of these best fit lines can then be used to estimate the chance of a team with a rating of Y winning their match. From this one calculates value odds for that team winning which are compared to the bookies' odds. When the latter exceed the former we have a value bet. That's the theory anyway.

I binned all the data and calculated the best fits for varying numbers of seasons as inputs, working all the way from 5 seasons of input data (with 9 seasons of test data) to 14 seasons of input data (with 09/10 as the test data). It took a while but I hope it was worth it, if only to disprove something. As more seasons are used to build the model the overall ROI improves steadily, suggesting the model is getting more accurate. It remains negative throughout though so we never see a profit from this hypothesis. In general the away ROI is much better than the home ROI, which makes sense again as we see many many more away bets than home bets indicating the chance of away wins is underestimated as bookies (and punters) overestimate the chance of a match ending in a home win so we have longer away odds than is 'fair'. All good so far. There are fluctuations in the data as we add more seasons but this is to be expected. The general trends are there though. Until we use all 14 seasons of data as inputs to the model and test on this season's data.

As I mentioned in a previous entry to this gamblog that sees a strong profit from the home sides and a big loss in the aways. It completely reverses the previous trends I have seen which can mean one of two things: either something fundamental has happened in the game of football to suddenly flip the model on its head or the relatively small data sample is atypical and we can expect a correction in the future. I think it's obvious which of those two is more likely isn't it?

So while the model using all 14 seasons gives excellent fits to the real data that doesn't translate into a profitable system, at least not like this. I am still looking into other ways of using this data though.

But are there ways in which the model could be improved to make it profitable? I have examined the profits (losses) from the version of the model that used 10 seasons as inputs and 4 seasons as a test to see. This choice of model was fairly arbitrary but I thought the 10/4 split was quite a reasonable one to choose to study. I broke the profits down by division, by month and by ratings bracket. And do you know what I saw? Nothing of interest, really. The League Two away games are marginally profitable but less than 14pts from 4 seasons worth of betting - no thanks. And why should this model work better for these games than others? There is no real reason why so again I think we have a statistical fluke effect shining through. September is a very profitable month for away wins while November and January are great for home wins. So what? Statistical flukes again - there is no rational explanation for these months outperforming others. Similarly the extreme ratings show a slight profit but we are dealing with such small samples that there is nothing significant to be concluded from this.

The system doesn't work as a value system from the ratings, despite what this morning's testing seemed to hint at. At least I know now :laugh

Now I can set about ripping it up and putting it back together in other ways that might work! :thumbs

[MattR]

Mat, how does the data pan out regarding the % chance you are getting for a win, rather than just when it is value, ie do those games suggesting say a 60% or higher chance of a win perform better than under 60%?

I do think that splitting it home and away, so the teams have a home rating and an away rating would be more meaningful (although who knows the end results may be just as fruitless regarding a system!) However there are so many teams who perform better at home than away this has to have a detrimental effect on the data you are using I would have thought. Fulham in recent years would be a prime example

Last 3 seasons

Home
P 57
W 25
D 15
L 19
F 68
A 65
Pts 90

Away
P 57
W 7
D 23
L 27
F 47
A 89
Pts 44


So surely their awful away form is having a detrimental effect on their rating when they are playing at home? Conversely they may also be getting rated better away based on their home record. Or am I misunderstanding how your ratings are being calculated?

[mathare]

Mat, how does the data pan out regarding the % chance you are getting for a win, rather than just when it is value, ie do those games suggesting say a 60% or higher chance of a win perform better than under 60%? By relating the ratings to the win % through the best fits I have developed an equation that determines the win % from the rating so I only need to know one of these pieces of information to find the other. So basically what you're asking here is do the higher ratings perform better? If we remove the idea of value, as you suggest though, how do we determine the performance of a rating? Higher ratings have a higher chance of winning, sure. But without looking at odds and value how could I check performance of a set of ratings?


I do think that splitting it home and away, so the teams have a home rating and an away rating would be more meaningful (although who knows the end results may be just as fruitless regarding a system!)I hadn't really considered the idea of teams having two entirely separate ratings - one for home games and one for away. That's an interesting idea....


However there are so many teams who perform better at home than away this has to have a detrimental effect on the data you are using I would have thought. Fulham in recent years would be a prime example. So surely their awful away form is having a detrimental effect on their rating when they are playing at home? Conversely they may also be getting rated better away based on their home record. Or am I misunderstanding how your ratings are being calculated?My ratings are based on the age-old Rateform ratings system as this method inherently takes into account the relative strength of a side as well as rewarding away sides more for better results. The home side contributes a chunk of their rating to the pot, as do the away side but to a lesser degree. Winner takes the pot which is equally split for a draw. This means an away draw is more beneficial to your rating than a home draw while an away win is much more valuable than a home win. So for Fulham a good set of home results will increase their rating at a slower rate than good away results would have done while poor away form will reduce the rating slower than poor home form. I will consider completely separate home and away ratings though so see what effect that has on things.

Thanks for chipping in with even more work for me :laugh

[MattR]

If we remove the idea of value, as you suggest though, how do we determine the performance of a rating? Higher ratings have a higher chance of winning, sure. But without looking at odds and value how could I check performance of a set of ratings?


Well what I meant was if for example, using your equation to find your win % , would you make profit if say all those that had say a 60% win % or above were the bets for the day? Regardless of whether your win % was above or below what the actual days odds were?

Mat, something just came to me then, if this is correct - this win% you are getting, say it's 75% is that then converting to 1.33 (1/3) odds? Well, presumably that means the other team had a 25% win %. I think maybe I've just found the 'flaw' as you put it. There is no accounting for a draw in your 'market' so effectively aren't you pulling odds for a 'draw no bet' market? This would account for why so many away games are value.




My ratings are based on the age-old Rateform ratings system as this method inherently takes into account the relative strength of a side as well as rewarding away sides more for better results. The home side contributes a chunk of their rating to the pot, as do the away side but to a lesser degree. Winner takes the pot which is equally split for a draw. This means an away draw is more beneficial to your rating than a home draw while an away win is much more valuable than a home win.


Ah ok, yes I remember those.



Thanks for chipping in with even more work for me :laugh

You know you love it :laugh

[mathare]

Well what I meant was if for example, using your equation to find your win % , would you make profit if say all those that had say a 60% win % or above were the bets for the day? Regardless of whether your win % was above or below what the actual days odds were?OK, I get you. I'll have a look at that this afternoon if I get a chance.


Mat, something just came to me then, if this is correct - this win% you are getting, say it's 75% is that then converting to 1.33 (1/3) odds? Well, presumably that means the other team had a 25% win %. I think maybe I've just found the 'flaw' as you put it. There is no accounting for a draw in your 'market' so effectively aren't you pulling odds for a 'draw no bet' market? This would account for why so many away games are value. I'm not sure that's the flaw, if there is one. All I do is work out the chance of a team winning. So if that's 75% as you say then there is a 25% chance they won't win. They could draw or lose - just not win. The draw is factored in. In fact I have built models for winning, drawing and losing but I chose only to value test the winning model as the draw model is very much weaker and the losing model is much harder to test as you have to effectively dutch the draw and opposition winning.

[MattR]

Ok I'm with you now, I thought in that example that you just had a 75% chance of one team winning and a 25% of the other team winning, not meaning that it would be 25% of a draw or loss. :thumbs

[mathare]

19th November 2009
I have looked into that idea MattR suggested earlier - backing teams with high ratings regardless of whether they are value bets or not. I decided to start with teams rated 1500 or above as I had to start somewhere. Teams rated at 1500 have a 44.23% chance of winning according to the model I used with teams rated at 3000 have a 55.50% chance of winning. I looked at home teams and away teams separately, placing 1pt level stakes bets on all teams with a rating greater than or equal to 1500, 1600, 1700 etc. working in intervals of 100 up to 2000 and then 200s up to 3000.

The attached graph shows the ROI for home teams, away teams and total plotted against rating. The most profitable rating range is 2500 and above but there are only 472 bets in this range generating a profit of 11.81pts which over 4 seasons is nothing worth writing home about so I think this idea is basically dead in the water. I'm fine with that though. I expect to hit several dead ends in this project but my attitude is that if I don't investigate these avenues then I will never know whether or not they could be my route to riches.

[mathare]

20th November 2009
I had yet another idea on this last night - what about other staking plans? In particular the fixed profit staking plan. With level stakes I am risking the same amount on a longshot as I am on the shorter priced selections so what if I vary the stake with the odds and look to win a fixed amount with each winner?

I looked into this idea this morning and it's a significant improvement, increasing the ROI from the model by some 4 or 5% but it still doesn't make it profitable. No staking plan can turn a losing system into a winner but it is worth knowing that fixed profits could be something worth considering for other systems I come up with on this epic journey through umpteen season's worth of data and systems.

[MattR]

Interesting Mat, I remember when I first found this site and used the staking system Keith had on his main w2w page (not sure if it's still there) It was a stake linked to the odds, not quite a fixed profit, but basically the lower the odds the more you bet. That worked quite well on a couple of horse systems but with the lower football odds I'm not sure how it would fare.

Just had another thought to throw your way, not that I want to give you more work :D Have you had a look at all at how things fare if you take the biggest difference between the two team's ratings? For example those with say a 1000 gap or more in the ratings , home team 2450 away team 1200 etc etc

[mathare]

Just had another thought to throw your way, not that I want to give you more work :D Have you had a look at all at how things fare if you take the biggest difference between the two team's ratings? For example those with say a 1000 gap or more in the ratings , home team 2450 away team 1200 etc etcShhh, you're spoiling the next chapter :laugh

You're right. This system doesn't take into account the strength of the opposition, only how highly rated the chosen team are. The odds will take into account the strength (and form) of the opposition to some degree but that could just mean we are picking out value bets where there isn't actually that much (if any) value as the opposition are too strong for the chosen team. Factoring in the relative strengths of the teams is (probably) the next step in my football odyssey.

If I am honest, I didn't expect this system to work (and it doesn't) simply because it focuses on the wrong things - one team only and not the quality of the team they face. But that won't stop me pulling it apart in every way I can think of. I still have a few more sub-ideas to work on for this team rating system and then I will give up, but not till I have really done it to death to make sure there is nothing in there. I plan to leave no stone unturned.

[MattR]

Look forward to seeing what you discover next. If there's something in this I think you'll track it down! Fascinating thread as always Mat :thumbs

[mathare]

20th November 2009 (part two)
You have probably guessed by now that I don't give up easily on an idea, not until I have looked at it from every angle I can think of and done all I can to see if there is any chance at all of it producing a profitable betting system. And so it is with this team rating idea.

The system I am trying to build has the concept of value betting at it's heart. A value bet exists when the available odds exceed what the model estimates as the fair odds for an event. But the odds released by the bookies may include many factors that are not built into the model producing the fair odds, such as team news, injuries etc. Suppose the odds on a team are much higher than expected for a reason, a reason unknown to the model. In such a case we have underestimated the true odds of that team winning and thus overestimated the value margin.

What I have done is breakdown the profits from one of the models by value margin, looking at bets above a certain margin. So for a 10% value margin the bookies odds must be at least 10% greater than the fair odds and so on for other margins. And? Nothing significant really. At the extreme margins (100% and greater ie the available odds are double the 'fair' odds) the ROI drops quite a lot but there are also few bets at this level so the sample is small which will have an effect on things. The overall ROI is best at the smaller value margins of 5-20% (which suggests that the big prices are big for reasons that are indeed not factored in to the model) but only at 10% is the ROI better than the basic system.

I have also turned this on its head and looked at the profits and ROIs when the odds are equal to or less than the same value margins as used above. The reasoning behind this is that if there are factors we haven't accounted for when calculating the true odds then we should be able to identify a value margin above which we shouldn't bet. Can we do that? Not really. By cutting out the bets where the value margin is huge we do improve profits but not enough to turn this system into something worth paying much attention to. The bets figures are for away bets with a value margin of 40% or less (ROI of 2.14%) but there is no significant reason why this margin would work and others around it wouldn't so I don't think this is a genuinely profitable system long term even with this value margin filter.

[mathare]

20th November 2009 (part three)
How I could be so stupid? :splapme

I looked at teams whose margin of value exceeded certain figures and also teams whose value margin was less than or equal to a certain figure. What did I miss? The inbetweeners! Those teams whose value margins lies in a certain range - above one figure but less than or equal to another. A quick bit of spreadsheet trickery to test this on the most likely range and we have it - a 7.90% ROI with 1514 bets over 4 seasons. The system is worth around 30pts of profit a season - and that's worth having.

But before we jump up and down and start celebrating we need to make a couple more checks:
i) how does it look for this season so far?
ii) will it stand up in the real world?

The first check is an obvious one but what does that second one mean? This is all based around value, right? The odds I have used to determine the margin of value are what I have dubbed ave-max odds - the average of the average and maximum available odds. I've used these as I have shown before that it is usually possible to beat the average odds by shopping around but not always possible to achieve the maximum odds as they are often with some obscure foreign bookie. So were I to follow this system for real would I be able to get the same results with the prices I can find as they are integral to whether or not we place a bet? I don't know the answer to this for sure and the only way to find out is to paper trade it, which I will do IF it looks like it holds up OK for the 09/10 season so far...

[youngtag]

Excellent Thread Mathare. It's certainly eye opening to see the rigorous testing and scientific and mathematical approach you take to your gambling.

Unfortunately some of the more advanced portion of your statistical analysis are above my tiny mind's comprehension but I think I get the overall thrust of your analysis.

My question is regarding your testing of the system. Are you saying that you have to go back over games from 10 years ago onwards and find out the best available odds and average odds for each game? Would this not take a small army of monkeys tapping away at keyboards in a room for several years?

Secondly, can I ask if where you get your stats from? Is it from the internet or can you go out and buy the stats somewhere?

Keep up the good work, I'll keep my eye on this blog as I think it's good to see how it should be done...

[mathare]

My question is regarding your testing of the system. Are you saying that you have to go back over games from 10 years ago onwards and find out the best available odds and average odds for each game? Would this not take a small army of monkeys tapping away at keyboards in a room for several years?It would have taken a small army of monkeys hidden away in some room somewhere had some clever chaps not set up a website back then that captured all that data. I get my data from said website (football-data.co.uk) and use that in my analysis. They have odds for the English leagues going back to the start of the noughties. They carry historical odds and data for the European leagues but I don't know how far back that goes - I haven't got rounded to using it yet so haven't checked.

Hope that helps

[mathare]

23rd November 2009
I'm wondering if I have jumped the gun again with this team rating system and started the paper trade without fully working through the analysis to make sure the system stands a decent chance of being profitable. It occurred to me over the weekend that while the system had shown a decent profit of nearly 120pts in four seasons that this didn't mean much unless the profits were spread fairly sensibly across those seasons. Was one season showing exceptional profits and the others generating much smaller profits, or even losses? Only one way to find out....

The 05-06 season (the first test season) produced over half the profit with 61.315pts. The next three seasons produced 14.605pts, 15.86pts and 27.755pts respectively. So far the 09-10 season (excluding the games played over the weekend) is running at a loss of -14.59pts. This season's loss is not insignificant but the easiest way to see if this system could work is to paper trade it so that is what I am doing (in the relevant section of this forum). After all, a paper trade costs nothing and one can learn from it so I may as well give it a go for this, a system that may well produce reasonable profits by the end of the season but only time will tell.

If this season ends with a loss will I ditch the system? It depends - mainly on how large the loss is. One losing season may not mean the system doesn't work as we have seen there have been four profitable seasons prior to this one so I may give it a second chance next season but let's wait and see what happens between now and May first.

I had a few more ideas for tweaks to this system and other related ideas to check out too over the weekend so today I plan to start working my way through those to see what, if anything, comes of them.

[MattR]

Mat, did the previous seasons also go through a losing spell early on and start off in the red? I'm wondering because I would expect a rating system to start a little erratic until the form settles down a bit and the league takes shape.

[mathare]

Mat, did the previous seasons also go through a losing spell early on and start off in the red? I'm wondering because I would expect a rating system to start a little erratic until the form settles down a bit and the league takes shape.Dunno yet Matt, that's next on my "to do" list. This morning (and early afternoon) I was working on some code to make my under/overs systems easier to manage. It's a bit of a grind getting the best odds for each match as you have to select the match in Oddschecker, select the market and then scan the prices for the best odds and they aren't always consistent about whether they list over first or under first so it's always open to me getting the prices the wrong way round. Fortunately I have now written a bit of VBA to extract the prices from Oddschecker automatically saving me the trouble. Makes it a lot faster to run as well as more reliable.

I'll start looking at those team ratings profits and how they vary throughout previous seasons now. You're right, it should be interesting and it's easy to see how they could take a while to settle down each season

[mathare]

Mat, did the previous seasons also go through a losing spell early on and start off in the red?The 05-06 season took off like a rocket, levelled out around November, slumped around 20pts in the new year and then shot back up. 06-07 started with a loss of around 30pts in the first 6-7 weeks, recovered about half of that, lost another 25pts or so and then staged a remarkable recovery pulling in over 60pts between mid-December and the end of the season. The following season saw a drop of about 20pts early on, bobbled about a bit, had a strong new year then dropped back a bit towards the end of the season. 08-09 had a nothing start to the season with a few wins and a few losses all but balancing one another out for a month or two before a steady climb ensued. There was a slump around March followed by a late season rally. And this season so far has seen a steady start to the season followed by a recent slump.

All of which suggests the losses observed so far this season are probably normal and can easily be recovered from.

[MattR]

That looks encouraging then Mat :thumbs

Would it take long for you to run that on some other major leagues like the Italian, Spanish, German etc? Or is is just a case of pasting in the relevant data and then letting your software do it's work? I would think in theory that if it will work on the Premier then it should work on other 'top' divisions of a country. Most of those leagues like the Premier are stable with the established 'better' teams performing similarly most seasons.

[mathare]

Would it take long for you to run that on some other major leagues like the Italian, Spanish, German etc? Or is is just a case of pasting in the relevant data and then letting your software do it's work?It's mainly just a case of pasting in the relevant data (in the appropriate format), clicking a few buttons and waiting while the PC churns through the data. That said there are a few options that can be tweaked that can sometimes make or break the system so while it may work in theory on the other leagues it may need some tinkering, and that's what would take the time were I to apply this to other divisions. However, I feel this is one of my weaker potential ideas for systems and I have some much better stuff to come so I am unlikely to try the team ratings idea out on the other European leagues just yet. It could be one for the future though as I would like to test a lot of things on the European leagues at some point.


I would think in theory that if it will work on the Premier then it should work on other 'top' divisions of a country. Most of those leagues like the Premier are stable with the established 'better' teams performing similarly most seasons.True, and that's something I plan to exploit via other systems but this one doesn't perform significantly better for one division within the English league than the others so whether it would still work for the European leagues when you factor in the Segunda Liga, Serie B etc I don't know. Few countries have anything like the depth of professional football that we have in this country.

[mathare]

23rd November 2009 (part two)
I wasn't thinking too clearly on Friday, I can't have been, as I rushed to get everything ready to post the qualifiers for the Team Ratings system for the weekend matches and completely missed the fact that where one system exists there may be several. And indeed I think I have found a couple more along the same lines.

A lot of the team ratings analysis I have done has revolved around the concept of value. This value has been established using three different best fit types on charts of the data. The system I posted up at the back end of last week was for just one of those fit types, and is actually the weakest of the three fits. It occurred to me this afternoon that I ought to play with the numbers for the other two fit types (logarithmic and polynomial) and lo and behold I have been able to find a reasonable looking system for each fit type.

Like the linear system I posted up last week these new systems use margins of value within a certain range. Even though the fits are better the profits are not quite to the same levels as the linear fit system though, unfortunately. That said they are not too bad with profits of 75.665pts (9.28% ROI) for the logarithmic fit and 97.09pts (19.07% ROI) for the polynomial fit system. Better ROIs than the linear fit if not quite the same profits! I have attached the number of bets, profit and ROI per season for these systems. As you can see 06-07 wasn't a great season for either system and for both systems the profits could be spread a bit more equally (ideally) but at least they are producing a fairly consistent number of bets each season and the overall profits are there at least. I'd say it's certainly worth paper-trading these two just to see how they pan out between now and the end of the season.

[mathare]

23rd November 2009 (part three)
There are still doubts as to whether I am thinking sufficiently clearly as my head is absolutely buzzing with ideas at the minute and bits of it are only slowly dropping into place. For example, the above thinking on the logarithmic and polynomial fit systems got me thinking about the linear system again. I made a very slight tweak to one of the value margin limits and improved the ROI by around half a percent, adding another 15pts of profit. However, the profits for this version aren't so evenly spread as for the original, as the attached table shows. In the original version the worst full season still netted nearly 15pts while in the new version the worst season was only a little better than breakeven. But one season is improved by 25pts so we seem to stand a better chance of a big winning season but at the risk of making very little at all. Is it worth it? At this stage I don't think it is worth tinkering too much. I will test the system live on the forum and see how it goes till the end of the season at which point I can really work on a full optimisation to squeeze every last point of it if I still feel it is worth it. Yeah, that makes sense. I think! :laugh

[mathare]

26th November 2009
Progress on researching football systems and processing all this data has slowed of late as I haven't been 100%. My various health issues (none of which are major but are enough to keep me under the weather) have been getting in the way and some of the new tablets I am on have whacked me for six the past few days so I am not getting through as much of this work as I would have liked. That said, some progress has been made.

