VAR - Victories Away Rising

TipTap commented on my recent VAR - Veritable Away Results post:

You say that VAR has removed some of the Home advantage - does this apply to league football as well? is there evidence for this? Although given it started 2017ish, then we had Covid and empty stadiums, may not be enough comparable data yet?

What data we have is pretty clear on the impact of VAR and of reduced attendances due to COVID. Lane Clark & Peacock (LCP), a firm of financial consultants based in the City of London, produced a report in December 2020 with the title "COVID-19 and VAR decimate 'home advantage' in football leagues across Europe".

LCP’s Football Analytics team who have developed TransferLab, an online football data scouting tool, have analysed results of football games across the big five European Leagues (the English Premier League, French Ligue 1, Germany’s Bundesliga, Italy’s Serie A and Spain’s La Liga), looking back over the past 6 seasons for comparative data.

The data shows that, while the introduction of the Video Assistant Referee (VAR) between 2017 and 2019 (depending on the league) reduced home advantage across Europe by around 14%, the remaining home advantage largely disappeared after there were no fans in the stadium following the pandemic.

For the first time in history, the top flight in English football saw more Away wins than home in 2020-21, and other top flight leagues to have their lowest ever home win percentage last season were France, Scotland, Germany, Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands. Portugal's lowest was in 2019-20, with 2020-21 not far behind. The EPL this season currently is the second worst ever for Home sides winning just 41.3% of games. 

Declining Home Advantage was already a trend I have written about before. In 123 seasons of top flight football in England, only nine times have Away wins exceeded 30%. The table below shows how many of those are recent with 1946-47 an outlier likely due to being the first season after the disruption of the Second World War:

VAR was introduced in the EPL for 2019-20, a season impacted by COVID in March of course, so there's an overlap for two seasons with the pandemic and restricted attendances, but the data so far seems to back up the logical rationale that Home advantage is reduced by goal-line technology and VAR. I'm sure there will be more on this in published studies as time goes on, but as investors we don't have the luxury of waiting for mathematical proof, since paradoxically by then the edge will no longer be there. 

If you had backed the Away in all EPL matches since the introduction of VAR, your ROI would be 9.4% (from 1048 matches) compared with -8.8% for the previous 19 seasons. 

Pizza Without Cheese

This blog now enters its 15th year, with this post being #2887. Four comments are required to hit the 4,000 mark, although I've probably deleted several thousand spammy ones over the years and the 2,687,154 all-time hits means the monthly average is, albeit completely meaningless, a little under 15k.

I say meaningless because this blog is essentially a personal diary - a record of ideas and thoughts over the years, some of which have served me well and some of which were perhaps rather naïve - but if some of my ideas over the years have improved your decisions in some way, that's satisfying to know.

Inspired by an article at Teslarati.com which claimed, with somewhat dubious logic, that by 2024, Elon Musk "could become the first person to ever accumulate a $1 trillion net worth" I took a look using similarly dubious logic at how long it might be before I might reach billionaire status, and while the bad news is it's a lot later than 2024, the good news is that it's a lot sooner than I intuitively thought it might be. By the end of December 2054 when I will be just 97, I "could" reach this milestone.

Unfortunately the calculations assume that my net worth will grow at the same rate has it has since 1992 (18.7417% annually in case you were wondering) which isn't going to happen, but this pointless exercise is a great illustration of the power of compounding. If spreadsheets had existed in my youth, some of my financial decisions would have been a lot smarter.

I find it quite fascinating and inspiring that Warren Buffett had a net worth of $1m when he was 30, and is worth $117b today, with 99% of that being earned after his 50th birthday. 

The secret to getting rich is to start investing early and live for a long time! 

The UEFA World Cup Qualifiers this week looked like the type of matches where the Draw might be value. In 2017 the eight matches produced four Draws and a 7.24 unit profit, but these were two-leg affairs and results from previous years weren't too promising. Two matches saw the home side as a big favourite but the other two generated one winner with the Sweden v Czech Republic game requiring extra-time. As a Cassini, it's most unfortunate that Italy miss out on a second successive World Cup. A World Cup without Italy is like a pizza with no cheese, as someone described it. 

No EPL Draw selections last week with arguably England's Big 4 all winning their quarter-finals and making it to a top quality FA Cup Semi-Final line up and no action this week either because of the International break. 

VAR - Veritable Away Results

In both the last post, and again last month, I touched on the topic of European club matches, and the differences between First and Second Leg games, and some of you may have noticed that over the last five seasons, backing the Away team in the Second Leg has been very lucrative, with an ROI of 33% from 186 matches.

Since 2004, following this unsophisticated strategy would not surprisingly have lost you 3%, so the recent profitability is interesting, and may be due in part to the introduction of VAR which removes some of the Home advantage.  

In 41 games where the First Leg was a Draw, the ROI over this time (past five seasons) has been 124%, with the score of the Draw not a factor. There is one game tonight in the Europa League that meets this criterion, and one in the new Europa Conference League where VAR is not being used. This match is also the first in spreadsheet history to follow a 4:4 draw.

In the NBA, my advice from January to back Overs on totals greater than 223 continues to be profitable, with a 95-69-1 record from February, an ROI of 13%. These numbers are provisional from GimmetheDog since Killer Sports seems to have a bug on the query. 

Moving The Goalposts

With a couple of big anniversaries coming up later this month, I took a look back at March 2008 when I started this blog on the eve of my 51st birthday. Those of you with an aptitude for numbers, which is hopefully all of you, will realise that this means I am now on the verge of 65, an age which used to mean being an "old age pensioner" and it's little comfort that I technically still have another year before achieving that milestone in life.