My recent blog entries saw me unveiling the discovery of some decent candidate systems that are now being trialled live on the forum. They haven't started well though I have to admit. Still, it's early days yet.

Those systems were the end of one line of investigation on the team ratings idea so I was able to start work on some other related ideas. The two I have finished involved the same basic idea of value bets with best fits used to determine where that value existed but this time I split the data into home and away teams. That is I created a ratings model whereby the ratings took into account home and away form but the fits used only home or away form and would consider only bets on the home or away team as appropriate. So the home ratings model used fits to all the home ratings and looked at value bets on home teams, and similar for the away model but using the away teams. The standard value test provided nothing of interest (as expected) but there were some profitable systems when one limits the margins of value being considered, as we did with the original system to produce the three systems above. However, none of these new systems produced significant profits on a season-by-season basis - either the profit was too small to really concern ourselves with or one or two good seasons were producing all the profit which means there are obvious long-term doubts about the usefulness of these systems. So nothing has really come of these alternative models which means I can shelve those and move on to something else. I started on another idea this morning but I haven't got that far yet. I will update here when I have more to report.

[mathare]

27th November 2009
My terrier-like attitude continues as I have not yet dropped this idea of team ratings and moved on to areas I think will be more productive and meaningful. There is still the possibility of wringing a few more semi-decent systems out of this idea I feel.

Having broken down the data into separate home and away models and reapplied the fits the next stage is to split the data by division instead. I have just completed the analysis of the Premiership model and might have a couple of interesting systems to test. The reason I think this divisional split will pay dividends is due to how the ratings are constructed. When teams move divisions their rating is reset to the initial value. In the Premiership there are only three spots that involve a change of division - the relegation places. There is no way out the top of this division which means the best teams will continue to increase their rating at the expense of the teams which finish towards the foot of the table. Therefore the range of ratings within this division is much greater than for all other divisions - a team in the lower leagues won't have a rating above 2000 without getting promoted really whereas Man Utd and Chelsea have recorded ratings up around 5000. These high ratings will be affecting the fit that is then applied to the 72 non-Premiership teams whose ratings is more in the 300-2000 range so it makes sense to split out the top flight and study it separately.

Anyway, I have done what I usually do for these things now and have plucked out a couple of systems that show decent but not mind-blowing profits. The first has produced 56.73pts of profit from 429 bets (13.22% ROI) from the start of the 05/06 season but is having a rough old time of it this season. The system hasn't previously experienced a run quite so poor as the one it is on at present but we shall see if it can recover when paper traded. The second system has generated 26.23pts of profit which isn't that impressive over nearly 5 years but has done so from 254 bets at a ROI of 10.33% so I am interested to see how it goes for the remainder of this season.

I will try and have the bets from these new systems online later today/tomorrow all being well. I will post and track them in my Team Ratings thread with the previous three systems this line of enquiry has thrown up.

[mathare]

30th November 2009
Guess what my next line of enquiry was having investigated the Premiership team ratings? If you said looked into the Championship team ratings then give yourself a pat on the back as that's exactly what I did, and with pretty good results too I think. My team ratings system portfolio is expanding rapidly now as I have uncovered another three systems (one for each of the best fit types I considered) each applying to away teams only again. The idea that away teams offer the best value is really starting to hit home from this exercise.

These systems are odd though. Remember a while ago I talked about margins of value and found a few systems when I looked for odds that were better than my fair odds but not so great that I suspected my model had missed something? These systems use the same concept - twice! There are two profitable ranges in these value margins for each fit, one at the lower end and one higher up. This suggests there is value to be had when the bookies have got the odds either slightly wrong or significantly wrong but not inbetween. I know, it's odd isn't it but it's a clear trend than appears in the data so who am I to argue with it.

The headline stats for these systems are:
Linear: 511 bets, 58.005pts profit, 11.35% ROI
Logarithmic: 478 bets, 70.685pts profit, 14.79% ROI
Polynomial: 363 bets, 87.595pts profit, 24.05% ROI

Not a bad set of stats for just one division I think you'll agree. When I get myself sorted I will add these into the relevant spreadsheet and track the selections in my Team Ratings thread.

[MattR]

Looking good Mat. I think there is something in aways as well. I have been testing something recently where I am generating half time odds and paper testing the qualifiers (those that were deemed value in relation to the actual odds on offer). I'm testing them in three systems, home/draw/away. To highlight what you are saying about the aways being undervalued by bookmakers here's the results so far.

These are to £2 level stakes

Home Wins
55 bets
17 wins
Loss -£13.63

Draws
46 bets
19 wins
Profit £3.32

Away Wins
63 bets
16 wins
Profit £31.28

Interestingly as well with the home wins is when the home team is the underdog, those with odds 3.00 and above, the loss is running at just -1.72.

Another interesting stat is that 16 of the 63 that have been ahead at half time, only 10 have gone on to win, and of the 47 that weren't ahead at half time only 5 have gone on to win. So there have been 16/63 half time wins but only 15/63 full time wins. Not sure which would have produced the better profit as I haven't record the match odds price, just the half time odds. Looking at some games today the half time odds seem to generally be a tad higher until you get to seriously odds on favourites when the match odds are higher on the underdog than for the half time win.

[mathare]

To highlight what you are saying about the aways being undervalued by bookmakers here's the results so far.

These are to £2 level stakes

Home Wins
55 bets
17 wins
Loss -£13.63

Draws
46 bets
19 wins
Profit £3.32

Away Wins
63 bets
16 wins
Profit £31.28Take a look at those SRs as I think they are telling in this case. Less than 31% for the homes, over 40% for the draws and around 25% for the homes. Long term, across all divisions, there are around 46% home wins, 27% draws and 27% away wins (roughly). Your SRs are way under that average for home wins, well above it for draws and about right for the aways yet it is this latter category that is showing the greatest profit. It's a small sample but it looks like further evidence that the away teams are overpriced and that you don't need an SR up around 27% to make a decent profit.

This is interesting stuff Matt, thanks for that. Certainly food for thought.

[MattR]

That's a good point about he strike rates Mat. The odds range on those away bets has been from 2.32 to 15.00. While the odds range on those that have won has been from 2.56-10.00 so they have won right across the board. I think I'll start posting up the draw and away qualifiers from today actually - there's one starting right now in fact.

[mathare]

4th December 2009
It doesn't take a genius to work out that after devising football systems specific to the Premiership and Championship that I would start to look at League One and League Two to see if I could pull the same tricks there too. That's exactly what I did, and it worked. Three more systems for each division - one each for the three types of best fit I have used for the data being studied.

Things looked promising for League One when the simple value test (backing all teams available at value odds for 1pt each) had a ROI that was around 4% better than for all the divisions combined. This suggests the fits for this division suited the data much better so I was hopeful that when it come to examining the margins of value that had proved so fruitful before that I would uncover some gems. Yep, right again. The linear system returned a profit of 82.69pts from the start of the 05/06 season taking in 503 bets for a ROI of 16.44%. The logarithmic system was the weakest with a ROI of 7.61% (56.805pts profit from 746 bets) with the polynomial system producing 46.88pts profit from 524 at a ROI of 8.95%. Those last two systems may not be world-beaters but are decent enough and an average profit of around 10pts or more a season means they may make worthy additions to a portfolio so all three of these League One systems will be paper traded to the end of the season.

If I thought things were looking up for League One then League Two was in a different class altogether. The simple value test of backing all value teams regardless of how much value the odds offered (as long as there was some real value in the odds) was profitable! That means all one needs to do to make money is churn out the value odds for each League Two match and back any team whose odds exceeded these value odds - simple! Of course, I wasn't going to settle for that as the ROI was only 1 or 2% so I knew from experience that the application of a couple of filters would greatly improve these figures. How does a profit of 79.685pts from 464 bets (a ROI of 17.17%) sound? What about 359 bets returning 99.03pts profit for a ROI of 27.58%? Or another 99.54pts of profit from 480 bets at a ROI of 20.74%? They are the figures for the linear, logarithmic and polynomial League Two systems - not bad eh? I need to see how these fare in the 'real' world so will be paper trading them alongside the other systems taking the number of systems uncovered from this line of research to 14 so far, with a couple of ideas still to investigate.

I will be posting qualifiers from all systems later on this afternoon or tomorrow - I just need to get the spreadsheet up to date to handle these new systems and then we're away.

[mathare]

7th December 2009
I said a week or two back that the Premiership was probably distorting the fits for the other divisions because the teams with high rating points tend to keep most of those points rather than have their score reset when they get division (via promotion) so I set about splitting the dat up by division and modelling that. I produced a number of systems that way but there are other ways to skin a cat. If the Premiership is the major factor in the fit not working for the lower divisions when then separate the Championship, League One and League Two? Why not build a model based on all three divisions? That's exactly what I have just done, and again it has turned out a number of interesting-looking systems.

The headline stats look pretty good:
Linear: 1469 bets, 112.95pts profit, 7.69% ROI
Logarithmic: 1302 bets, 139.54pts profit, 10.72% ROI
Polynomial: 1538 bets, 123.01pts profit, 8.00% ROI

But break these figures down by season and you'd see that the seasons 05/06 to 07/08 are steady, 08/09 is a stellar season making plenty of profit and then this season is a nightmare so far with each system seeing a drawdown in the region 25-30pts. Is that a correction for last season, putting things back to normal? Or is this a sign that the system has died and will record a big loss this year? There is no way of telling at this stage so I will, of course, be paper trading these three new systems alongside the others to see how they pan out for the rest of this campaign.

And after nearly a month of working on it (on and off) that pretty much brings to an end the study of these team ratings. I will take a bit of a break from this when I have tied up a few loose ends and come back with some new ideas in a little while. There is plenty of work in the pipeline...

[mathare]

7th December 2009 (part two)
At the back of my mind for the past few weeks have been conflicting thoughts. On one hand there is an optimist thinking these football systems can be combined to form lovely little portfolios that can be relied on to bring in a nice sum every football season. On the other is the realist asking why these potentially excellent systems don't seem to be living up to their reputations in the paper trades. Sure, it's early days for the paper trades but there are more red numbers than black in the columns that matter.

It's fair to say that the work I have done to put together these systems includes a fair amount of what could potentially be construed as data mining. The system rules are justifiable and I can explain why each of them makes sense but all of these systems were constructed using an artificial set of odds really. They use the average odds from a variety of bookmakers but no-one intentionally bets to average odds do they? This is where the lack of an SP in football is really irritating and frustrating. Because I am using rules that apply both a minimum and maximum to the odds at which any given team should be backed (through the margins of value) I may find that the averages odds lie squarely in that window but that the best odds are outside it. Then what? Back at odds that are not the best available? That way madness lies but should I spurn the bet simply because one bookie has gone out on a limb and set odds outside my value range? It's a real conundrum.

What I have done to try and work through this issue is bring in the odds from a couple of bookies and use them in place of the average odds and then recalculate the system figures. I have done this for the Premiership Linear system initially. The average odds give a profit of 68.92pts from 408 bets. The Bet365 odds result in a profit of 18.62pts from 390 bets - a much lower profit although roughly the same number of bets. Hmmm. Use odds from Ladbrokes and there are 325 bets resulting in a loss of 23.65pts. It's 5.06pts from 280 bets with Stan James and 28.47pts from 364 bets using Victor Chandler's prices. Even using the best odds from BetBrain it's only 27.35pts from 414 bets.

None of those are even close to the profits I claimed before are they?

I have checked back on how the odds I used previously were derived and that's all fine. I have double checked the formulae used to calculate the profits and they are all spot on too.

I still don't quite understand it and will have to let it churn around in my brain for a while and see what comes out later - I'll probably have some idea when I settle down to go to sleep tonight! I think all I can do at this stage is paper-trade the systems and see how that goes. Those trials are using the best odds from the Oddschecker bookmakers, which is what I would use when backing the selections myself and seems as good a set of odds to use as any. Anyway, I have slapped the optimism back down a bit and mentally started halving any of the ROI figures I gave previously to make them potentially more realistic and achievable. But the time for really reviewing this is in May, not now, but I felt it important to share this insight and add the potential health warning that the claimed profits may not be possible but not because I have been fiddling the figures - I can't quite explain why. Yet.

[MattR]

Interesting Mat. What if you just used those bookmakers and took the best odds on offer from those for each game. Where does the ROI and profit sit then?

[mathare]

Interesting Mat. What if you just used those bookmakers and took the best odds on offer from those for each game. Where does the ROI and profit sit then?I don't know and I have killed off the spreadsheet I was using for it now. Oh well. As I said, the paper trade for the rest of this season is the acid test as far as I am concerned. I will look again at the end of the season how the odds I used during that trial compare with the odds available elsewhere (using data from football-data) and compare ROIs again at that stage

[mathare]

9th December 2009
I am very angry and frustrated! I didn't realise till around 9.30 last night that in amongst all the Champions League games and FA Cup replays were a number of Championship fixtures. Because I hadn't spotted these were being played I haven't included them in any of the paper trades I am doing on this division, and while they are only paper trades I was trying to make sure they were based on real odds that I recorded so I knew they were accurate. I can't get the under/over odds now either.

With all this in mind I set about trying to work out how best to update my various football spreadsheets to account for these missed fixtures and in doing so have uncovered some glaring errors in some of my code that invalidates a lot of the work I have done so far in this division, and perhaps in others too. This is BAD news!

I will update this thread and the appropriate system threads when I have finally worked through the mess and assessed the true impact of these errors

[mathare]

9th December 2009 (part two)
Oh, what a mess!

I have sorted out my Unders-Overs spreadsheet and associated systems now, including double-checking the bets for this season are now spot on. They may not exactly match what I have posted as part of the paper trade before but the figures are right at least. I'll sort all that out on the appropriate thread shortly though.

I think the team ratings systems will be less of a hassle to sort out. I hope so anyway!

[mathare]

9th December 2009 (part three)
My Team Ratings spreadsheet was much easier to sort out, thankfully!

It's a good job I have an honest face and am only paper trading these systems though as last night would have netted a profit of 23.40pts largely thanks to away wins from Blackpool and Cardiff, both of which came up on all three Championship-specific systems. My figures will include these bets (which I have posted up after the event) for completeness as I am tracking the systems performance over the season as well as during the paper trade so need all the games in there. It's typical that the evening I miss is a cracker though isn't it?

I'll have to be more careful not to miss games in the future. I know how it happened too, which is more annoying. I usually check a certain webpage for a service I use at lunchtime and that lists all the fixtures for the next few days along with their ratings. Somehow, yesterday I forgot to check this webpage and missed those matches. Oh well, mistakes happen I guess, and I have learned to be more attentive in the future :)

[mathare]

11th December 2009
Why? Why do I always seem to do this? I have several projects on the go and then one day I wake up and find something else, something that sounds more 'fun', that I want to do too and throw that into the mix as well. Why can't I prioritise and actually finish one project before starting another? I am juggling so many things at the minute it's ridiculous, and at the back of my mind is the thought that the missus probably wants me to go back to work one day not spend the rest of my life starting umpteen little (!) projects and not actually completing any of them.

The latest project to be thrown into the mix is the back testing of my False Favs. I started to go through it manually this morning (as that is how I pick all the selections on a daily basis anyway) before realising that to pick the horses, then fill in all the results with SP and BSP is going to take ages. I know Excel and VBA well enough to know this can be speeded up a little, as long as I have all the data in the right format. Which I don't but I can work on that, right? So that's what I set about doing, organising and reformatting racecard data so that eventually I will be in a position to hopefully automate the back testing of the False Favs, at least to some degree. And it has taken all morning so far and I am still not that close to completing this portion of the task. Meanwhile I have various notes and files littering my desk and HDD relating to the various other projects I have on the go. Would it reallly be that hard to finish some of them off? For me, unfortunately the answer seems to be YES!

[mathare]

11th December 2009 (part two)
It may have taken all morning and most of the afternoon but I hope it was worth it. I have hopefully proved to everyone (including myself) that my False Favs lay system is profitable in the long-run despite the recent poor performance. I have put up over 16 months worth of qualifiers from the last two years and the graphs show a steady upward trend - the system definitely works but like any laying system it has swings, both upward and downward. But it is the long-term trend that is most important and that is certainly in the right direction.

As a result of this back-test I have also improved on some of the tools I had previously built to help me with projects such as this one and I now have a fully working toolset for back-testing various systems, which will surely come in useful in the future. I feel rather content about all of this now, and I am certain that this is the end of that project too - I won't back-test the lays any further back, I see no need to, and there is no way I can fill in the gap between November last year and June this year - so I can draw a line under it and check it off as done on my ever-increasing 'to do' list.

Now what's next? :laugh

[tophatter]

Now what's next? :laugh

A cup of tea!

[mathare]

14th December 2009
It was a staking review morning for me today as I was getting sick of seeing the stats on my spreadsheet that tell me several of the lay systems I follow are in the black when viewed in terms of points profit but in the red for cash terms. It means I am losing when the points are worth more and winning when the points are worth less - exactly the opposite of what I should be doing. I'm maximising my losses and minimising my wins, to some degree at least. So I have taken some time out to review the staking for all the W2W lays systems I follow.

Before discussing the new staking plans I will be applying to these systems I ought to explain the staking I currently use as my default plan. I use a 1% fixed stake rounded down to the nearest 50p. So for a £500 bank my stake is £5, which is how it remains till the bank reaches £550 (or £450) at which point the stake is recalculated. It made sense to me when I first started to use this plan as it's effectively staking slightly under 1% on average so has that little bit more safety than standard 1% staking. It also makes life simpler, staking £5 rather than £5.23 etc.

Now I am beginning to realise this 'one size fits all' approach doesn't work that well so I am looking at plans that suit each individual system better. I am looking only at simple plans - namely fixed stakes, fixed liability, percentage stakes and percentage liability - as I don't feel it is worth complicating issues more than necessary. I don't want to even think about loss-chasing plans and so on - keep it simple, stupid. So I have split out the data from each system under review and applied each of these plans to the selections using a £500 starting bank with settings of £5 fixed stake, £50 fixed liability, 1% stake and 10% liability. I have used these settings as they mirror my default staking plan fairly closely in as much as I use a 1% basic stake (which is £5 from a £500 bank) and cutoff at 11.0 which means my maximum liability is ten times my stake so £50 or 10% of the bank. All figures take a 5% commission into account and are based on my data rather than official bets and odds.

CD Lays
Using a £50 fixed liability is best here, nearly doubling the bank by the end of the review period (924 lays from 29th April 2007 to yesterday) at a ROI of 1.08%, which is 0.40% better than the next best plan which was £5 fixed stakes (£171.90) profit. Fixed liability is only really worse than fixed stakes in one brief period near the start of the lays and is usually way ahead in profit terms, especially in the second half or so of the bet sequence. The bank reaches a lowest point of £397.06 from a starting value of £500 so the plan is very safe too it seems.

The actual staking I had been using comes out worst of all the plans.

Ladies Lays
The most profitable staking plan is fixed liability with a profit of £184.65 from the 342 lays on this system, equivalent to a ROI of 1.08%. Fixed stakes comes next with £165.75 at a ROI of 1.72%. Percentage stakes has a ROI of 1.26% generating £141.06 of profit while percentage liability and my own staking plan are dreadful and best forgotten about. The graph for these staking plans shows the fixed liability plan to have deeper troughs and higher peaks making it a much swingier plan than the other two, which look pretty similar but the vote goes to fixed stakes for simplicity and the better ROI (and better profit, ultimately). The £500 reaches a low of just under £350 for fixed stake, £226.70 for fixed liability and £360.97 for the percentage staking plan so fixed stake again seems safe enough with 70% of the starting bank never brought into action.

Lay'em
Here there are a massive 3004 lays so the staking analysis has plenty of data to work with. Percentage liability results in a loss of £189.66 so I'm not using that plan. Percentage staking has a ROI of 0.43% for a profit of £488.26, fixed stake results in £792.95 profit at a ROI of 0.82% while fixed liability generates £1024.83 at a ROI of 0.68%. So fixed liability results in the most profit but fixed stake has the best ROI. When the lays hit a bad run the fixed liability plan drops hardest and fastest but it is fixed stake that gives the smoothest ride so looks the best candidate here. The record lows on the banks are £346.60 for fixed stake, £85.93 for fixed liability and £288.68 for percentage staking. It has to be fixed stake on that basis then.

Max Lays
Of the gour new plans only the fixed stake and fixed liability show a profit and both are in three figures, which is a decent start. The actual figures are £105.55 (0.37% ROI) for fixed stake and £167.55 (0.36%) for fixed liability. Unfortunately the fixed liability bank busts at one point so we'd best not use that one, eh. Admittedly the performance of all plans has improved greatly since that point, which came a good while back (around 400 lays into a 941 lay sequence covering 19th March 2007 to the present day) but even so the liability plan is very twitchy with high highs and low lows while the fixed stake plan just gets on with it and runs relatively smoothly and steadily. The lows on these plans are £189.55 and -£144.54 for fixed stake and fixed liability respectively but as I said this was some time ago and things have improved a lot since then. Anyway, fixed stake is better than the staking I am currently using so I guess I should switch to that.

NH Profit Machine
My staking isn't so bad here with my plan coming in 3rd but still well behind the two fixed plans. Fixed stake makes a profit of £858.90 (2.76% ROI) whereas fixed liability comes out at £1533.65 (2.82% ROI). The percentage plans make more profit, significantly so for the percentage liability plan which makes nearly £3500 profit, but the ROIs are much lower. Also the percentage liability graph is mental! It has crazy spikes that come crashing down as fast as the profits build - I don't need that sort of scary ride thanks very much. Fixed stake gives the smoothest ride but fixed liability isn't that bad for this system. The ups and downs are a little more extreme but not massively so and the fixed stake and fixed liability lines are diverging throughout indicating the latter will continue to generate greater profits and it has the better ROI, just. The banks are safe with lows of £388.77 on fixed liability and £469.00 on fixed stake. There is no significant extra risk associated with using fixed liability so that is the plan I will use here.

I'm not suggesting anyone else following these systems should immediately change their staking here, by the way. These are reviews done on my data and are changes I will make to my staking - how you stake these systems is up to you. I have found that the aforementioned plans seem to suit the data best according to my records but the same may not be true for you so you should conduct your own staking reviews before making any changes to your existing staking methods.

Incidentally I did the same exercise for my own False Favs and will be changing my staking there to fixed stake.

[mathare]

14th December 2009 (part two)
Having got back into playing poker again in the last few decision, I decided this evening that I really need to get out of the habit again. Due to health concerns I have been out of work for nearly four months now and have been using the time to learn more about what it takes to make it as a professional gambler and while I am a way off making a living from the game I have streamlined my portfolio, made sure I am staking properly and generally learned a lot about the mindset required to make an income solely from gambling. It's a rocky ride but I think I could ride it out - if the missus will let me!

My thinking has changed quite a lot from when this was just a hobby, a small second income alongside my salary. Everything is about the bottom line now more than it used to be. How am I spending my time and what is that doing to contribute towards making a profit? I allow myself the evenings off but during the day I want almost everything I do to somehow be working towards making professional punting pay off for me. Staking reviews, systems research, number crunching etc. is all good ground work that will benefit me long term. Taking the time to place my bets, checking the markets so I can get good odds etc are moves that will see a more immediate pay off.

Poker, on the other hand, is lucky to bring in 20c an hour! What use is that? It's profit, right, and I am gaining experience true enough but I am struggling to see the pay off for the effort I am putting in. I have been around poker - playing, reading, learning - for several years now yet I am still piddling about on the micro stakes cash tables and have yet to make anything like a decent score from the cards. That's not to say I am a really bad player, I don't think I'm too bad when I am truly focused and playing my 'A' game, just that for whatever reason (mainly not having the time to really focus and dedicate my efforts into playing to the best of my ability I suspect) I haven't been able to get far off the ground with poker. Not that I am giving up, it's just that I want to move poker to one of my many back burners and focus more on projects that I have had in the pipeline for ages now and I really need to do something about them. They could have a very bright future and pay off in several ways, not only making me money but also giving me an opportunity, so I ought to take them seriously and give them the time and attention they deserve and require.

The thing is with me is that while something is new, fun and interesting I can't let it drop and have to keep plugging away with it. Until it gets a bit stale, or is usurped by something more fun or more interesting to me at that moment in time. Then the original project is left to stagnate and I find it hard to pick it up again. In order to breathe life into some of my old work I have had to start from scratch, both to keep it interesting by going back to basics and to make it possible to actually start it again as I didn't keep very good notes on what I was up to. I have tried to improve on the latter part of that by making detailed notes on everything I do now. For the football team ratings stuff I did I ended up making 25 pages of notes. In fact they are more than notes, I write something akin to a full explanation, a manual of sorts detailing the approach, the results and my thoughts along the way. I want to be able to pick these things up at any stage by reading these notes and hopefully get right back into the correct sort of mindset. That's the idea anyway.

One of the projects I have on the go is a software development project that I had the idea for several years ago. I had dabbled with bits of it in the past but never really got very far. I gave it up as I didn't have the time to dedicate to it (sound familiar?) but now I could make that time and do something useful with my time. If I need to go back into the job market, is it better to refresh and develop my software development skills or my poker skills? Much as I would love to say poker is more important, it's not is it? I took this project up again recently and got going but then hit a major stumbling block. I didn't (and still don't) know how to get to the vision of the software I have in my mind. I know what I want it to do but I don't quite know how to get there. I started to learn Visual Basic as that is what I will program in but the training materials I had didn't take me far enough. So I have got another course, a more thorough one, and I know I should see it all through from the very start but it is boring as I know most of the early stuff so it's not gripping me and making me think "I need to do more of this, it's fun." Sure, I could skip some of the early parts but as I am learning a whole fresh language I want to make sure I have all the basics down pat and know all the little tricks these courses tend to contain as they will surely come in useful in the future. So I have the carrot of the bits I want to learn dangling in front of me but it's just not tempting me, it feels more like a chore than something I want to do at present. I need to change that mindset and slog through these basics so it gets a bit more involved and fun then hopefully I will be re-enthused and can start to make some progress.

I am more likely to convince the missus to let stay at home and be a (semi-)professional gambler if I can show I am doing something useful with my time - and that means making good progress with this software project or proving I can make a decent income at the card tables. At the minute I'd say the former is a lot more likely than the latter so I have to give that route a fair crack of the whip. I will still play poker but I need to think of it as a treat almost, something to be played on and off for profitable enjoyment but not one of the main uses of my 'working' day.

[mathare]

16th December 2009
The recent poor run of results on the horses continues and in all honesty it is starting to grind me down. I have started to really fight for good prices but it's not making an ounce of difference when the horses don't play their part. With the profit from the Chelsea-Everton match last weekend I am pretty much assured a profit this month unless there is a total meltdown on the nags in the next couple of weeks but that profit should be greater if this were an average month (whatever one of those may be).

I am seeking solace in numbers, as I so often do. I want to make sure my portfolio is tight and that my staking is appropriate. Fortunately, since I added in the calculation of profit in points a few months back this is much easier now than it used to be. All I really need to do is check that each of my systems is profitable when viewed as points and that my staking is sensible given things like the longest losing run to date. Here is that information for the W2W Systems I follow:

45 Males
I hold my hands up now and admit I haven't been keeping a very careful eye on this one recently. My bank isn't much above the barrier I set so I have sort of forgotten about it somewhat. Naughty, naughty. Anyway, I'm down 5.38pts at the minute with a current losing run (CLR) of 1. The LLR is 9 so my 3% staking is fine for handling the losing runs but I must remember to keep an eye out for selections.

Claiming Jockey
I only have 40 bets recorded and am down less than a point so I can't draw any meaningful conclusions here. An LLR of 6 (so far) plus a CLR of 3 would suggest that may standard 3% staking is fine for the job and it's a case of waiting to build up more data on this one to see how it turns out long-term.

Double Top
Up 144.65pts from 1404 bets so well in profit. The LLR is 16 so the conventional wisdom of doubling that to get the suggested bank means my 3% staking is pretty much spot on. The CLR is 7 with a short-priced winner coming just before that sequence started. It's been struggling the last month or two (down nearly 10pts since the start of November) but remains a solid system. It's just suffering the same blip that everything else seems to be having around now and as this is my biggest backing bank it is costing me more in cash terms than poor runs on other systems. But this does mean when it comes good again, as it will, then I will make back those losses in decent time. The graphs show this is doing well and is steady in the long-run at least, so I am happy with that.

First Timer
I only have very few bets on this system since March 2009, 14 to be exact, which makes me wonder about the rules and how Auto-Sys is handling them. They look fine, but the rules themsekves are quite restrictive so it kinda makes sense that I haven't had many bets. I'm up 5.51pts but this isn't that meaningful on such a small sample size.

Info Rated
Only 54 bets in this one too so again no significance can be placed on the findings. November saw the longest losing run to date at 6 but there have been a couple of runs of 5 losers in the past. I'm down 2.87pts thus far but the 3% staking should easily handle any losing runs and again it's a case of letting this one get into the long run rather than focusing on short term results from a small sample.

Johnston Fav Tracks
A profit of 149.75pts from 611 bets on this low SR system which has seen a losing run of 29 before now, making the current run of 6 look pretty insignificant. I reduced my stakes a while back on this system to protect the bank and it seems like a good job I did with such a high LLR figure. But if you can stomach the losing runs associated with a low SR this is a worthy addition to any portfolio with Mark Johnston bagging winners at good prices in the summer. The graphs show this year has followed the same basic trend as last year, a steady start followed by some big wins before slipping back a bit late in the season. This one is solid enough.

LTO3
A profit of 15.58pts (from just under 400 bets) but a cash loss of just over a tenner suggests I am doing something a bit wrong here. The profit graph for this one is spiky rather than a relatively smooth upward trend so I have probably been staking high as the profit comes down and then low as it climbs again, as can happen with percentage staking. This is a candidate for a staking review but as a system is profitable, on the whole. The LLR is 11 but it has been in good form recently with only 3 losing bets in the last 10. October and November saw a run of 9 losers though and only 2 winners in 21 bets so perhaps this one experienced the bad run earlier than most other systems.

Michael Stoute
+38.59pts from this one to date with an LLR of 17 (so 3% staking is safe enough really) and a current losing run of 5. This one has been pretty static this year really but long-term it's alright. Actually, last year wasn't so hot for this one either (a loss of 8.25pts) whereas 2007 was a bumper year (+43.45pts) so it is worth monitoring this one to see if the bubble has burst. I have sensible staking and a bank barrier in place though so I have the tools to be able to keep my eye on this one and am protected if it really has seen better days. Hmm, I hadn't realise how this had stagnated. Interesting.

NH Media
This system has seen a steady increase over the past couple of years, or at least as steady an increase as gambling banks can have given their ups and downs. I only have 19.44pts profit from 910 bets which is pretty small I have to admit. The current run is 3 winners in a row and just 3 losers in the last 10 bets whereas the LLR is 13. My staking is safe; this just doesn't make much profit each year but it can tick along in the background, and it's interesting to note that this is one of few systems currently experiencing a purple patch.

SixPlus Loser
Up and down, up and down. But mostly down this one, since the summer at least. A loss of 4.67pts from the fairly small number of bets so far (143 bets) with an LLR of 11 but a recent run of 2 winners from the last 5. Most losing runs seem to be around 3, 4 or 5 punctuated by a winner or two. Another to just let run and see where it goes I think. My analysis suggests this is best in the summer but can be very swingy but I am using a small sample so I can't be confident about those conclusions.

Trainer 3
I restarted this around March of this year and am up 10.07pts so far from 175 bets. Things peaked around October and have steadily fallen since. The LLR of 11 came in early-mid November but since that point it has been pretty much on message with 14 winners in 34 bets resulting in a net loss of 1.57pts, so the SR is about right but the prices on the winners are a bit on the low side. I don't have enough data to be totally confident of the long-term stats for this one but I think it's yet another one that needs to be left to bubble along and see where it takes me.

It seems that some of the systems are actually performing well at present, some are perfectly average and others are indeed running below the expected levels but this is natural for any portfolio I'd say. It's nice to discover that not everything is broken though - just the systems that are carrying more of my cash perhaps. I haven't found anything other than the LTO3 system that has really made me question my staking too so I am happy to let things go on as they are for the most part. I'm doing my bit but I need the horses to play along too and then I will surely reap the benefits of all these systems.

[mathare]

Saturday 19th December
There is no easy way to say this - today hurt! Today was expensive, my fourth worst day ever in fact. The backs I am following continue to run through a real rough patch and today the lays decided to join in the fun and games. I said on today's daily waffle thread that today is the closest I can ever recall coming to quitting gambling and I really think that's true. Today was a real kicking given that I have recently put a lot of effort into doing all I can to make sure my house is in order when it comes to gambling. I have given my portfolio a thorough examination and checked all my staking and still I suffer days like this - it just doesn't seem fair does it? That's because it's not, like the rest of life.

I think I know why today hurt more than other days, and it's not just the amount of money I lost (although that is surely part of it). It's my health and state of mind too. You may (or may not) know that for several months now I have been suffering abdominal pain. Constantly. I've seen my GP plenty of times and tried tons of different tablets. I've seen consultant gastroenterologists and had three endoscopies (two gastrocopies, one colonoscopy) plus numerous blood tests and an ultrasound. And I am still in pain. Recently my GP put me on peppermint oil tablets as an anti-spasmodic and they really helped - most of the pain was gone after taking the tablets. Until a couple of days ago. The pain came back with a vengeance and the peppermint oil tablets just aren't doing it for me any more. I have upped the dose to the maximum stated on the info leaflet but I am still in pain. It's been around 8 months of pain now and despite all the drugs and all the tests the NHS is no nearer finding out what's wrong with me. Do you know how frustrating that is? It's also pretty depressing.

I gave up my job (that I hated anyway) in August as I couldn't work through the pain and wanted to reduce my stress levels (not that it seems to have made any difference to my condition) so I have no income. I was claiming Employment Support Allowance but my medical certificate ran out recently. But that's OK as the peppermint oil tablets are working and I could go back to work, right? Right, a week or two that was the case but no longer. I have an appointment with a GP (but notmy GP) on Monday when I hope to get more drugs and a new medical certificate. Until then it's pain all the way.

So my mind isn't exactly 100% to say the least. The pain I am in is ball-breaking enough without my only source of income kicking me in the knackers too! That partly explains why I felt like quitting. But I have calmed down now, relaxed a little. I was watching Rain Man but I couldn't focus, my mind was racing. Updating this is cathartic in many ways and helps me clarify my thoughts so let's get it all down on 'paper'.

My worst losing days tend to coincide with poor days on the lays; the backs down help but losing backs are a steady dripping away of funds whereas a bad day on the lays can wipe weeks, if not months, of previous profits. I need to reduce the impact of such days of my bottom line. How? Diversification.

I think my portfolio has a pretty reasonable balance in terms of backing and laying systems and I don't have all my eggs in one basket when it comes to the sports I bet on. Most of my turnover is on the horses, sure, but I have bets on football, darts, rugby and all sorts of sports. I have been trialling a football tipster for the past month or so and things are looking pretty good there so that could be something to follow up on. The new SBC newsletter is out next week too so over the christmas break I may well scour the pages of that in detail looking for other non-racing services to bring on board. I really think I need to start increasing my turnover on other sports so that the racing doesn't dominate my betting activities so heavily. What the the chances of racing, football and all the other sports kicking me in the nuts at once? It has to be lower than just one sport doing it.

As well as diversify my betting activities I need to think about other ways I can bring in a few quid on a fairly regular basis. I have done some writing in the past and am thinking about picking that up again. I am also developing some software that should make a difference once I get it into a workable position but that is many months, perhaps ever over a year, away from reality due to the complexity and scale of the project. Still, I am determined to make it work for me and when it's done it could be a really good revenue stream but as I said that is somewhere down the line. But gambling will still have to be my main income source (I'm in no fit state to work really) so I could do without any more kicks in the balls like I had today. I am pretty confident I am in a good position to make hay when the gambling sun finally shines but at present it feels like it's thick grey clouds as far as the eye can see. I need to remain positive (about everything) and ensure I am making steps towards what I want to achieve no matter how small those steps are. But I also need to recognise I am making such steps and content myself with that. There are a lot of positives to what I am doing these days and I need to remember that. Of course, winning a few quid along the way would help :wink

[mathare]

Sunday 21st December
Days like yesterday make me want to take everything apart and put it back together again to make sure it is all as I expect it to be; inspect every little piece and clean it before reassembling. With that in mind I have been pondering my choice of betting exchange. I have been with Betdaq for a while now (I switched from Betfair when they changed their commission structure to one I regarded as less fair) but there is no doubt that they are very much the little brother as far as exchanges are concerned and that all the big money is on Betfair. So I have been wondering, even though I am on a better commission rate with Betdaq than I would be with Betfair (something that would remain the case for quite a while with my turnover levels) is that being offset by having to take worse prices, particularly for the lays? Would I be better off paying more commission to Betfair but getting better prices there? Unfortunately there is no easy way to tell if that would be the case (whether the Betfair prices are better) short of running the two sets of prices side by side for a continued period to ensure a fair test. But for how long and for which markets etc? Of course, once I decide to switch exchange I am immediately shooting myself in the foot in terms of commission. By moving back to Betfair for even a short while I will be reducing my Betdaq turnover and thus increasing the commission paid there so I need to make a decision (the right decision) and stick to it. And to do that I need information, I need to be able to directly compare the two exchanges to see which is offering me the best deal.

I did a study some time ago that showed at low turnovers Betdaq offered the better commission structure and that is still the case. But commission is only one factor. Betfair has the BSP concept that Betdaq lacks. Ditto commission points holidays, which are something I miss I must say. But it's the prices that matter most, along with the liquidity at those odds. My False Favs records show that on Betdaq I have recorded around an 11% overlay whereas BSP is equivalent to something like a 21% overlay on SP, significantly greater. However, that's Betfair starting price, not necessarily the price I would be taking on Betfair. Hmmm.

I am starting to feel like one of those people who is being different just for the sake of it by using Betdaq. You mention exchanges and people instantly think of Betfair, and for good reason. They have much better advertising than the purple people and have been more innovative too. Take the liquidities too. There is currently over £538k matched on the match odds market on Betfair for the West Ham v Chelsea game this afternoon but just £88k on Betdaq. That's a big difference. The prices are the same (as one would expect else arbers would have mopped it all up) but the volumes are staggeringly different. More than twice as much has already been matched on Betfair than Betdaq for the 2.15 at Kempton and even at the high prices the gap between the back and lay odds is smaller on Betfair indicating a more active market even at that end of it. For example, Taaresh is 34/36 on Betfair and 31/39 on Betdaq. Cossack Prince is 19.5/24 on Betdaq but 20/22 on Betfair. It makes a difference.

I am starting to convince myself that I need to switch to Betfair. I think this is one case in gambling where it is best to go with the crowd rather than against it. If nothing else I can treat it as a fresh start, an opportunity to draw a line under the lousy recent results and to try again with a 'new' exchange and a fresh new attitude to it all. Sure, I'll be back on 5% commission rather than the 4.25 I am on at present but this somehow feels like the right move. After all, I am probably going to need to deposit funds with an exchange soon anyway after the lays yesterday so I have that opportunity to make the switch.

I'm not going to rush into this one though. I have enough in Betdaq to see me through today and hopefully through till Christmas at least so I can re-evaluate how I feel and what I think the right decision is then. I'd need more in my account to get through Boxing Day but it is likely that I will take that day off anyway so that may not be a concern. Betfair feels like the right answer but as I say, I ned to ponder this one a bit more.

[MattR]

Difficult one Mat. I did/do have a betdaq account, though I can't even remember the password it's that long since I used it and I only had a few bets in there with a small amount and I used up the balance in there with an arb that won at the bookmakers (this is back over 2-3 years ago now!) I also have a small amount in World Bet Exchange but that was really just to get the joining bonus. I was also testing something on NHL and they had a lower commission rate on that so I did it in there. Football wise Betfair have many more markets especially on the less prominent leagues. I don't think you can get half time and correct scores on the lower English leagues can you? Maybe that's changed I'm not certain.

What if you were to put a small amount in to Betfair and run perhaps one back and one lay system in there as a live test?

[mathare]

What if you were to put a small amount in to Betfair and run perhaps one back and one lay system in there as a live test?I thought about that but for how long should I run such a test? It takes time for an overlay figure to settle down to anything like it's true value so were I to do this I would be better off moving over systems with a decent number of selections so that the 'long term' is reached faster as it were but in doing so I take away a decent chunk of the turnover from my Betdaq account and thus increase the commission on every other system. It's a tricky one. Plus it has to be an existing system that is moved to Betfair rather than a new system so that I have some idea what sort of overlay is expected.