I've mentioned retirement more than once in this blog, and in fact 14 years ago, back in March 2008 when I set up this blog I wrote in my profile:

I am at that age where I can start thinking about retirement and anything I make from trading sports will bring that day forward.

"Bringing that day forward" hasn't yet happened, although since I never specified a date I was looking to bring forward, maybe there's still a chance I can claim to have achieved this goal. Of course, what happens in life is that the goalposts keep moving.

While we may think that when we achieve a certain net worth, we will retire, maybe travel for a while and live happily ever after, the reality is that if we are fortunate enough to hit that number, we realise it's not the finishing line we thought it was, and we set our sights on a new one.

Personal circumstances are defined by Collins as "the conditions of your life, especially the amount of money that you have" and as the term suggests, they are not the same for everyone. For myself, I'm fortunate in that I can now stop working anytime I choose, but for now I'm in good health and being paid silly money for the amount of work I do, and with travel placed on hold for the past two years I'm quite happy to carry on "working".

I am, however, well aware of the saying that "life is what happens when you're busy making plans" - and no, it wasn't John Lennon who originally came up with that insightful quote, dating back as it does to at least 1957 which I might add, was a vintage year. 

A couple of years ago I did mention the subject of possible retirement to a former boss, who remarked that I shouldn't retire FROM something, but TO something. That was good advice, and with a pandemic arriving shortly after that conversation, I'm glad I held off on pulling that trigger since travel would have been seriously restricted. 

Before I get to the betting updates, a couple of observations about that first blog post almost 14 years ago. The first is that my very first comment was from the inspirational Graeme Dand who wrote:

I have no idea whether this Tiger guy won or lost, or indeed whether Graeme ever did spend more time on golf, but a Tiger Woods finished the Masters that year as runner-up to Trevor Immelman. When I first started tracking my sports investing in 2006, Golf was actually my top sport that first year but by the time I started the blog, MLB and NBA had taken over.

As many of you know, Graeme is currently dealing with more important issues than sports betting, and I encourage you to follow him on Twitter even if you don't care about horse-racing as much as Graeme does, which is a lot. 

It was looking like the MLB season might be shortened this year but the dispute between players and owners was resolved last week with a full 162 game season in tact, albeit starting a week later than originally scheduled. 

Unfortunately with the Killer Sports MLB page currently not working, my participation may be somewhat limited, but if you are playing, note that the National League will be adopting the Designated Hitter rule, extra innings will no longer start with a runner on second, and doubleheader games will be the full nine innings.   

After a few days away travelling for work, I thought I'd wait for this weekend's EPL games to complete before updating the numbers, and as I cautioned back in January, finding Draws in March is historically very tough, and this season appears to be following the same pattern with March nothing short of a disaster!  

If you took heed and lowered your stakes, well done. If you lowered them to zero, well done indeed. It was a fortuitous time to have a work trip. Why is the first quarter of a year so bad? Logically it does make sense that with teams playing each other for a second time, the market should be more efficient, but the consistent drop off over 22 years is still surprising. 

In European competition, in Second Leg matches where the Home team has more than a one goal lead from the First Leg the value historically is on the Away team, and neither Liverpool (v Internazionale) or Manchester City (v Sporting) won their Second Leg matches from this position last week, although City were able to Draw. 

There is also an edge on the Away team when the First Leg was a Draw, (10.25% ROI from 219 matches), but Bayern Munich were 1.19 to beat Salzburg and the edge isn't there on matches with a hot favourite. 

Heartless

I had the thought on Thursday morning that anti-Russian, more specifically anti-Putin, sentiment might be a factor in the markets for the League Cup Final with casual punters showing their outrage by throwing their money behind Liverpool as a proxy for Ukraine against "aggressor" Chelsea, owned of course by Roman Abramovich, a close ally of Putin's. 

Whether or not this was part of the reason that Chelsea and the Draw drifted during the 72 hours before kick-off is impossible to say for sure, but it's an example of how there is sometimes an edge to be gained from unlikely places. 

The average prices via Odds Portal went from 2.32 to 2.19 for Liverpool, 3.21 to 3.37 for the Draw, and 3.4 to 3.57 for Chelsea. 

As I wrote in my last post, the Draw is where the value exists in Finals with no club having a fair win probability greater than 0.5, and the Draw opened at 3.16 on Pinnacle, drifting to 3.39 by game time, but as is usually the case, a much more tempting 3.6 was available on Betfair which seemed very generous given the history of this fixture and domestic finals in general.

A perfect draw ensued, taking the ROI on Draws in all 18 League Cup Finals since 2005 to 50%. Of the five Finals with no odds-on favourite, four have finished level but that's too few matches for the ROI to be meaningful.

Of the 18 finals, ten have been all-Big-6 matchups with, yes you guessed it, six results being Draws with the favourite winning the other four. 

With no selections in the EPL for the second consecutive weekend - the Brentford v Newcastle United game slipped out of contention - at least one reader made some money from Draws this weekend, and hopefully quite a few more of you.  

I've previously written about how the second half of the season isn't as lucrative as the first, and with 256 games played, we're entering into the time of year (particularly weeks 26-31) when the system really struggles:

I'm travelling again for work this week, so there will be no month-end updates, or any updates for that matter for a while. As things stand, February could go either way with the major index Futures currently