There are two voices doing battle in my head at the minute - one telling me to stick with Betdaq and once telling me to switch to Betfair. on one hand I don't want to change things just for the sake of change; I have to make any changes for the right reasons. But on the other I do often notice that the gap between back and lay prices in Betdaq is often more than one tick and with a low liquidity it is easier for prices to shift faster and more extensively. Someone determined to get a few grand on a horse at Betdaq means I may have to chase the lay price up a few ticks whereas that is not likely to be the case on Betfair, it may be one or two ticks at most especially at the front end of the market. Whenever I look at my P&L figures I am staggered by the effect commission has on things - for example I have paid £65 in commission to Betdaq this month and that's with some big losing days where less commission is paid compared to big winning days. I know I will pay more at Betfair, for the foreseaable future at least, but do the benefits outweigh the additional costs? Striker Torres went of at a BSP of 9.25 yesterday whereas I had to chase the price up to 9.4 on Betdaq to get matched. That could have saved me a couple of quid there. Charlie Delta went off at 5.58 BSP whereas I was on at 7.6 so I could have saved £20 there! Getting prices like that will certainly help offset the additional commission payments. OK, there's no guarantee I would have got matched at anything like BSP, I could have been on at a similar price to that I was matched at on Betdaq anyway, but there are certainly signs pointing me towards a switch back to Betfair. If it is not a superior exchange why does it have so many more users (and a greater liquidity) than Betdaq? It's not as though Betdaq is still the new kid on the block any more either.

[MattR]

I think there's a couple of answers to why more people are on Betfair. The biggest one is liquidity. Unless the big players switch then I don't think others will. The second key one I see is the amount of in play stuff they do. There are probably 50-70 football matches in running on a saturday and sunday and they are now also doing unmanaged inplay match odds on the championship and serie B. I think virtually every tennis match on the atp and wta tour is in running as well. Another factor is the amount of markets they do and events they cover.

Mat, what if you were to mix and match for a while? When you go to put your lays in have betfair and betdaq open and simply take the best price, whichever exchange it is on.

[barrelmaniac]

Mathare, you obviously have a certain amount of pressure in your betting, not that its your fault as unfortunately your health has dictated much of the situation that you are in. I hoped that by now betting would be my primary source of income, but unfortunately it hasnt worked out that way (yet).

I was in a position about a year ago when I was about to give up betting, but for me I found myself coming back to it, I came back to it because the the enjoyment that I get from it, not like a gambler in a bookie buzz, but the enjoyment of trying something, learning and understanding while hopefully oneday making some real money from this, so here I am, still here and enjoying my adventure, I decided to try and enjoy the ups and downs with money that I can easily afford to lose.

I know that your situation is different, you certainly put a lot of work into this and I hope it works for you, If I were you I would put this week behind you, regroup your thoughts and keep trying, However if you feel like throwing the towel in again in the future its probably right for you to check your general situation if and when it happens and change accordingly, there is sometimes a time when we stop and think that something is 'just not fun anymore' when it comes to this its time to stop. However I don't think that your adventure is over with betting yet.

[mathare]

Mat, what if you were to mix and match for a while? When you go to put your lays in have betfair and betdaq open and simply take the best price, whichever exchange it is on.That's a possibility I suppose. I'll give the practicalties of that one some thought

[mathare]

21st December 2009
The Betdaq v Betfair debate is still the major issue and I have been thinking through the pros and cons of each for some time now. I have considered the options, including moving some systems over and checking both exchanges side by side but I just don't think they will work for me. As I said the other day I am not able to focus 100% all of the time (which is another reason why I think I should steer clear of the poker tables) because of the pain so having bets on with two exchanges is likely to lead to error. I know it's a lay bet but should it be with Betdaq or Betfair? If I am checking prices from the two exchanges side by side I could get into a situation where I have an order on one exchange then spot a better price on the rival exchange, take that and before I can cancel it my other order is matched too. If I cancel the order before placing the other bet I could then find the price has moved at the second exchange and I now need to go to the back of the queue at whichever exchange I decide to use for that bet. It's opening up another potential source of error, something I am keen to avoid.

The missus is forcing my hand on this one somewhat, which may not be a bad thing else I may procrastinate excessively, by dragging me out christmas shopping this afternoon so I will need more funds in whichever exchange account I wish to use else I won't be able to cover the bets while I am out. Throw another few hundred into Betdaq and play things out there till I am 100% about this decision (I am currently about 80% or so) or trust my instincts and jump ship to Betfair? This week will be my last on the 4.25% commission rate at Betdaq as I am only 1 point above the level at which I need to have that rate so next week I'd be on 4.5% anyway so commission becomes less of a factor in my decision in some ways. I keep coming back to the fact that Betfair is so much bigger and more popular than Betdaq and the thought that I am now rebelling for the sake of it rather than for any really valid reason so it is looking increasingly likely that I will rejoin the ranks of active Betfair punters. Unless I can think of a good reason not to make the switch back by the first race I will be depositing into my Betfair account and using that instead of my Betdaq account. At least that way I have around a week to get used to Betfair again before the new year starts and I start with a clean fresh outlook on all my betting activities.

[mathare]

29th December 2009
The year is nearly over and I am looking forward to 2010. At least I think I am. My mind is whirring with all sorts of plans but unfortunately very few, if any, of them have a clear path forward. I have some grandiose ideas but I don't know how to get more than a few baby steps along the road to fulfilling these ideas and that bothers me. A lot.

Over christmas I did a lot of thinking (unintentionally really but then I had a lot of downtime) about a couple of football projects I am working on. The first is a long-term study project that has a very fuzzy outline in my head. It's one of those that until I start to do more work on it then I won't really know what it is and what I am trying to get out of it. I couldn't summarise it as present as I don't really understand what I want from this project and where I should be taking it. I have tried to sit down and define it a bit more but find myself unable to do so - I just can't get a clear enough image of what is possible and what use some of the data I have could be. I have to get in there and get my hands mucky before it will start to take shape. It's almost as though I need to start clicking Lego blocks together almost at random, looking hard at they shapes they form, before I work out what it is I am trying to build. And continuing that rather odd analogy, I will probably end up breaking up a number of the Lego structures I do put together before settling on the final design.

The second project isn't much more defined either. I have had an idea for a piece of software in my head for a long time now and have the opportunity to do something about it. But the vision I have is probably two years off in terms of development effort, especially as I don't understand all the technologies that will be required (although I am doing my best to learn them, steadily). As with the previous project, this is likely to be one that takes on several guises before it eventually settles on what will become the final design. With software development though it is always useful to have some sort of plan, milestones through which the software will pass on it's way to completion. I am unable to map out such milestones though as I can't get a proper handle on the design at this stage and that is seriously frustrating me. In fact it's no longer 100% clear to me what the product should do exactly. What's my unique selling point? What makes my software different from other tools that are available? Are those differences enough to give me any sort of market share? Are the differences good? That is to say, is the reason the other tools out there don't do something because it's simply not worth doing? I think this is another of those projects that I am going to have to throw myself into and see where it takes me. It may lead to years of frustration with nothing to show for it at the end or it could lead to a commercial product - I just don't know.

At the end of the day though I have to remain focused on one thing: money. I have to have an income so these projects need to bring in money somehow. They either need to provide me with insight and knowledge that I can apply directly to increase my gambling returns or I need to persuade someone that by bringing me on board in some capacity and using my skills they can make more money and thus should pay me for my time and effort.

This is all fairly vague isn't it? I'm sorry about that but it has to be for several reasons, not least because I want to protect my intellectual property rights at this stage and also because I don't know many details myself!

2010 is going to be an interesting year for me I feel, and hopefully a real turning point in my gambling career. I have set my gambling portfolio up nicely now with a good balance of backs and lays on the horses plus diversification into other sports. I am putting in the hours on the football research, continuing to prod and probe the data looking for new angles of attack that have been missed by others. It won't all be plain sailing but I am hopeful of a good year next year.

[mathare]

9th January
I signed off last year with some old waffle about a couple of major projects I was working on and how I was lacking direction on both. Nothing has really changed, to be honest. I have done a little bit of work on each of them and they have advanced forward in baby steps but no more. I may have come up with a few ideas as to how to take them forward and what they each may become but nothing is for certain there at all.

The poor weather we are experiencing in Britain at present has given me a lot of spare time as it has resulted in a lot of sporting events being cancelled so I have fewer opportunities to get a bet on. Much of that spare time has been spent mulling over how I can make some money. I'm around breakeven or down a little for this month so far and while it is early days I was hoping 2010 would be the year where I finally start to crack this game and push on with my banks. It's not so much that I am getting impatient at that not happening but the lack of opportunity for bank development is starting to frustrate me. I have been pondering the results of some services I follow and looking to see whether I could reasonably step up stakes for them. They are showing a solid enough SR and ROI so I feel I could probably up stakes but I am making sure I am prepared mentally for the greater losses that are associated with losing bets at larger stakes. I don't like to rush these things, I prefer to wait till it feels right.

I am also thinking of other ways I can bring in a bit of cash. I've been doing a little bit of writing, but not as much as I could or should have been doing. Could that bring in a few quid somehow? I have been thinking about going back to the poker tables in search of a few quid. I had been floundering around before but I have started to piece together a bit of a plan that I should see through if I can (which I am usually unable to, admittedly). January for me is all about getting the year off to the right start, making sure I have everything in order so that as the year progresses I am in increasingly better shape to make a full-time income from gambling activities.

[mick56]

9th January
January for me is all about getting the year off to the right start, making sure I have everything in order so that as the year progresses I am in increasingly better shape to make a full-time income from gambling activities.

mathares,enjoyed reading your post,and wish you every success with your new projects.

JAN is perhaps also the most important month of the betting year for myself.On Jan 1st each year i decide the size of the level stake i am going to use through out the coming year,this will mostly be dictated by the amount of working capital available,but this is not the only consideration,this year for example i have decided to use the same stake as last year,because although for the past few years i have been happy to work from a 50pts bank,the poor results i endured during the last quarter of 09,even although they where payed for out of profits all ready accrued on the year,lead me to decide that,for peace of mind i now want to work from a 100pts bank

I agree it is very important to get a good start to the year so that you are reinvesting out of profits and that could prove difficult this time from my memory and records when turf racing resumes after along period of snow we can expect some unpredictable results!.

[mathare]

23rd January 2010
Still no real progress on those two major projects I mentioned in previous entries to this gamblog but with good reason this time - a shift in focus. It's largely about poker for me now, SnGs in particular. I had a small bankroll (a little over $55) in PokerStars that I decided to try and spin up to a more respectable sum playing $5 SnGs. That didn't give me a lot of wiggle room, get it wrong (or just hit some bad luck) early on and I could easily go bust at those stakes but I figured it was worth the risk. I'm not going to dwell on my poker exploits here, that's what my Poker Diary (http://www.win2win.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?t=64549)is for but it's going pretty well so far and poker currently accounts for over 10% of my monthly profits but I would like to get this figure up to around 20-25%, preferably by winning more at poker rather than making smaller profits elsewhere.

A couple of weeks ago I spoke of looking where I could up stakes to increase the amount of money coming in. I haven't done much on this front other than check a couple of systems are using the right staking plan (they are, thankfully) but I am waiting for things to settle down a bit on some systems before I make a move up in the stakes but I am mentally prepared for the greater swings that come with larger stakes and certainly look forward to greater profits.

Another thing I touched on a couple of weeks ago was whether I could make some cash as a writer, just on the side. I'm pleased to say that I think I can and am in advanced negotiations on that front. I don't want to say too much more at this stage, not until I have firmed up a few details, but it looks like I might have bagged myself a monthly writing gig, which I am really pleased about.

Diversification - horses, football, poker and now writing. It's all good if it brings in the money :)

[mathare]

29th January 2010
Wolves' draw with Liverpool midweek brings my Premiership draw system to a close for another season with every team bringing in a profit, as the system dictates they should. These profits varied from £4.37 (Stoke) to £817.07 (Chelsea), depending on how often (and when) the teams drew matches. I made a total profit of £1377.79 from a total stake of £1615.84 which equates to a ROI of 85.27%! And not a bad total profit bearing in mind my unit stake was just 25p. OK, some of the stakes got a bit scary despite the low unit stake (£288.23 on Chelsea getting a draw, for example) and there were 15 occasions when the stake on a result was over 100 units (£25). But this is a second successful season for this system which now has a ROI of 77.22% in that period so I am delighted. I modified some of the original system rules to build in a better safety net although at the loss of some of the profits but this season was scary enough with my rules so I dread to think how it would have been with the original rules. I upped my unit stake this season (from 10p last season) and I will consider another step up, perhaps to 50p, in August depending on how various other banks stand at the time as that may require a larger bank than I am willing to use for this system but I will run some numbers over the summer and see.

This season has also seen me extend this system to the SPL, again with great success. That's running off a 10p unit stake just to see how it goes for the first season but with the system still in operation (the rules for stopping haven't been met for the SPL yet) that has a ROI of 38.08% so next season I will probably increase the stakes there (to a 25p unit stake) and perhaps look to include another division or two. I haven't decided yet whether to look at foreign top flights (Italy, Spain etc) or stick with the English leagues and include the Championship or maybe League One or League Two. A job for the summer that one.

[MattR]

Mat, congrats on the draw system :thumbs When you're considering new leagues over the summer take a look back on Serie B, I found that a very good one, although the prices are in the low 3's as to be expected with the odd 2.9ish.

[mathare]

When you're considering new leagues over the summer take a look back on Serie B, I found that a very good one, although the prices are in the low 3's as to be expected with the odd 2.9ish.Ah yes. Thanks for the reminder on that. You might need to remind me again in the summer though - I'm useless like that :laugh

[tophatter]

Nice work mat, took some bottle to do the big stakes im sure but you had ther research behind you which makes all the difference.

[mathare]

Nice work mat, took some bottle to do the big stakes im sure but you had ther research behind you which makes all the difference.Totally. Starting out at 25p and ending up at nearly £300 with the prospect of it going much higher if the right result didn't come was pretty scary but as you say I had put in the hours in advance so knew what I was letting myself in for before I put a penny down on this one. It was back-tested over several years and with several variations on the rules before I found a set I was happy to run with. And now I am reaping the benefits. It's especially pleasing to see something work as well as it has because of the tweaks you have put in place, some real rewards for the effort you've put in.

[mathare]

7th February 2010
I have achieved what I set out to achieve on the poker front, for the most part at least. My aim was to spin my bankroll up to a more respectable sum and claim a bonus I had waiting for me. It took me nearly a month but I managed it and feel all the better for it. But now it's probably time for a change in focus. I was playing SnGs as a bankroll builder but there are other poker skills I wish to develop that may take me away from SnGs, I haven't fully decided yet. I am seriously considering a move away from PokerStars though as I don't feel I have had my fair share of luck there. I seem to attract way more bad beats than is healthy. Full Tilt would be my site of choice were I to move, and I currently see no real reason to remain loyal to PokerStars. I can get a 27% rakeback deal with Full Tilt so it would be silly of me not to give them a go at least.

But it's not all about poker for me these days. Yes, it brings in a few quid and by building up my bankroll I increase my earning potential as I can player at higher stakes but there are other long-term projects I need to continue to work on as ultimately they should be able to bring in more money than poker. I'll learn a lot from them along the way too. In my recent poker challenge I set myself a number of objectives, goals I had to meet along the way. The idea was that by being able to tick off these goals as I met them I was able to see real progress and feel as though I was getting somewhere. I have a major software development project that is in the very early stages. I can see quite clearly in my mind what I want the finished project to look like (bits of it anyway) but I know it will take a long time to get there. I don't want that vision to be the only target I have to aim at as it is so far away that I will struggle to be motivated to keep edging slowly in the right direction. I need some intermediate targets to aim for in order to keep me on the right path and so that I feel I am still achieving as I tread the long path towards where I want to be. I would like to document some of these goals in this gamblog, then I know you're all watching me and I have to front up to you lot if I fail along the way. So the first one to start with is:

Complete Visual Basic 2008 Step-by-Step tutorial book by end February

I don't want to set any more objectives at this stage as I am in the very early stages of this development project and it's not meaningful to set more objectives. I have my target now and should be able to meet it quite comfortably so let's get that out the way then I can re-evaluate where to go next.

[mathare]

11th February 2010
Last night's draw between Hibernian and Aberdeen brings to a close my SPL draw system. I started the season with a bank of £200 (to be on the safe side although a much smaller bank ought to have sufficed; it was a nominal sum anyway really) and a unit stake of 10p. The bank didn't drop much below the starting point, reaching a record low of £197.99 and finished yesterday with a new high of £251.51. That's more than a 25% increase on the starting bank, pretty good bearing in mind the bank/stake ratio. 29 winners from 96 bets (30.21% SR) and a ROI of 57.46% - figures I am delighted with. I'll be upping the stakes on this one next season, probably to a 25p unit stake.

I have also realised recently that I am not making the most of the opportunities open to me. I have been paper-trading a system that is profitable after just over 200 bets. I think that's enough evidence for me to go live with it so I shall be adding that one into the mix today. I'm also not making the most of my own lays, the False Favs (which really need renaming as that name is overused in the systems marketplace). I started them with a £500 bank at £5 level stakes when I added them to my portfolio and as the bank shot up, nearly doubling in fact, I added a bank barrier to protect 45% of my max bank (equates to around £425 meaning the most I could really lose was £75 from my starting bank). The full set of lays (which is what I was doing at the time) are around 17pts away from coming back above that barrier so they are all recorded as paper trades in my spreadsheet. But I have shown that the 3/1 to 13/2 range is very profitable and has a great SR so I should really forget about the full set of prices and just concentrate on lays in that range. Then I can make some quick profits rather than waiting for the full set of lays to make another 17pts. I may as well implement the rule change now, forget about the barrier and start reaping the rewards of finding a useful price filter. After all, I shouldn't be ignoring a lay system with an 85% SR and 3% ROI - it should be in my portfolio. How can I claim to be taking a professional approach to gambling when I am spurning opportunities such as these?

[mick56]

Hi mathare ri your above post its really strange because i only started reading your false fav thread this am because of a ref made by another member(page 11 post 310)but when i started looking at your most up todate figs i wondered why you had not concentrated on the most profitable price filter.

What i would like to ask you is have your any racing reasons or thoughts as to why this price area is proving more profitable or is it just a happy coincidence which you can now exploit?. and when you concentrate on this will you still keep paper proofing the less profitable filters. cheers

[mathare]

What i would like to ask you is have your any racing reasons or thoughts as to why this price area is proving more profitable or is it just a happy coincidence which you can now exploit?. and when you concentrate on this will you still keep paper proofing the less profitable filters. cheersI have put my thoughts on why these filters should work in the thread with the qualifiers although it may be back on page 17 by now. I will continue to publish figures for all filters for a while yet; I won't drop any until it can be proven that they are not worth bothering with. As it is, the full set of filters provide a comparison between selected odds ranges and help guide any followers to the best set of prices for them to use depending on their circumstances. I will post up the full set of qualifiers in that thread every day but will pick and choose only those in a set price bracket to follow myself

[mathare]

16th February 2010
Complete Visual Basic 2008 Step-by-Step tutorial book by end February - Done :thumbs

That was nice and easy, and completed well inside the deadline I set myself. I thought I could do it quite comfortably and thought about setting a more challenging deadline but one can never be quite sure what might crop up.

In theory now then I have all the skills I need to start real work on Project X. In reality things are very different. Project X is underpinned by a massive database and I have no real experience of database design but I do have resources to help me with that so I'm not too daunted. I will be working on the database and the GUI for this project initially, slowly piecing together bits although it will be many months before anything really comes of this. I hope to learn a lot along the way though and IF I can get it working anywhere near as well as I hope I can then it should be a really good, and useful, product. The end is a long way off though and for now I just need to splash about and try to work out a few little bits to give me some confidence to go on with the grand plans.

[mathare]

16th February 2010 (part two)
A rather inauspicious start to Project X unfortunately. I may have completed the basic training I needed but it seems that what I am trying to do is way beyond what that book covers so I need to continue my own personal development by picking up another book and learning more skills. Sigh. Not entirely unexpected though; the Step by Step guide I went through was an introduction to Visual Basic 2008 as a whole, covering things from the very start. Now I need to go on and learn more about creating dynamic datacentric applications.

I went into town earlier to look round the bookshops as a surf on Amazon had picked out a few books and I wanted to actually flick through them, read some excerpts and work out which book was the right one for me. I live in a university town and the only bookshops we have now are WH Smith, Waterstones and a small stationers-cum-bookshop. Of these, Waterstones is by far the biggest but even their computer section is pathetically stocked. A massive shop and it has only a few shelves with computer books on. Pffft! I am not impressed. Waterstones used to have a branch over by the uni but that's closed down, which is a shame as that did away with a lot of the 'popular' stuff and stocked a lot more academical books.

Are Amazon and the like killing the traditional bookshop? I used to love going in booksops and just browsing around and admittedly I do that with Amazon now. I rarely even thinking of buying a book in a bookshop unless it is drastically reduced from the cover price and I know I can't get it (significantly) cheaper from Amazon so it's hardly suprising that there are so few decent bookshops nowadays but the one time I want one I can't find one.

I have used the "search inside this book" feature on Amazon and narrowed my choice down to a couple of books. Both would help I suspect but which is the better book for me? Unfortunately it looks like I will have to lash out around £20 on one of them and hope it's good enough.

In the meantime I am working on front end and back end bits instead. I still don't really know what the GUI should look like so I can play around with that to some degree. I have also started work on some of the back end data using trusty Excel. It's not ideal as it means I'm not working with a database and I can't be fussed learning to use Access well enough, especially as I want to use a SQL Server database ultimately. However, Excel does mean I can get to grips with how much data I will be handling as well as writing some of the routines to calculate some of the derived data. That ought to give me plenty of time to ponder my book choice.

[mathare]

17th February 2010
After a bit of soul-searching I find myself in a horrible position, one I hoped I'd never be in but in my hearts of hearts I always suspected I would end up here. I'm under pressure to start making things happen on the profit front. In short, I need to bring in some cash soon and prove I can do it on a fairly regular basis.

Personally, I'm happy with my portfolio as is and if the results had gone a little differently so far this year (in both the racing and football) then I would be nicely ahead rather than only slightly ahead, which is where I stand at present. Given time things will blossom nicely I'm sure but time isn't something I have really. I have a couple of months at most, probably, to start making something at least approaching a reasonable income. It's not a problem that that income will be used to increase the banks, reinvesting for a larger potential income later down the line, but I need to prove to the powers that be (the missus) that I can make some reasonable cash from this game.

What does that mean though? It means Project X has shifted immediately to the back burner. It's a great idea and one I still wish to pursue but realistically it could take me a couple of years to get right. A couple of years is fine if I have an income already but I don't so the time that would have been spent on Project X needs to be diverted into trying to earn (win) some money. That means two other projects come online: Project F and Project P.

Project F - put in some serious hours crunching football data finding at least one football system that I am 100% sure will hold up and bring in long-term profits at a reasonable level. Ideally I'd find a high SR system (which will probably have a naturally low ROI) and balance that with a lower SR but higher ROI system. This isn't going to be a quick win though, I do need to put in a lot of effort into getting all the data I want to be able to crunch. Much of it is derived and calculated from the data I have already but I need to write the code to process all that data to produce the new figures and then analyse those to see how best to make a profit from them. My biggest worry with this project is that by the time I get anything out of the other end the football season could be over, or almost over so I am in effect setting up systems to start running in August or September and my grace period could be well over by then.

Project P - start building a proper poker bankroll, putting in the hours at the tables and bringing in some money from online poker. I will start on Full Tilt this afternoon or tomorrow and see how I get on there. It'll be $5 SnGs while I settle and start to grow the bankroll but I have a rough mental roadmap through the stakes so I just need to stick to the plan, stay disciplined and hopefully show I can make a few quid through Project P.

At the end of the day though, I am coming to terms with the fact that I may have tried to go (semi-)pro too early, without the necessary living expenses in hand, separate from my gambling bankroll. It wasn't entirely a conscious decision as I was kind of forced out of work through ill health and am still not 100% by any means so I can't re-join the 9 to 5 world yet but I think when my health improves I will be forced back to the day job for a few years at least. Ho hum, such is life.

[barrelmaniac]

I completely with you mathare, from my calculations I should be flying by now, but its just not happening, I still see the potential and Im sticking with it for now, although it has given me a kick up the backside to get on with the other systemsthat I had on the backburner, I was hoping to go part time with work by now, but unfortunately it looks like another year of hard graft.

Your situation is difficult I agree, with being forced out of work due to health and being under pressure to show results with your betting, its not an easy senario, but as we all know all it takes is a couple of good months are we will all be back on track, however I do appreciate that you have limited time for this to happen, but all the best with what you are currently doing and whatever the future has planned for you.

[mathare]

22nd February 2010
What have I let myself in for? Why do I do this to myself? Project F is massive! To implement all the ideas I have come up with (so far, I'm sure there will be more as time goes on) will take ages. I don't know if Excel is really up to the task but I am going to have to give it a go. The way things are at the minute I am planning to conjure up well over 100, and perhaps nearer 200, bits of information for each match. Some are hard facts, some are calculated or derived figures based on various matchday inputs and there are also over a dozen ratings per team. Never mind the time it's going to take to calculate all this data, it's going to be a nightmare trying to get all the various filters consistent and working as desired. I might never get a flashy front end on this; it may end up as a tool that only VBA-conversant programmers can use, unfortunately. Not a problem for me but it does limit the usefulness of the application away from my desk. With a whizzy front end I could make it useable by pretty much anyone but otherwise it's way too difficult for Joe Public. But Excel isn't designed to do flashy user interfaces and the constraints I would have to work with probably mean Project F results in something only I can use. I'm a bit disappointed by that to be honest but we shall see how things pan out as Project F develops.

[mathare]

26th February 2010
Project F continues at a reasonable pace. Or at least as reasonable as it gets I suppose. It will be a while before I have crunched all the data and calculated everything I want out of it but I know I will get there, eventually. While Excel is stressing one of my cores I have started work on another side project, also football related. Some of you may have read a book called Profitable Football Betting by Paul Steele, certainly if you like betting on football. In it Steele outlines a number of systems and does some testing on them before comparing the various systems to see which is best. He then shows you how to put it all together to pick some winners. The copy of the book I have got is several years old and I can't find a newer updated edition online. Anyway, I think there is some sleight of hand in his system testing so I am going over some of his systems again with my own data. I'm using more data than the author did in this book too. Why? I want to use the ratings some of these systems produce in Project F but want to make sure the ratings I am using are the best of their kind, so I am retesting them all. That too is taking some computing power as some of these systems have 30 or more variations. But I'm getting there.

At the end of this all I hope to use Project F to run some worked examples of developing a football system. At the very least I hope to be able to use it to run through a few scenarios so you can see the approach I am taking and what I am trying to do.

[mathare]

27th February 2010
Back in December I decided to switch my betting exchange of choice from Betdaq to Betfair in search of better liquidity and thus a more competitive market which should hopefully result in a lower overlay, even though this move meant an increase in my commission rate. Has it worked? It's not quite as easy to tell as I would have hoped as I can't easily compare Betdaq and Betfair prices for all my bets, but what I can do is check my overlays for this year so far and see how they compare to those I was getting from Betdaq. Several of the lay systems I follow haven't racked up enough selections so far to make it a statistically significant sample so I will just use those systems that have had enough bets. Ditto for the backs.

Lay'em overlay is better at Betfair
NHPM overlay is unchanged (roughly)
Easy Money overlay is better at Betfair
False Favs overlay is better at Betdaq
Nailed On Lays overlay is unchanged (roughly)

Nailed On AW overlay is unchanged (roughly)
Progeny overlay is better at Betfair

So it looks like the move to Betfair was reasonable enough. I'm still on a higher commission rate at Betfair than I would be at Betdaq but I have improved my overlays on lays and backs. I also have a few new systems that just wouldn't work as well at Betdaq, including some place bets which are fine on Betfair but the place markets on Betdaq had incredibly poor liquidity. I'm satisfied that it was the right move to have made.

[mick56]

Hi mathare these comparisons are always a worthwhile exercise,my own situation is that last Nov i started placing my wagers on betfair as opposed to the early bog prices with bookmakers,i have continued to record the latter and 4 months on find that i would have been slightly better off if i had continued with the bookies but as this covers only 80 individual bets it is early days.I do like the idea as i understand it that BF actually want you to win.

[mathare]

I do like the idea as i understand it that BF actually want you to win.Betfair don't care whether you win or lose. On each bet that is matched someone will win and someone will lose. Someone will be paying commission on their winnings so the exchange are making their money regardless of what happens. Because of this they have no concerns about big winners racking up plenty of profit, unlike your regular bookies, as it's not coming out of Betfair's pocket.

I still use BOG bookies myself for racing bets, but I always compare their prices with Betfair after factoring in commission to make sure I am truly taking the best price. I check the bookies for other bets such as football and general sports bets too. There are often better prices to be had with a bookie, especially on low liquidity markets such as lower league football. With sites like Oddschecker making it so easy, there is no reason not to shop around for the best odds these days.

[mathare]

7th March 2010
The year is still quite young but already I have been forced to re-evaluate a few things. I have had too many painful losing days of late just to let things carry on as they are. While I am not working I need my gambling portfolio to be capable of providing a reasonable income, or least be sufficiently profitable for my banks to build to a level where they can then provide said income. I'm after organic growth; I don't fancy pumping more money in to the banks in order to get them to the point where they should generate a nice income if they maintain their ROI mainly because I don't have the spare capital to increase the banks sufficiently. However, I do have the support I need if I can prove that I am building the banks fast enough to have that income in the not too distant future. Things just aren't playing ball though and little is going to plan, hence the need to re-evaluate where I stand and where I am going. This is not a knee-jerk reaction to a bad day, although it partly feels that way. The pressure has been building for a while and if I am not going to make it in this game it is best that I admit that as soon as possible, come to terms with it and move on in whichever way I decide is most suitable.

The biggest question to address is the obvious one: give it all up or carry on?

It's a tough question to answer objectively. I reckon that anyone can make some profit from gambling given the right advice and if they adopt the right attitude. The key is what their expectations are. Are they happy with a small regular profit each week or are they looking for a second income? Why are they gambling? Do they understand that most gamblers have a small ROI and make profits through a large turnover? I maintain that my portfolio is in better shape, in terms of balance if not profit at present, than it has been at probably any time before and I have been going five or six years now. My attitude towards the game is more mature. Losses still hurt but to adopt a poker expression I don't really tilt or steam. I don't just shrug off a bad day like perhaps I should but neither do I ignore them or dwell on them. I think back to see if there are any mistakes I made that contributed to the loss or whether it was all out of my hands. When I have a good day I don't go and blow all the money, it's all rolled back into the relevant bank to build the stakes and safety levels for future bets. I don't think my portfolio is too wide of the mark and my mindset is pretty professional so I don't see why I should give it up on that basis. That said, if I am struggling to make any money then what's the point? Why put the effort in for little or no reward?

Let's look at this from a different angle: if I wasn't gambling how else would I spend my time? I've been gambling for years now and it's become habit. There are two situations to look at here - when I am holding down a regular job and, as now, when I am not. Let's consider former first. At my old place I would run and update Auto-Sys sometime in the morning as my workload allowed and then in my lunch 'hour' I'd enter all the bets into my spreadsheet before putting them all on with the bookies or exchanges, where I'd mostly leave orders one tick above the current best price (so a back order at the current lay price and a lay order at the current back price). Then I was done. If I got chance in the afternoon I'd update some of the results as I went along and check a few orders and amend them as necessary, again, if I had time. Often this meant my lunchtime was over an hour but the sort of industry I work in usually adopts a flexitime approach and I don't mind staying on a bit later than normal if I can get my gambling in at lunchtime. This approach has some drawbacks, mainly if some people from the office go down the pub for lunch. If I go too then obviously I have much less time to get my bets on. That would be less of a problem at the minute though as I can't drink alcohol for medical reasons. Anyway, I've developed this approach over a few years and it has always worked quite well for me in the past. Once I am home from work my evenings are my own and would often be spent playing poker or developing various ideas for gambling systems and software.

Now let's consider the other scenario, the one where I don't have a job which is where I find myself at present. This is not a situation I am in out of choice, more necessity as I am not well enough to work. Abdominal pain that has gne undiagnosed for over a year now - isn't the NHS wonderful at times? :rolleyes: Anyway, I now have a lot of time on my hands so how best to spend it while still generating some money? I have built my portfolio up a bit over the past six months or so taking on some new systems to add more balance, including a number of sports systems to counterbalance things a little as my portfolio was heavy on horse racing before that point. Horse racing is an excellent gambling medium (the sport has no meaning without someone punting on the outcome) as it takes place every day (excluding a few days around Christmas) in the UK, weather permitting of course. With a good number of horse racing systems on the go that means that there are best every day so no day is wasted in that quest for profit. This daily grind is supplemented by sports systems chipping in a few times a week but mainly at weekends plus things like poker. With more time available to me I am more inclined to put the bets on race by race, or perhaps a few races at a time rather than all in one go at lunchtime. I like to spend my mornings getting up to speed with a few things, running Auto-Sys, catching up on email and perhaps doing a bit of research into various ideas before getting on with the horse racing bets and poker in the afternoons.

If I am not fit enough to work and give up gambling how would I spend my time? I am addicted to being online and gambling is such a part of my life now that I would find it incredibly difficult to give up. Unless it gets me into serious financial difficulties (which it shouldn't do with proper bankroll management) then I have no reason to stop gambling. So that answers that one really. I'm not going to cut off my nose to spite my face and give it all up as I don't want to and unless one really wants to give something up the temptation is always there, always calling and usually calls one back in to whatever it is they were trying to give up. So I'm going to carry on gambling.

The next big question: is my portfolio suitable for the job in hand?

I'm not looking to add more systems here. I have taken on more recently and think I have enough on the go now, especially as I have to think that at some point, probably in the not too distant future I am going to have to go back to work and can't then have a portfolio that is too large else I'll never get all the bets on around work. So I guess the question really boils down to whether any systems I am currently following should be ditched. For a system to be dropped it needs to have shown that it is not up to scratch, either a losing system or one that is not contributing very much to the bottom line. And this needs to be proved over a significant number of bets. So far this year the flat laying systems (CD Lays, Lay'em) and almost all the NH systems I follow have struggled and are in the red but that's not a reason to ditch them unless these losing trends are repeated over a much longer period. For example, the Lay'em has proved profitable over several years so to ditch it after a poor run this year would be stupid. Ditto NHPM and many others. Have any of my systems shown sufficient evidence that they are not going to cut the mustard? I confess I harbour doubts about the long-term profitability of one of my football tipsters (Sports Investor) but I am prepared to see how that one turns out. What else? My overall stats suggest I should lay off the spread bets (have done for a couple of years anyway) and the no-limit hold'em cash poker too. Hmmm. I'll come back to that one in a bit.

If the make-up of my portfolio is OK (and as nothing stands out as needing to be dropped) then it's time to look at the second part of the problem - staking. Am I using the right staking plan for each system? To answer this properly would mean undertaking full staking reviews for each system, which I'm not going to do at this stage. Instead I am going to focus on the systems that are struggling most of late, especially compared to their long-term prospects, and make sure they are being staked correctly. Comparing this year's stats so far with long-term figures gives me a shortlist of systems to look at, namely Ladies Lays, NHPM, Lay'em, CD Lays and HSR (a non-W2W backing system). I won't go into details of the staking reviews here, just give the results.

CD Lays - currently £50 fixed liability - OK
Ladies - currently £5 fixed stake - OK
Lay'em - currently £10 fixed stake - OK
NHPM - currently £100 fixed liability - reduce to £75 for safety
HSR - currently 3% staking - OK

My staking is fine then which generally means the losses I have been experiencing are down to the horses themselves and it's poor fortune for all the systems to have hit a bad spell at the same time. The whole idea of having a portfolio spanning many systems and several sports is to avoid having all my eggs in one basket but that in itself doesn't prevent lots of the eggs from getting broken, which is what has happened of late.

I have established (to my own satisfaction at least) that there is little I could have done to have mitigated against the recent losses. I'm carrying on in the game with only one staking change and with my full portfolio in tact and hoping that a corner is turned soon. However, when one needs to start making profits that will build banks and earn an income time isn't something that one has in abundance. I therefore have to consider how best to spend the time I do have. I am almost certainly going to have go to back to work whenever I am fit to do so, I've come to accept that, so with that in mind I think a few routine changes are in order unless I can earn a reasonable hourly rate without resorting to a 'proper' job. How could I make such money?

Poker is obviously one way. Anyone who has been reading my poker diary will know that I have been playing the micro-stakes Rush Poker tables on Full Tilt with some success. Not a lot, but some. I have been playing a few hours most days recently. I could extend those playing hours to fill most of the working day but what good what that do me? Let's say I play two tables at once and average 400 hands per hour per table. If I can get my win rate up to 2BB/100 (which is probably reasonable) then I am earning $0.40/100 hands or around $3.20 an hour! That's equivalent to about £2 an hour and I am not going to be able to live on that. Poker, at this point in time, can only be a part-time gig while I build up experience that will allow me to up the stakes and thus my hourly rate.

Reading books, watching films and so on isn't going to make me any money so I can forget about that how ever much I would like to do that.

I could try picking my own horse bets (method bets) and hoping I make a few quid that way but bearing in mind I barely know one end of a horse from another and don't have follow horse racing that much I am going to be up against it from the start so this hardly seems like a good way to go.

I could spend the time researching football betting systems looking for profitable angles. This is going to be a lot of hard work for potentially little reward, at first at least, as the bets are only likely to come once or twice a week and I will be starting with small stakes while I ensure the system works in the real world. There is also not that much of the football season left so this is more of a medium-term propostion. It's probably worth doing though as even though it's more systems (something I said I was looking to avoid for now) they will be of my own making so I can't blame anyone else if they do go south, and can take the plaudits if it all goes well.

I think the best way of occupying my time though is going to be the continued development of Project X. I think it could be back on again after I bought a new book recently that should help me overcome a number of the problems I was having. It's still early days on that front yet but I am hopeful. Getting Project X off the ground would be fantastic. I know what I am like and if I can get it started it will become all-consuming and I will want to work on it as often as I can which ought to help getting into a more mature state that bit more quickly. And the sooner I get it operational the sooner I can use it and start making money from it. :thumbs I ought to work through this book and identify what other problems I will face before I get too excited but I think it's time to take Project X seriously and treat it as work.

With all that in mind I plan to go back to a lunchtime-only approach to my betting on the horses rather than putting the bets on one race at a time. That frees up more time (and brain power, concentration etc) for this task and hopefully means I will get on with it faster. I'm going to balance this with some poker though and try to strike a nice balance between the two. I can always use Rush poker as a 'treat' as I can easily play short sessions at those table without feeling I am not going to get the real benefits. Session length at Rush doesn't matter much at all, unlike a proper cash game or tourney play for example. I said previously I had a fairly professional mindset when it came to gambling and while that may be the case it's time to take a proper professional approach to everything I am trying to work on and to balance their needs accordingly. If I am going to be back at work in the not too distant future it's best I get my main gambling activities back into a lunch hour so I am in the habit by the time I start work again. Then when I do start work I just swap Project X and the poker tables for the office and everything else can pretty much stay as is. Project X and Rush Poker can be evening and weekend activities.

I'm happy with that plan. Now to kick it into action and more importantly stick to it...

[mick56]

Hi mathare your above makes an interesting read and i am sorry to read of your current dilema,to me you may have answered your own question concerning recent losses by referring to the downside of operating multiple systems in order to spread risk.The theory is good but as is often the case in racing the practice can hurt when all or most systems in the portfolio simultaneously go through a down turn.

It would appear from your above that you are on top of the situation,which means to me that you are at least half way towards finding what for you will be the correct solution.

My advice would be to consider for a while risking your cash on only the most profitable of your systems,this could give you a breathing space while still generating some of the income you need.

I think that the majority of backers who have worked hard to learn enough to win long term fall away on the journey because they are under capitalised at the start.

Every month i withdraw a months wages from my betting capital when i have a good month i still draw the same amount which facilities doing the same after a losing month, but i have this money covered a year in advance and so do not have to touch any profit accrued from the current years bets.

And when betting is your sole or main source of income the above can prove very useful during a lean or losing spell,because it takes away many of the stresses and worries which can effect your judgement.

Anyway i wish you the very best what ever route you decide to take.

[mathare]

19th March 2010
I haven't updated this for a while so let's quickly trot through where things stand at present.
I've had a decent Cheltenham festival with a good return from my False Favs and also from the method backs that I have spent so long putting together so it's very satisfying to see a decent return for my hard work.
Things are still up and down with my portfolio but that's part of the game and at least I know my staking is appropriate
I haven't been able to stick to the "all on at lunchtime" plan quite as easily as I had hoped for one reason and another. I must try harder with that.
I have spent some time working on an under/over 2.5 goals system for the English football that seems promising and has had a good start. It's a very simple idea, as many of my system ideas tend to be, but I am hopeful for some decent returns from it even though I am likely to only paper trade till the end of the season.
My False Favs are in a rich vein of form and doing really well, especially since I added the 3/1 to 13/2 price filter and I am making a few quid back on those. The bank is growing nicely and I may have to look at increasing the stakes in time to help that bank grow bigger as it looks like I have stumbled across a good thing here.
Project X hit yet another major stumbling block but I am hopefully able to work round that now, although it has added quite a bit to the expected duration of the project. I have also been re-thinking my approach to this somewhat and may yet end up with a slightly different end product to that I had originally envisaged but time will tell. Big thanks to CrazyBadger for helping me out with this :thumbs
Poker is going pretty well although I haven't played for a while. I'll update my poker diary with more on that shortly.
My testing and reoptimisation of the Paul Steele football systems has stalled as other ideas cropped up and I found myself with limited time. Hopefully I can get back on this now the festival is over.
I think that brings things more or less up to date. I'm sure I will think of other things in time but they can't be that important if they don't come to mind right now.

[crazybadger]

Project X hit yet another major stumbling block but I am hopefully able to work round that now, although it has added quite a bit to the expected duration of the project. I have also been re-thinking my approach to this somewhat and may yet end up with a slightly different end product to that I had originally envisaged but time will tell.Big thanks to CrazyBadger for helping me out with this :thumbs
No problems mate. Feel free to email me if you need more help/advice on it.

[Mattw07]

Hi Mat

i thought id wait for Cheltenham to end before i asked this, i dont know how well today went but youve had a good week of method bets already, so will method bets be replacing the system bets in the coming months?

Matt

[mathare]

i thought id wait for Cheltenham to end before i asked this, i dont know how well today went but youve had a good week of method bets already, so will method bets be replacing the system bets in the coming months?Oh hell no!

I was using the RP Cheltenham Festival Guide for all the stats and trends and similar guides aren't available for other meetings outside the major festivals so I'd be flying blind on that front. Add in the fact that it was taking me between 45 minutes and an hour to analyse each race and organise my thoughts and you soon realise that to use the approach I was using would become almost a full-time job. I would obviously have to specialise rather than going through every race but I just don't have the desire to spend the time devising method bets at this stage.

I'm also very much the kind of person who would rather put in the work upfront and reap the rewards later down the line which suggests a systematic approach to betting. I spend time analysing football data looking for potential systems so I can then just apply the rules week in week out to pick the bets rather than having to study team news, injuries etc. Where possible I automate things, which is how Auto-Sys was born so I don't have to remember all the system rules and can just click a button instead. The spreadsheets I use for my football systems are another example of this "invest effort now, benefit later" approach as many of them automatically download the fixtures, results, odds etc and can output all the stats at a click of a button. Minimal effort to use and maintain.

That doesn't really fit with method betting where one would need to be on top of the racing news, familiar with most of the horses in the field one has chosen to specialise in etc. I'm happy that when push comes to shove, if I have all the information available, I can pick a few winners but I don't plan on producing method bets on a regular basis.

[mathare]

25th March 2010
And still things refuse to go to plan. Why is nothing I try to do as easy as I hope it will be?

I mentioned Project X again the other day and that I had hit a major stumbling block that I was hopefully going to be able to work round now. It's good to have hope but not so great when it is misplaced like this seems to have been. The stumbling block has become a wall I am repeatedly banging my head against. SQL Server 2008 Express is seriously doing my head in :headbange

I don't have all the skills I need to develop Project X but I am more than happy to learn what I need to know. I've taught myself Visual Basic which is what it will be written in and am now trying to learn about databases before moving on to the technology that will link the VB with the database. SQL Server 2008 Express seemed a sensible place to start as it's free Microsoft software, like Visual Basic 2008 Express which I have been using to learn VB so should mesh nicely with VB Express. It probably does, if I can get it working! :helper

The installation seemed to work OK but when I try to connect the SQL Server Management Studio to the server (all of which is running on my PC) I get an error telling me it can't connect. I have no idea what's wrong so have issued a plea for help on the SQL Server forum in the Microsoft community. Hopefully the guys there can sort me out and I can actually get beyond chapter 1 of the SQL Server 2008 Express book I have bought. :rolleyes:

[mathare]

25th March 2010 (part two)
If you bang your head hard enough against a brick wall something has to give, either your skull or the wall. And today it's the wall. I have got SQL Server Management Studio to connect to SQL Server. I am back in the game :woohoo:

[mathare]

30th March 2010
Having got SQL Server working I promptly shoved it to one side and started attacking the poker tables with gusto. Unfortunately that was an utter disaster and poker is very much on the back burner now, which means other projects have come to the fore once more, including SQL Server. That said, I am doing some work on Project F and a prototype version of Project X instead at the minute as they make me feel like I am actually achieving something. I can see spreadsheets filling with numbers which represents tangible progress and is rather satisfying. It's also just what I need at the moment, to prove that I can get somewhere with the various projects I have in the pipeline.

The gambling has been a bit of a mixed bag this month as you may have seen from the various Daily Waffle threads. One thing I have done this month is split out my False Fav qualifiers in my spreadsheet such that the new system I started last month using the 3/1 to 13/2 price filter are no longer mixed in with previous selections to give me a better idea of how the new filter is working out for me with real data. The results are incredible and it's probably time I reviewed my staking on this system so as to make more hay while the sun is shining so brightly. I will be doing my usual monthly review in a couple of days so that's something I will look at then.

One thing my betting records spreadsheet lacks is an overall ROI, and that's something I wish to address in the next few days. I have a ROI for each system both on a per calendar year and overall basis but I don't have a ROI for my portfolio as a whole. I know how much profit I would like to make on a monthly basis (on average) but by not knowing my ROI I don't know by how much I need to increase my turnover to get to that point. The overall ROI is an important figure in my opinion and I can't believe I have gone so long without calculating it. Time to set that right I think...

[mathare]

6th April 2010
What was the last thing I said? I want to update my betting records spreadsheet with an overall ROI figure so I had a much better idea of how much I needed to increase my turnover by to generate the sort of profits I would like to see. Have I done that? No!

Instead I have started up a number of new projects. Le's call them Project W and Project H for now. Did I need to start more projects? No. Have I finished all the others I was working on? No. Have I finished any of the other projects I was working on? No. Is this normal for me? Unfortunately, yes.

I don't know if any of you have ever done a Belbin personality test. It's designed to tell you what role within a team you are most suited to. See here (http://www.belbin.com/rte.asp?id=8) for more on the individual roles. Somehow, in my professional career I have ended up as a "completer finisher". I'm a software tester (and part software engineer) by profession so it's my job to ensure that before my company delivers anything it is subject to all sorts of quality checks. I polish the end product, basically. Yet in my personal life, well in my spare time at least, I am not that role at all. I rarely get a final product ready to be polished, and QC'ing one's own work is notoriously difficult anyway. In my own work I guess I am more of a "plant", the ideas man if you like. I come up with numerous ideas and for each I tend to work it up a little to see whether it is feasible and by then something else has usually come along and I have started working that up. I have notebooks and a hard drive cluttered with partially completed projects and it's honestly about time I finished a few of them. Fortunately I have a bit of a plan...

I can't switch of my ideas brain, that just doesn't happen. I have my best ideas at odds times, such as in the shower or just as I am settling down to go to sleep (which is why I have a notebook by the bed). I'm not going to stop showering or sleeping so the ideas will keep coming. The trick is to break these ideas down into more manageable chunks and try to complete some of these chunks. It should work but only time will tell if it really does.

And so we come back to the new projects I have started. Project W is still very much in the ideas phase but I have done some initial research into the feasability of it and it should be very much possible. It's going to take some work on my part and requires me to learn some new skills but if the end result is anything like I envisage it then it will be worth it. It's not a huge project either, at least not in the initial stages, so I should be able to crank this one out in a reasonable time if I put the effort in. I'm not going to say any more about Project W at this stage but I will do when it is up and running.

But Project W is behind Project H in the order of things at the minute and the good thing is I am most of the way through Project H and should have it completed in the next day or two. It's required no new skills, just the dedicated application of well-worn skills. It's actually the sort of thing I enjoy doing every now and then too as it's a nice bit of brain exercise that's not too challenging and I know the rewards will be worth it, even though I don't gain from it at all really. What is Project H? The H stands for 'help' as I have been helping another forum member sort out their betting records and get them into some sort of proper order so they can better evaluate their portfolio and work out how best to proceed to avoid some of the frustration they have been experiencing of late. This has involved taking their existing data, completely reformatting it and then writing some code to fill in a lot of the gaps, such as automatically adding all the SPs for the selections to allow overbet calculations. It's not a quick job to do all this so it's not a service I offer to many people but this particular member (who I won't embarrass by naming) was in desperate need of my help and I am happy to help where I can. The more I can educate gamblers to the importance of full records of all bets and an array of statistics than can then be calculated the better armed they will be in the fight for profits and I can sleep soundly knowing I have done my bit to help.

So Project H has a day or two left in it, then I can start to work on Project W and Project F in parallel somewhat. I think I need to put the effort into completing those before I bring Project X off the back burner which means my SQL Server education will just have to wait for now. And as for that overall ROI figure - who knows when I will get round to that!

[mathare]

7th April 2010
I'm getting there. Project H is now done and out the way, although it may generate a few little bits of follow-up work but they will just slot in here and there as they will only be minor work packages.

Unfortunately my health still isn't 100% and has dipped a little recently so I may take a short break before getting on with the next project. That said, Project F requires quite a bit of computer processing power before human brain power needs to be applied so I could probably get on with that for now.

[mathare]

11th April 2010
I still haven't got any further with that overall ROI figure that I said I wanted to add to my spreadsheet and to be honest it is dropping down my priority list somewhat. What would I do with such a figure once I have it anyway? I could use it to work out what my turnover needs to be to generate a desired profit level but how would I increase my turnover to reach the required level? I'm very much in favour of organic bank growth as that proves systems in my book so unless banks grow how can I increase turnover? By increasing stakes and sacrificing bank security - which I am certainly not going to do. Also my portfolio contains a good number of lay systems which will drag my overall ROI figure down. Not that I know what I expect my ROI to be or what I would like to make it. If I knew what it was I would try and maximise it but I feel it is better to have a balance of systems in my portfolio rather than trying to maximise certain related figures. And because of that my focus has turned instead to my the make-up of my portfolio and ways in which that could be improved.

I have noticed from the stats sheet in my spreadsheet that I probably have staking issues. I am experienced punter who has been gambling for a number of years now. This is both a good and bad thing. I know what to expect from day to day and can handle losing runs pretty well. I can also recognise danger signs and potentially spot when things are going sour with certain systems. But it also means I tend to assume I know what I am doing and that a "one size fits all" approach will work, whereas that's not necessarily the case when it comes to staking. For example, I start all backing systems on a 3% percentage staking plan with a £200 starting bank and tend to just let them run, tweaking the staking only now and then and only when I have built up enough data to make trends more apparent and significant. Is this the right approach? For some systems, maybe. For all systems, almost certainly not. And so it is that I will spend this afternoon conducting a number of staking reviews with a view to improving the returns from my portfolio.

Since I introduced a points profit column to all my system results I can see at a glance how each system has performed over the years and what my returns have been in both cash terms and in points. It is this that has led to this review as I can see now that several systems are showing a cash profit that is significantly out of line when compared to the points profit. Take my 45 Males bank for example. A loss of 7.38pts from 220 bets is what it is but this system is one that's on 3% staking from a £200 bank and in cash terms I have lost £74.73 on this system, equivalent to more than £10 a point. How is that so when I am betting to 3% of a bank that started at £200 giving me an initial stake of £6 and when my average stake is £4.93? And this bank is not one of a kind either. My SixPlus Loser bank has a cash loss of £46.50 but a points loss of 2.61pts, equivalent to nearly £20 a point but again it's staked to 3% of a £200 starting bank. My Trainer 3 bank is in profit to 5.84pts overall but shows a cash loss of over £30. Go figure! My spreadsheet is littered with examples such as these and it's high time I conducted a number of long overdue staking reviews to revise my staking and prevent this pounds-points discrepancy from occurring.

I don't want to prejudice the results of these reviews but I suspect I will be switching to level stakes in a number of places so that will be one of the main areas I will be focusing on. However, it is important to note that I am looking to see how best to improve my staking going forward rather than necessarily selecting the plan that would have done best on the past results. I am also keen to keep my staking simple so some of the more complicated staking plans won't even be considered. I also want to look at longest losing runs (LLRs) to help me decide on how large a bank, in points terms, is required and thus help set my future stakes. As part of this review I will also be reviewing my bank barrier settings and updating them as necessary.

45 Males
Total Profit/Loss (£): -74.73
Total Profit/Loss (pts): -7.38
Equivalent £/pt: 10.13
Actual Average Stake (£): 4.93

It's clear from the figures above that percentage staking isn't really working for this system. The average stake is £4.93 but the loss is equivalent to a staking level more than double that. When it comes to simple alternative staking plans level stakes is the obvious choice so is that a better plan here? The Staking Machine (TSM) certainly thinks so, with a smaller loss and a less negative ROI for level stakes than percentage stakes. That makes the decision to switch to level stakes a pretty easy one then. Conventional wisdom says a betting bank should be double the size of the longest losing run. With an LLR of 9 but an ELS (expected losing streak) of 12.5 that means I should be looking at a bank of 20-25pts. The bank stands at just over £125 in cash terms so a new level stake of £5 ought to be suitable for this system. My bank barrier is set such that I only have 1 point at the new stakes before the bank would go under the barrier so the barrier level will be adjusted downwards to give me a bit more breathing room, say a total of 9 points at the new stakes, equivalent to my LLR so far. That ought to be sufficient wiggle room while still securing a reasonable portion of the bank.

Mark Johnston
Total Profit/Loss (£): 1099.37
Total Profit/Loss (pts): 149.75
Equivalent £/pt: 7.34
Actual Average Stake (£): 14.68

My staking for this system has varied throughout the years, starting at 3% but that percentage being reduced as the bank has increased and I have taken measures to protect more of the profits as well as reduce the stakes to stop this one system having such a massive impact on whether my days would end in profit or not. It's interesting to note that I have made nearly 15pts of profit but that each point is equivalent to only half my average stake, indicating I have missed out on quite a bit of profit. TSM confirms that level stakes would have been the better plan to have used. My LLR is 29 but the ELS is 38.9 based on the actual strike rate of the system selections. That would make for a bank of somewhere between 60 and 80pts. The system bank is a few pence under £1300 which means each point would be worth anything from £16.25 to £21.67. I'm after nice round numbers to make life simple here so £20 per point seems like a sensible stake. That gives me around 12pts before the bank barrier kicks in. I'm happy with that for now and can always review my bank barrier as and when.

LTO3
Total Profit/Loss (£): 125.50
Total Profit/Loss (pts): 35.51
Equivalent £/pt: 3.53
Actual Average Stake (£): 6.26

The figures above suggest that level stakes would have been a better staking plan than that I employed as shown by the difference by the last two figures (the equivalent £ per pt value and the actual average stake). After all, at that average stake of £6.26 and a profit of 35.51pts I should have a profit of around £222, nearly £100 more than I have actually made. TSM once more reinforces the superiority of level stakes here. The LLR is 11 with an ELS of 16 which doubles to 32 making a point worth £10 as the bank stands at £325.50.

Michael Stoute
Total Profit/Loss (£): 103.94
Total Profit/Loss (pts): 34.59
Equivalent £/pt: 3.01
Actual Average Stake (£): 11.22

My actual average stake is close to four times greater than the £/pt equivalent again indicating a lot of lost profit. TSM agrees once more that I should be on level stakes. The LLR here is 17 and the ELS is 19.1 so we're looking at a bank of 34 to 38 points. The betting bank for this system is £303.94 which means each point equates to somewhere between £8 and £9 or thereabouts. In the interests of bank security I'm going with the lower figure so this system will switch to £8 level stakes. The bank is currently just under a barrier but I think it's fair that I give the new staking a fair crack so I will drop the barrier by 10pts to see how that goes.

SixPlus Loser
Total Profit/Loss (£): -46.50
Total Profit/Loss (pts): -2.61
Equivalent £/pt: 17.85
Actual Average Stake (£): 5.46

Another significant discrepancy between my actual average stakes and the £/pt equivalent. Spotted any patterns yet? This time the actual average is much smaller than the calculated equivalent points value because the system is showing a loss. This means I am losing at a much faster rate than I would be at level stakes. Does TSM confirm this finding? Of course it does. What stake should I using instead then? The bank is around £150 at present. According to the LLR (11) and ELS (13.5) I should be looking for a bank of between 22 and 27 points. At £5 per point I would have over 30pts in the bank so I can afford to go a little higher. Let's go to £6 per point, in keeping with the system name. I will also downgrade the bank barrier slightly to allow a few more points of breathing space for the new staking to take affect. I've allowed a little over 9pts, that ought to do it.

Claiming Jockey
Total Profit/Loss (£): -7.84
Total Profit/Loss (pts): 0.67
Equivalent £/pt: N/A (-11.73)
Actual Average Stake (£): 5.63

The equivalent £/pt value here is negative, and thus meaningless, as the system is profitable in terms of points (just) but not in cash terms. If it's profitable in points then I would have made a small profit using level stakes rather than the small loss I am currently showing. It's still early days for this system but again TSM points me towards level staking so that's the way I shall proceed. The LLR and ELS figures suggest a bank of around 20pts and with the £200 starting bank almost all intact I may as well go with £10 a point. That gives me plenty of space with my current bank barrier figure so no adjustments required there.

Double Top
Total Profit/Loss (£): 412.59
Total Profit/Loss (pts): 136.87
Equivalent £/pt: 3.01
Actual Average Stake (£): 6.59

I started this system on very low stakes to start with which will affect the figures somewhat but even there shouldn't be such a disparity between the last two figures so my staking seems to be in error here too. When the profits peak percentage staking is very much the better plan but generally speaking it's level stakes that is delivering the goods and seems to be where I should be for this system. I need a bank of around 32 points for level stakes with an LLR and ELS of 16. The bank stands at around £500 giving me a point value of around £16. I don't have much in the way of margin for error with my current bank barrier settings so they will be adjusted to give the new staking plan more of a chance. 10pts ought to be enough for this system.

First Timer
Total Profit/Loss (£): 33.02
Total Profit/Loss (pts): 6.04
Equivalent £/pt: 5.47
Actual Average Stake (£): 6.66

Another system for which I have little data but already the two most important figures above are diverging and TSM would have me switch to levels for this one too. The LLR and ELS are both 6 but with so little data for this system I would want a bank bigger than the 12pts these figures suggest. In fact I am going to double that again (more or less) and start the new staking plan at £10 per point. The bank is nowhere near the barrier and I have around 10pts before the bank would switch to paper trading so I am happy with those settings.

Info Rated
Total Profit/Loss (£): -24.69
Total Profit/Loss (pts): -0.33
Equivalent £/pt: 75.04
Actual Average Stake (£): 5.23

I'm losing at a rate that's over 14 times faster than I would at level stakes. That's a slightly artificial as the system is still quite immature with only around 100 selections but even so, something is wrong. I think now that I should be on levels and of course TSM agrees. My bank should be somewhere around 20pts too which works out at around £9 per point but I am prepared to take slightly more risk in exchange for numbers that are easier to work with and will opt for £10 per point. I am a long way above the bank barrier here so no further adjustment needed in that department.

NH Media F/c
Total Profit/Loss (£): 51.56
Total Profit/Loss (pts): 17.08
Equivalent £/pt: 3.02
Actual Average Stake (£): 1.46

This is another of my systems that I started on very low stakes which explains the low averages. This is perhaps the only system whereby my equivalent £/pt figure is better than the actual average stake though. That suggests my staking has been better than levels but TSM isn't convinced, but then again TSM is applying the same staking plan to all my data whereas the first chunk of data for this system was all to low stakes levels anyway. TSM reckons levels are the best way forward and I am inclined to agree. I need a bank of between 26 and 28 points according to the LLR/ELS figures. With my bank at £251.56 I am prepared to accept a bit more risk than normal and use a £10 stake to keep the numbers simple. My bank barrier levels are OK too so again no adjustment required there.

PP Free
Total Profit/Loss (£): -20.61
Total Profit/Loss (pts): -3.22
Equivalent £/pt: 6.40
Actual Average Stake (£): 5.54

This is another system I don't have much data for but again I would be better off to level stakes already. TSM suggests a bank of 20pts for this one which means £9 to £10 a point but I am not so sure about this system given the lack of data I have at present so I am going to downshift my stakes to £5 until I can be more sure about how it will work out. Because of the small stakes the barrier is at an acceptable point and needs no adjustment.

Trainer 3
Total Profit/Loss (£): -30.65
Total Profit/Loss (pts): 5.84
Equivalent £/pt: N/A (-5.25)
Actual Average Stake (£): 7.64

This is another system that should be profitable for me (based on the profit in points) but isn't, resulting in a meaningless £/pt figure. All other systems have headed off towards level stakes, is this one the same? Of course! With an ELS of 13.9 and an LLR of 11 I'm looking at a bank of between 22 and 28pts so if we split the difference and look at a 25pt bank we'd have a level stake of £6.77. That can be rounded up to £7 bearing in mind I have shown this system to be profitable in terms of points and the bank should be safe enough anyway. My bank barrier kicked in a few days back even though the system is in profit in points terms, which seems odd now. So I am resetting the barrier level to allow at least 10pts of space for the new staking.

HSR
Total Profit/Loss (£): -57.88
Total Profit/Loss (pts): -3.32
Equivalent £/pt: 17.44
Actual Average Stake (£): 5.32

I always assumed that with a decent SR (up around 45%) that this system would suit percentage staking but that's not what the figures above, or TSM, are telling me. So we switch this one to levels too making it all systems that were on the percentage staking plan switched to level stakes. Hmm, interesting. The LLR and ELS figures suggest a bank of between 14 and 20pts to be sure of surviving the losing runs which means I could go for £10 a point where I to use the smaller bank figure but I prefer a bit more safety than that and will go for £7 instead. I am also reducing the bank barrier level to give the new staking a chance else it has just one chance to find a winner before paper trading kicks in.

[mathare]

14th April 2010
One of the sports services I follow is a football tipping service I trialled for a month or so last year and found it to be reasonably good. When I was offered the chance to subscribe for a year for £95 I figured it was worth a go, an extended trial if you like.

Some people have far more patience than I and would use this extended trial as exactly that by paper-trading the service for a few more months. Not I. I dived straight in with real cash, albeit to fairly small stakes of £2 per point with bets staked from 1pt to 10pts with the occasional double maximum bet at 20pts.

Alarm bells should have gone off at the start when their website failed to offer a full results history and no recommended bank size information, no historical strike rate and no ROI indicator. I requested this information from their customer services department a few times and eventually I got a few answers. The service started in September 2008 and didn't have a losing month till this year. The suggested bank size is 20 times the maximum bet so 400pts. The long-term SR is 35% with a profit of 256pts to advised stakes.

Yesterday the system had it's fourth double maximum bet of the year and like the three before, it lost. That's 80pts down on those bets. Overall I am down 110.70pts to advised stakes, a ROI of -12.42%. It took me a while to get that recommended bank figure of 400pts out of the guys running this service and by this point I had smashed up one 100pt bank. I adjusted it to 250pts figuring that if it can't survive on that then I am not interested. But now, with nearly half that bank gone and some poor results so far this year I am wondering how long I should persevere. I am paid up for the year so when do I stop putting real money down on the tips and paper trade? And if I do that will I miss the recovery?

Instead of thinking too deeply on those fronts I want to consider level stakes rather than suggested staking to see what difference that makes. With odds ranging from 10/11 to 100/1 (correct score bets) it seems somewhat odd to consider level staking but let's go with it all the same. 192 bets means 192 points staked, obviously. And interestingly enough, assuming my maths (well, spreadsheet formula) is correct, which it seems to be, level stakes shows a profit of 7.98pts for a ROI of 4.16%. OK, that's not a return to be hugely proud of for a backing service but it's a whole lot better than the losses from advised stakes isn't it?

The key question is what to do with this information? Had any of those double maximum bets gone in then I may not even be writing this as the figures would be a lot better. For example, last night's double max was Macclesfield to beat Burton which I got at a tad better than 6/4 so instead of costing me 20pts that could have won be 30pts, a swing of 50pts almost halving the current loss. On level stakes though that would just have been a 2.5pt swing. If the big bets start coming in then the losses could be wiped out quite quickly.

I have just been over the staking again and it seems that bets in the 5-9pts range are performing poorly but the rest are doing OK, with the aforementioned exception of the double maximums. I don't know how the staking is arrived at so it would be wrong of me to go changing the advised stakes (halving the number of points, for example, or knocking a couple off the bigger bets).

This system is one of the biggest red figures in my portfolio in cash terms, and points terms actually, but what I have done through this mini-review is convince myself that it ought to be given more of a chance. If those double max bets come good then the losses can be quickly trimmed back. Perhaps the service has been somewhat unlucky, who really knows, but I feel it deserves a proper chance even though I was close to throwing in the towel last night when then double max failed to come good, again.

[mathare]

15th April 2010
I'm losing track of the various projects I have on the go so it's about time I took stock. It may also be the time I split this thread into two and used one for general gambling chat and the other for project-related updates but as most, if not all, of my projects are ultimately gambling related then perhaps such a split is somewhat artificial.

Anyway, I think the main projects I have mentioned over the last few weeks are:
Project F - a football system research project that has been going on for several months now in one form or another. I think I have started to get a much better handle on this recently as I am much closer to having all the necessary data in one place, and in the right format. I have been overworking my poor CPU to get there but I'm just about done. It hasn't helped that once or twice I have uncovered flaws in some of the data on which many of the calculations are based so I have had to start again with some aspects of the data processing but hopefully this time I've got it all sorted. There is still some way to go before I can actually sit down to use all this data as part of the actual research part of this project but I am making steps in the right direction. This project could run for quite a while yet. I'm hoping the database I am compiling will allow me to debunk a number of popular football theories as well as uncover a few decent football systems.
Project H - this was the help I was providing a fellow forum member to sort out their betting records and that's all now wrapped up.
Project P - poker! That game of cards that I have had such a love-hate relationship with over the years. This project was very simple - play poker and make money. Sometimes it all went exactly to plan but at other times the plan went out the window my money was going down the drain. If I am brutally honest I have yet to work out which form of the game suits me best. Should I be playing tourneys or cash? I don't know. I have toyed with both and have certain amounts of success at both but nothing so consistent as to persuade me that they offer the best prospect of profits. I said in my poker diary recently that poker has dropped down my list of priorities and when I do clear the decks sufficiently to allow poker back in I will be trying out a few different variations again to see what I prefer and where my strengths truly lie. I admit I have a habit of throwing my toys out the pram after a few losing sessions and switching to a different game. I want to find a game I can play profitably and focus on improving my skills for that game, but that's one for the future.
Project R - R for ratings. I don't think this got too much of a mention at the time (a couple of months back) and I'm sure I didn't declare it a formal Project but it effectively is one so I may as well regard it as such. The ratings in question are those in Paul Steele's Profitable Football Betting and I am looking to re-optimise them for my own purposes. I started this, and got as far as optimising a couple of them but that was back in February or early March and I haven't been anywhere near them since. I need to get this done before I can get into the meat of Project F really as I think these ratings may prove useful in certain circumstances. I'm quite cross with myself that I forgot about these for so long as this is exactly the sort of task I could have fitted in here and there over the past few weeks. Oh well. It's come back to the fore now so I can set about plodding my way through it.
Project S - S is for SQL Server, something I want, nay need, to teach myself in order for me to progress with various other projects (including Project X) but I have put other projects ahead of this one in terms of priority as I wanted to clear my plate a little, finish off some of the work in progress so that when it comes to working on Project S again it can seque neatly into work towards Project X. That means this project is right down my priority list at present, perhaps even as far down as second from bottom.
Project W - you may have gathered by now that the nomenclature I use for my projects relates to their subject matter. R for ratings, F for Football and so on. What then is Project W? Is it about researching systems for WWE wrestling? No. Racing at Wolverhampton? Nope. I am trying to put together a website. I have an idea for a website (at least one in fact but for now Project W concerns just one site) that I would like to get off the ground. I've never developed a website before but as a former software engineer and programmer it should be easy enough. I have consulted a few experts already and got a reasonable idea of the way forward but I just need to find a block of time, probably a few days, to work through all the information and research a few things prior to actually coding the site. I'm really looking forward to getting this up and running though, it's really quite exciting.
Project X - the biggie! This one breaks my naming convention to but it does so for a good reason. It was the first project I named in this style and while the project itself has a proper name it is one of the best things about it and I am keen to protect that name so I am not publicising it at this stage. That's partly because I don't want the name to be stolen from under me while I try to get this project going and partly because I don't want to attract too much attention to something that may be a couple of years in development. When it's close to being ready then I will unveil the true identity of this project but not before then. If you've been following this thread for a while you will know that a massive database lies at the heart of Project X, which is why it depends so heavily on Project S. I have bits of the GUI sketched ou in my head and a few on paper but nothing more concrete than that. I want to get some of the database written first so I can be sure that the data elements I want available via the front-end are doable. This project is very much on the back burner though. This is my long-term plan and the more I can clear the rest of my projects out the way the more time I will have to work on this one.

In terms of priorities I think the order of the above is R & W ahead of F, then S and finally X. What about P? That will fit in as and when I have time and am in the right mental state. I need a break from poker still but I don't know when I will feel ready again to tackle the tables so I am not assigning that a priority. Projects R and W are both important to me at present and to some degree can be worked on in parallel. While my computer is crunching data for Project R I can be working on Project W.

To the list of projects above I would also like to add another: Project A. This is a recurring project that comes up every month at present (and long may it continue to do so) and when it occurs it immediately jumps to the top of my priority list. A is for articles, in this case the football articles I am writing for the Secret Betting Club newletter on a monthly basis. I have just completed the research for my third article for them and submitted the initial draft. I am expecting to have to rework it a little once I receive the feedback from the SBC guys but their comments help improve the quality of my writing and as such are most welcome. I am getting a lot out of this experience too, and really enjoying the work too. So most of the hard work is done for this month leaving me free to work on other projects, such as those above.

Unfortunately one of the projects I may have to start on soon will consume a lot of my time in the future. The Department of Work and Pensions have dismissed my claim for Employment and Support Allowance so despite the fact I am still suffering with my health I may have to start Project J - find a job! That will certainly limit the time I have available for my other projects but hopefully it will spur me into using the time I have available now better and making real progress on some of these tasks I have started but not yet completed.

[mathare]

5th May 2010
A few weeks ago I set about putting all the projects I had on the go in some sort of priority order, and the good news is I have pretty much been able to stick that order. Most unlike me! :laugh

It's (almost) all been about Project R and Project W recently. I have made quite a bit of progress with the ratings although I would have liked to have got further than I have at present. I was hoping to have it almost completed by the time I go on holiday (tomorrow) but that's not going to happen. I could perhaps have got them done had I not started Project W a few days back for a change of scenery. That particular project has taught me a lot already and I am finding it slower going than I had hoped but ultimately I know I am doing the right thing taking my time to get the website and the contents right and fit for public consumption rather than rushing things out there. SO while I haven't made the progress I would have liked I know I am going about things in the right manner.

I have also done quite a lot on Project A over the past few weeks, leading me to re-evaluate a number of systems I was developing but ultimately I should end up with a more robust approach to football betting as a result, and that can only be a good thing. Once again I am learning a lot from this project and improve several skills so it's all good.

And now I get a holiday! :happyboun I can't wait to get away, quite honestly. I am starting to feel a bit rundown and burned out so the opportunity to get away from it all is most welcome. OK, I admit it, I am going to miss my PC and the daily betting a bit but I know not taking the laptop is the right thing to do if I want a proper holiday. Are you reading Keith? :laugh

[mathare]

19th May 2010
The holiday is very much over and it's right back to business for me now. Only I am finding it a bit harder than I had hoped to find the motivation to pick up some of the projects I was working on before I went away. I'm slowly getting there but things look like they will drag out more than I had hoped they would. Oh well.

While I was away, and for a couple of days after I got back, I thought about some of my daily figures from the start of this year and also about the portfolio and staking changes I had made. I wanted to answer the ultimate question: am I making the best of the opportunities that are coming my way? In short, am I making as much profit as I 'should' be? It's a tricky question to answer as it boils down to maximising overbets, minimising overlays and looking at ways to maximise profits while minimising costs and losses. Where does one start?

I'm happy enough with the balance of my portfolio now, happier than I have ever been I think. That's not to say it's perfect by any means but it suits me. If anything it's slightly lay heavy on a daily basis but that's not a bad thing as laying suits my mentality better than backing in many respects. I like regular small returns rather than the occasional big win punctuating a string of small losses. During the week it's mainly the nags I am betting on but I do have a decent number of sports systems on the go too so I am not too dependent on any one sport, which is a position I wanted to get in so I am pleased that is the case.

Is it working though? Are the changes I made having the desired effect? Perhaps the most effective way of answering this question is to monitor changes in my ROI, a figure that I can also use to work out how far away I am from being able to use gambling as a primary source of income. Once I know what my ROI is and my average daily turnover I can work out daily expected profits and extrapolate that up to a weekly/monthly/annual income and at least know then where I stand.

So I have set about updating my spreadsheet with daily turnover and ROI figures so I can at least start to see if things are heading in the right direction. It feels as if they are as I have made a profit every month so far this year but these profits are not big enough for me to class myself as a full-time professional so I need more figures to work out how far away that dream is. I'm getting there though...

[mathare]

21st May 2010
I have just done something that feels very odd - I have voluntarily closed an account with a bookmaker. It was done out of necessity more than anything else. Whenever I tried to place a bet online with Boyle Sports it was rejected by their risk control system even though I am an overall loser with them. Weird. But if they aren't going to accept my bets online then I am not interested in doing business with them so I have closed that account. It feels wrong to limit my options and to have fewer bookies available to me but I know it was the right thing to do.

[mick56]

Hi matt this appears to be an ever increasing occurrence,and if more people closed thier accounts,and informed as many others as possible it might give some of these people who call themselves bookmakers pause for thought.

If i had an account with the firm you mention i would be pleased to inform them that they would no longer receive my bussiness because of the way they treated you.

If enough people got involved in this way it would be most interesting to observe the reaction.

[mathare]

25th May 2010
Just when you think you have everything set up just the way you want it someone comes along and throws a spanner in the works. Today that someone was Betdaq.

When I started using betting exchanges I began with the biggest, Betfair. They began to introduce changes to their commission structure and various other charges that I felt were somewhat unfair so when Betdaq offered me an incentive to switch I did so. I think they were offering to match (or better, I forget which) the commission rate on Betfair and then freeze it for a set period. Ah no, that's right, they said you could move your Betfair points to Betdaq and have the equivalent commission and as the two exchanges use different points structures this was a great deal so I jumped ship and went purple. At several points I compared Betdaq and Betfair to make sure I was still on the right exchange and each time it pointed towards me sticking with Betdaq. Towards the end of last year I reckoned a switch to Betfair was in order so that I could get better prices due to the greater liquidity, and that's where I have been for a while now.

This afternoon I got a phonecall from Betdaq asking why I hadn't been betting with them recently. I told them I had moved to Betfair for better liquidity. They then told me that their liquidity is greatly increased since they started offering existing customers a special deal, a deal they would like to extend to me. They offered me a commission rate of 2.5% fixed for six months plus for every £100 I give them in commission they will give me a £50 free bet. Sounds good, doesn't it? But how good does the deal need to be to take me off Betfair? Is this enough? That commission rate is very appealing but what does it mean at the end of the day? That's what I am about to look at by crunching the numbers through Excel...

[mathare]

25th May 2010 (part two)
A quick bit of dirty maths suggests that the Betdaq deal may not be quite as good as perhaps I first thought.

I have managed to get my Betfair commission down a little, to 4.70%, since I switched back there in December 2009. I have been there around 6 months then and only taken 0.30% off the base commission rate. On that basis a rate of 2.50% represents a significant drop in commission so is enticing.

Consider though the commission alongside the overlay. What use is a lower commission rate if I am not getting prices that are as good? My ROI would drop off despite the fact I am paying less in commission. So how much worse can I afford my overlay to get before the drop in commission is no longer worth it? If my average overlay on lay systems with Betfair is around 10% then I can afford a 13% overlay at the lower commission rate with Betdaq. That's not as big an increase as I expected so I need to seriously think about a switch to Betdaq now.

I have monitored a couple of markets on both Betdaq and Betfair to see if the liquidity on the former really is better than it used to be. I'm not convinced, you know. Betfair always has significantly more matched than Betdaq on the horse racing markets I have looked at (the main win markets for several races shortly before the off).

Another factor to consider is Betfair SP. I don't lay to SP and I try not to back to it either as I prefer to know what odds I am matched at but I do use it as a safety net for some of my backing systems, especially at bigger odds. I put in an order for a price that is bigger than that currently on offer and set the order to use SP if unmatched by the off. That's a little trick that was mentioned to me a while back and works really well for those horses going off at decent double-figure prices.

I don't know what to do. I have checked my Betdaq account and it doesn't seem as though they have applied the new comm rate yet anyway so for now it's a moot point. Maybe I need to sleep on it and see if I can come up with any other reasons why I should (or shouldn't) swap exchanges again.

[Mattw07]

25th May 2010 (part two)

I have monitored a couple of markets on both Betdaq and Betfair to see if the liquidity on the former really is better than it used to be. I'm not convinced, you know. Betfair always has significantly more matched than Betdaq on the horse racing markets I have looked at (the main win markets for several races shortly before the off).



Im not sure where the better liquidity is either, i havent noticed any inprovement on the horses in the last 6 monthes.

[mathare]

30th May 2010
Project W is done and live! :yikes: :happyboun

And I have learned quite a lot in getting it to that stage. I used a site builder (RV Site Builder) to get most of the structure etc in place and also wrote a lot of the content in that. However, the site builder had a number of limitations that stopped me from getting the site exactly how I wanted it so after publishing the site via the site builder I downloaded a copy into Dreamweaver and made a number of changes that way.

I'm pretty pleased with the way things have turned out though. It's not going to win any awards but for a first go I am really pleased with it. I have had a good trawl over all the links etc this afternoon and ironed out a few teething problems. No doubt there will be more issues to resolve as time goes on but a few friends have had a look and reckon it does what they'd expect so I can't be too unhappy with that can I?

Now I just need to get some traffic going there :laugh

[mathare]

1st June 2010
Another month passes by and it's been another profitable one, thankfully.

Some systems haven't performed to their potential and have had a poor month. In particular I'm thinking of Easy Money Lays when I say that but other systems have continued previous poor performance levels, including SixPlus Loser, Double Top, NH Media and Trainer 3. I have looked at my staking for all of these and for now at least no changes are required but some of them are on a watch list and if they continue as they have been the stakes will be cut.

Other systems are absolutely flying, in particular lay systems such as CD Lays, Lay'em, my own Classic Lays (ex-False Favs) and the NailedOn lays. Between them these systems have put on over 90pts in May - not at all bad bearing in mind I was away for 10 days of the month. A couple of backing systems also had a really good month, Progeny and HSR in particular and as a result I have increased the stakes on both of these.

I checked over all my banks and these were the only changes I felt were required at this time. Let's hope for continued good results on these systems and an increase in profits as a result. :thumbs

[mathare]

5th June 2010
Over the last couple of days I have been rethinking my approach to staking for various systems in my portfolio. The reason is my overall ROI. Including the years spent following systems that didn't really work for me and were dropped my total ROI is low, much lower than I expected and hoped it would be. It's around 0.40% in fact. Things are better for this year, my ROI for the year to date is a little under 2% which when you consider that the majority of my betting is lay betting is alright. I'm happy enough with that sort of figure, especially as it's heading in the right direction - upwards. My average absolute daily profit/loss is heading upwards nicely too which means I stand to win/lose more on a daily basis. You can't always win at this game and I accept the larger losses as part and parcel of making greater profits. My average daily liability is also on the way up nicely, which is to be expected if my ROI and average profits are also increasing as the three are connected.

Anyway, in an attempt to help improve that ROI I have been looking again at my staking and how I can better use my spreadsheet to help me with it. I've set up some rules in Excel to conditionally format cells to show me when a bank becomes a candidate for increasing/decreasing stakes. I have also reworked all my bank figures to show them in terms of points for the current stakes and added (where necessary) a column showing the suggested bankroll for a system, again in points. It's hard to believe it has taken me this long to put these measures in place really but there you have it. I've done it now anyway.

I have also scrapped bank barriers. For whatever reason they just hadn't been working out for me and in the long run had actually cost me a bit of money. Perhaps I wasn't using them right, not setting the barrier levels to the right point or whatever. But they weren't doing it for me and I have happily dropped them. I haven't come across them outside of this forum either, and while that doesn't mean they are not a good idea it does mean that they are not that widespread so I feel I am better off sticking to more normal methods of bankroll management. This meant a few updates and tweaks to my spreadsheet too and hopefully I have made all the changes correctly and not broken anything! I did take a backup first though, just in case :)

All of this has resulted in the staking for a few systems coming under review. SixPlus Loser is one that needs the stakes decreasing it seems. My bank has been suffering for a while now, not that it ever really got going (a high of 125% of starting bank was achieved July '09). It had been under a barrier but I will now reduce the stakes for a while with a view to ditching it if it continues to disappoint.

Two of my own laying systems (Classic and Premier Lays) are due for a stakes increase though. I am confident they can thrive on higher stakes so I will make that change soon.

My Max Lays bank is in the right ballpark staking-wise but the performance of that system is somewhat disappointing compared to my other lay systems. The overlay is significantly higher this year than for other lays and the bank has been dropping steadily for a little while now. It's in no real danger but it's gone up a bit then down a bit without ever really threatening to take off and make a real profit. I will be looking at this system in a bit more depth soon to see whether it is worth continuing with it to maintain turnover and thus help reduce my Betfair commission or just drop it from my portfolio to help improve the bottom line.

[mathare]

6th June 2010
What did I say yesterday? "You can't always win at this game and I accept the larger losses as part and parcel of making greater profits" - on a day that would become my 10th worst of all time. Oh the irony! :rolleyes:

Still, onwards and upwards.

Today sees another change to my gambling activities - I'm giving up poker for a while. I have just posted in my poker diary the reasons for this but the long and short of it is that I can't give it my full attention when I am playing, for whatever reason, and as a result my game and my results are suffering. If I can't give the game the attention it needs then playing is just going to cost me money in the long run so it makes sense to give it up until such time I can play with the blinkered approach to the game that it requires. I don't know when, if ever, I will have such focus but I certainly don't have it now so there is no point wasting the time and money on the poker tables.

Instead I am going to throw myself into what I hope will become my magnum opus - I'm going to crack football betting. In a big way too, I hope. I plan to thoroughly dissect the game and all the data associated with itm, examine it from all angles and perhaps even put the pieces back together in a strange order but one that will hopefully work and will spit out several profitable, reliable football systems. That's what I am after. That and a deep understanding of football markets, how matches are perceived by the general public, how this affects the markets and how I can profit from that. I'll be looking at various rating systems, examining relationships between various aspects of games, looking at conventional wisdom to see whether it is based on myth or fact and so on. In short I plan to become an expert in football betting. It's a grand aim but I think I can do it, given time. And the only way I can get the time I need is to give up playing poker.

A lot of what needs to be done at this stage is number crunching. Compiling spreadsheets and databases, devising and tweaking algorithms and calculating huge amounts of derived data. That's something I can do on and off, which is how my time presents itself most afternoons.

I check my bets on a race by race basis making sure I have them all matched and that my prices are OK and so on. I like to keep my results up to date race by race too where I can, or at least update them several times throughout the afternoon. It suits me to do it that way, but I have found that poker doesn't fit into that way of working very well. Poker demands my attention all the time and I can't do that. This football project can fit in the gaps between races perfectly.

Cracking football betting is something I have had in mind for a long time now, and finally I think the time is right to have a bloody good go at it. Time to dig out the spreadsheets I abandoned several weeks back, months back in some cases, and refresh my memory. Where was I up to and where was I heading with it?

[mathare]

15th June 2010
It's taken a bit of time but I think I am back up to speed with my football betting stuff now and have started to dig deep into the data to look for potential system ideas. I have calculated and derived well over 300 bits of information about each and every match in the English League covering 9 seasons (I had more seasons covered but without odds information for the earlier seasons the info is pretty much useless). I ought to expand this to 10 seasons by adding in the data for last season but I haven't got round to it yet, and it took me ages to calculate everything for these seasons so if I want to get anything done before the new season kicks off I'd better work with what I have for now at least.

Picking out systems from this lot is going to be a long drawn-out process and to be completely honest I'm not entirely sure of the best way to go about it. I have had a bit of a dabble and one potential system has already dropped out. It has a 7% ROI and was profitable in 8 out of 9 seasons so on the surface it looks reasonable enough but I will need to do more digging to be sure of it before I decide whether to carry it forward to the next stage of the process (whatever that may be).

Once I have finally cracked football betting I can start on the horses :helper

[mathare]

18th June 2010
I've spent a couple of days adding in the data for last season to my footy spreadsheets and using that raw data to calculate everything else I need. I've also extended the number of data items per match to over 350 with ideas for more to add too at some stage. This has meant I haven't really done much in the way of researching actual systems but the one I thought I had found the other day isn't actually that great, but a variation on the same theme leads to a decent-looking system with a double-figure ROI but as before I need to dig a bit deeper to make sure it all holds up and makes sense before I dive in with it.

I am currently compiling a list of football betting angles I want to investigate too. Whether this list leads to anything remains to be seen. Some of the ideas are just thoughts I've had, general interest items really, ponderings if you like. Others are well thought out avenues that could lead to real profits. But we'll see how far I get with those.

With the horses kicking me hard in the wallet this month my motivation is somewhat lacking. That seems counter-intuitive in many ways, things are going badly so I should be looking at ways in which I can diversify and hopefully improve things overall but I seem to be more motivated when things are going well. Which they aren't at present. But there's not much I can do about that. I have faith in (almost) all the systems I follow so it's just a case of letting them do their thing and taking the rough with the smooth I guess.

[mathare]

25th June 2010
I have a gift for you. It's football system that has dropped out of my analysis this evening. It's a pretty quiet system with just 317 qualifiers in 10 seasons but that averages out to something like 1 bet per weekend during the season doesn't it? Enough to generate a little bit of interest, surely.

The stats? OK, here you are:
317 bets
137 winners
43.22% SR
37.13pts profit (to 1pt level stakes)
11.70% ROI

Not too shabby I'm sure you'll agree.

The profits breakdown such that the start of the season and the very end are the best but there is no significant reason why this should be so I don't recommend backing the selections only at certain times of the year. In terms of breakdown by season, it got off to a pretty shabby start but has been profitable 6 years oout of 10 and last year it made 30.83pts profit with 15.36pts profit the previous season.

The rules are nice and simple:
Back Premiership teams playing at home who have scored no more than 4 times in their last 6 home league games.

That's it. Check how many goals each home team in the Premiership has scored in their last 6 games at home and if it's 4 or less then back them. What could be easier?

Why am I giving this away when I could build it into a portfolio of mini-systems (which is what I hope to do with the results of this analysis, coincidentally)? Because I don't understand why those rules should produce a profit so I am throwing it out there to see what you lot think. Is this system data-mined? It kinda feels like it but if I tinker with the variables slightly (change the number of goals, for example) then it still works but isn't as profitable. This reduces the fluke potential a little at least.

Why could this system work? Well, what do we know about the teams it picks out? They are doing poorly at home, generally speaking. They could be unbeaten, theoretically but in actual fact no team that meets the rules has amassed more than 12 points in their last 6 home games. So the teams are unfancied, basically. A home win is somewhat unexpected due to the paucity of home goals. This is going to built into the odds which will be pushed out more than one would expect for an average home team. But a goal drought can't continue for too long. Teams feel the pressure, especially at home where their fans get on their backs. The players know they haven't been doing that well and owe the fans. Plus there is a degree of regression to the mean - a team doing badly will do better soon such that its results start to average out in the long run.

Look at the SR of the system - 43.22%. The average win rate in the Premiership is 47.16% over the last 10 seasons so despite the fact we're picking out goal-shy teams we still have a decent chance of a home win it seems. Away wins happen 30.91% of the time so it's still much more likely that we'll get a home win than an away win, on average, despite the goal-shy nature of the teams we're backing.

So on that basis I can justify all the rules except one: the fact that it works in the Premiership only. This one really puzzled me for a while and I think I have finally got a handle on it. And it's a slightly weird one.

The bookies see a lot more money for the Premiership than the other English divisions. That's fact. The Premiership is televised more often, has better players and attracts far more interest generally as well as from the betting public so turnover on the games is higher. Because of this the markets for Premiership games get more care and attention from the odds-makers than other games would. Again, that's only natural. Bookies are making sure they don't make a mistake on their main markets else they'd be left open to large liabilities from clued-up punters. So when a poor-looking home team is playing the bookies shorten the odds on the away team as the weight of public money will likely come down on the side they think is more likely to win - the away team. This lengthens the odds on the home side and gives us a value bet. The average odds of a qualifying team for this system is 3.15. In the Championship the odds average out at 2.36 while it's 2.37 for League One and League Two. That's for teams who have scored 4 or fewer goals in their last 6 home games. These figures are a massive 0.70 above the overall average for the Premiership but only 0.25 greater than the average for the other divisions.

Put simply: goal-shy Premiership teams are available at much longer odds than they should be when playing at home.

The figures I have quoted are average odds. If you are able to get the best odds on each and every bet your ROI goes up to 20.25% (64.19pts profit). If you get the best price some of the time (which I model by taking the average of the best price and the overall average price, meaning you're getting better than the average in the long run but not as good as the best price on each bet) your profit is still over 50pts with a ROI just a touch under 16%.

And I'm giving this away for free... :yikes:

[mathare]

4th July 2010
Things like this happen to me a lot. I think I have found something that looks promising and get excited about it only to dig a bit deeper and find it's actually a bit crap. But if I keep looking I normally find something else that is bigger and better than the first thing I found.

And so it is with football systems. Back in the middle of June I found a trend that was profitable and had a 7% ROI. At the time I was amazed to have found anything that was profitable and the fact that the ROI was only 7% didn't bother me. Then over the next few days I found a variation on that system that seemed much more promising. Hurrah! A week or so later I was back with a system I was giving away for free. Why was I doing that? Because I didn't fully understand why the trend existed and by trying to explain the system to you lot I found myself understanding the reasons behind it better.

But I was still happy for it to be out there in the public domain because at the end of the day it's not that good really is it? A profit of 37 points in 10 years and the last two years between them have produced around 46pts profit. That means it was losing up till two years ago, right? A loss of a tad over 9pts in the first eight seasons - that's rubbish! Who would still be following a system with those returns?

I accept that and fully agree with this criticism (which only I have made so far). So did I give up and throw in the towel? Or did I go digging around and unearth a massive number of other profitable trends? I think you know the answer...

I have thrown away the least profitable trends and many of those whose profit breakdown across the seasons just isn't up to scratch but even after all of that I still have 183 profitable trends to play with. And all that has come from looking at nothing more than the last 6 games teams have played, and only then in terms of goals and results. I haven't used shots, corners, bookings etc - just basic data and still I have found nearly two hundred profitable avenues.

The question now is what to do with them. I will be playing with these 183 systems more to work out what the best thing to do with them is but right now I am toying with the idea of creating a number of portfolios from them using these trends as contributory mini-systems to form bigger portfolio-based systems. I don't quite know yet how to structure the portfolios. Do I go for one based on home wins, one on draws, another on away wins etc? Or use a risk-based split - one low-risk, a medium-risk portfolio and a high-risk system?

How I combine these profitable trends isn't important right now. I still have another six weeks or so before the season kicks off and I have only analysed a small portion of my data. If I can find 183 profitable trends looking at just a team's last six games how many will I uncover when I look at ratings or the various figures I have derived and calculated for each match?

Things are only just getting started on the football front...

[Laf]

4th July 2010
Things are only just getting started on the football front...

It will be interesting to see what you come up with Mathare. Football systems is an area I have a big interest in and have dabbled with in the past. It was a painstaking process though having to sift through all the data and I just got bored quite quickly. Reading your blog has got me interested again and I might just have a go again while I have some time on my hands.

[mathare]

It will be interesting to see what you come up with Mathare. Football systems is an area I have a big interest in and have dabbled with in the past. It was a painstaking process though having to sift through all the data and I just got bored quite quickly. Reading your blog has got me interested again and I might just have a go again while I have some time on my hands.Sifting through the data is the boring bit for sure. That's why I have written some VBA to crunch and digest as much as possible for me so I only need tweak the code here and there to produce a comprehensive summary of all the information to see whether it's worth investigating a certain angle further. But even then it takes time to get a fully optimised system out of it. And all I really have at this stage are mini-systems that need to be combined into portfolios to be any real use, and I still haven't really worked out how best to do that.

I still have a hell of a lot more data to analyse in various ways too and I am slowly beginning to accept it won't all be done before the season starts. I think I need to finish working up a few ideas I have started on (including those form-based mini-systems) before attacking anything new. I have a huge ratings project I am desperate to get my teeth stuck into but can't see that producing anything before the season kicks off unfortunately.

I'm glad something has caught your interest again though Laf. It'll be interesting to see what you come up. Hope it's good! :thumbs

[mathare]

Thursday 8th July
There's around five weeks to go till the start of the football season and unless I make a move soon I won't be ready to go when it all kicks off. With that in mind I have stopped plucking out mini-systems from the data I am using and gone back to the form-based mini-systems I pulled out last week (or whenever it was) and have started to seriously think about how to combine them into portfolios.

There are several ways I can about this, including:

trial and error - combine a few mini-systems and see what happens, add/remove them as necessary
combine them based on profits - bung the most profitable ones together and forget the rest
aim for a fairly even spread of bets throughout the year - but this pre-supposes I have a figure in mind for the number of bets I want from each portfolio (I don't, yet)
combine them in such a way that results in a smoothed accumulation of profits - when one system suffers a drop counter it with another whose profit spikes
and several other ways too
So which should I use? That's the tricky question and unfortunately I don't really have an answer at this stage.

Obviously a smooth profit accumulation is more desirable than a boom-bust profile. I have a record of the number of profitable seasons for each mini-system but not the full profit breakdown so fitting the pieces together to create a smooth profit line is a little tricky.

I need to think about how many bets I want from each portfolio too, even if it's just an approximate figure. I don't to wait ages between bets or have so few that each bet takes on an added importance with an ability to make or break the season but nor do I want so many bets that the workload for that portfolio is ridiculous. I need to strike a balance somewhere. I dunno, maybe 10-15 bets per week for each portfolio would be about right for a maximum workload. 50-60 a month then, 9 months in a season so somewhere around 500 bets per season at the absolute max, and almost anything below that is acceptable. As long as it's not too low, as I said above. I'm probably looking for at least 80-100 bets per season to give me a reasonable rate of return and reduce the impact of any single bet losing. I can certainly use those figures to provide some initial guidelines and see how it goes from there.

That still doesn't get me much nearer the best way to combine these various systems though. I think a certain amount of trial and error is going to have to come into it so thank goodness for Excel and VBA which can do virtually all the hard work for me.

I'd better have a play this afternoon and see what I come up with...

[mathare]

Wednesday 14th July
Well, I've been playing as I said I would. And I think I've got somewhere :happyboun

I have taken the 180+ form-based mini-systems and broken them down into five different portfolios - one for each possible result (home win, draw, away win) and one each for under and over 2.5 goals. It's been a slightly awkward process as there are many ways in which I could have combined the various systems within each portfolio. Was I trying to maximise profit? Maximise the ROI? Create the smoothese profit accumulation across the seasons? Balance the number of bets per month? And so on.

In the end I tinkered until I had a portfolio whose stats seemed 'right' - the number of bets each season seemed OK, the monthly breakdown suited and there was a pretty steady accumulation of profits, that sort of thing. It's not very scientific, it all comes down to feel really. That's not usually my sort of thing, I prefer to have some science behind everything, but I'm going to have to just trust my instincts on this one I think.

The problem with any football betting system research though is a lack of SP data. The game isn't designed to be a betting medium, unlike dog and horse racing, so there's no concept of starting price. Instead I am relying on data captured by others and trusting that it's correct. This makes me slightly nervous as it means profit figures I have based on that data may or may not be 100% accurate which in turn means I ought to paper trade any system I come up to ensure it works to 'real' odds captured by myself around the time the games take place. That way I know I have reliable data.

I have yet to work out the details of paper trading these new portfolio systems, including fundamental things like how to get the qualifiers and how/where to conduct the paper trade. I guess watch this space for further details really.

And although nothing is set in stone at this time (I am still tinkering now and then with the make-up of some of these portfolios) I think it's reasonable to give you some stats for each so you can see what I have been working towards.

Home Wins (10 season stats)
2022 bets
995 winners
49.21% SR
319.04pts profit
15.78% ROI

Draws (10 season stats):
2272 bets
834 winners
36.71% SR
561.18pts profit
24.70% ROI

Away Wins (10 season stats)
2065 bets
839 winners
40.63% SR
521.58pts profit
25.26% ROI

Under 2.5 (5 season stats)
2393 bets
1533 winners
64.06% SR
361.42pts profit
15.10% ROI

Over 2.5 (5 season stats)
1534 bets
935 winners
60.95% SR
262.00pts profit
17.08% ROI

I'm not going to post profit graphs at this stage but by and large they are reasonably smooth lines going up at around a 45 degree angle for each portfolio, which is just what I was after.

In a way it seems a shame to effectively dump so many of these mini-systems (I'm only using around 1 in 4 for the portfolios). I have found all these profitable betting angles and I am just ignoring them from now on, but I am doing so having cherry-picked the best combinations (I hope) to form low-risk profitable systems. I've sorted the wheat from the chaff, if you like.

Now to press on with the other mini-systems I have, based around several ratings, to form those into profitable portfolios. :thumbs

[barrelmaniac]

thats what i call a good roi for football, would be worth a bit more research on the sp's though, but looks like some good productive work :thumbs

[mathare]

Monday 2nd August
I'm still tinkering with football systems and still churning out promising-looking portfolio-based systems so I can't wait for the new season to start this weekend. In fact I think it starts on Friday night doesn't it? Ooh, exciting!

That means I only have a few days to make sure I am 100% happy with all the portfolios (one of which I have only sketched out so far and haven't finished working on) and how best to use them. I should have somewhere between 8 and 10 portfolios if I can get all the data worked in time. This is quite thrilling for me as it's not often I feel confident enough in my own work to start putting down real money but that's what I plan to do with these portfolios, albeit to small stakes to start with. I have done a lot of backtesting and have double-checked all my figures so I am confident of making a profit and I'm going to put my money where my mouth is and prove my confidence is well-founded.

I'm also looking to extend the Simplex systems I applied to the Premiership and SPL with great success last season. Over the past couple of days I've looked at extending this idea into the lower divisions of the English league and while it works I'm not sure the risk-reward ratio is right for me. I have yet to make my mind up properly what to do there. I'd like to add at least one new league this season (as well as increasing the stakes on the others) but I haven't found one that really fits the bill yet. I think I'll take a look in Spain and Italy and see what they have to offer...

[MattR]

What's Simplex Mat?


I know what you mean with the excitement. That's what's happened with a couple of systems I've just started (including the one in the thread I just started) The way the system worked and the ratings I used in conjunction with the data all made sense and the strike rate increased as the rating went up which made perfect sense and really suggests that it should work just as the back testing suggested. There was no back fitting or playing around with the data it just all correlated exceptionally well with the rating. Which as you were saying above is the same reason I was ready to jump straight in with real money albeit carefully to start.

[Win2Win]

My new bots ticking along nicely, and I have some new tennis trading techniques to try, seems easy to make money from unless you've got a really fancied player. More swings in the WTA when both players are similar odds.

[mathare]

What's Simplex Mat?It's a football system I bought a few years back and have since tweaked the rules for additional safety without compromising the profits unduly. I won't give away the rules as the authors are still trying to flog it but it's pretty simple and once you know the secret not worth the price they are asking for it now.


I know what you mean with the excitement. That's what's happened with a couple of systems I've just started (including the one in the thread I just started) The way the system worked and the ratings I used in conjunction with the data all made sense and the strike rate increased as the rating went up which made perfect sense and really suggests that it should work just as the back testing suggested. There was no back fitting or playing around with the data it just all correlated exceptionally well with the rating. Which as you were saying above is the same reason I was ready to jump straight in with real money albeit carefully to start.Glad you're making a few quid from your system Matt. I have it on a watching brief at the minute :thumbs

[mathare]

Tuesday 3rd August

I think I'll take a look in Spain and Italy and see what they have to offer...That's much more like it! At least it is for the Italian leagues, the less said about La Liga the better really.

In loose terms the system I am looking to extend is a loss-chasing system that involves the kind of staking I hate. It's Martingale, sort of. At least only 'sort of' the way I manage it. But that's by the by here. All you really need to know at this stage is that I am starting with a 10p unit stake in my calculations. Doesn't sound like a lot (and it's not, really) but it can get quite big quite quickly and that's when the real profits are made. Or not in the case of La Liga as that division has shown the only losses I have ever known this system make. That comes courtesy of Alaves in 2001-02 and from just a 10p unit stake the losses on that one team mounted up to £221,536.99 - yes, nearly a quarter of a million quid! The largest stake got up to £83,076.75! :yikes: Even ignoring outliers such as this (and one shouldn't ignore them completely as it shows freak sets of results can happen) the risk-reward ratios just don't stack up so La Liga gets put to one side. Incidentally, I checked out the Segunda Liga (Spanish second division) and it was a hell of a lot better. But I'm not comfortable picking out lower divisions if the method doesn't apply equally to the upper echelons of football. It smacks too much of back-fitting when one picks and chooses like that. There is no reason I know of that the second division in Spain should be any different really to the top-flight so I am wary of this method working well for one and not the other. If it worked for La Liga but not the lower divisions (as is the case with England's Premiership) then I am far less worried. I trust top quality teams more than I do their lesser counterparts.

Over to Italy though and everything seems pretty rosy. I've only just finished churning the numbers out (and I've got it down pat now and can run a whole new country's leagues in only a couple of hours) but they look pretty good, for both Serie A and Serie B so I think I have found what I was looking for. In terms of risk-reward ratios both divisions are better than the lower divisions of the Football League. And with the new portfolio systems I will be following I don't want to overextend myself with too many new systems as that increases the chance of a visit from the cock-up fairy so adding in Serie A and maybe Serie B seems like the right move. But I have a few weeks to mull that one over as the Italian leagues don't start up till the end of the month.

Before I settle on Italy though I should just have a quick look at the other Scottish divisions...

[mathare]

Tuesday 3rd August (part two)
Scot Div 1 - no
Scot Div 2 - yes
Scot Div 3 - no

Because it only really works in Scottish Division Two and not the divisions either side I'm ignoring the lower Scottish divisions. So I'm sticking with the Premiership, SPL and then Serie A and perhaps Serie B too. Phew! It's been a busy couple of days but well worth it.

[biyax]

Nice read mate .. .. a gamblog in life of a bloody good winner :laughitupsmilie:

:biggrin::biggrin::biggrin: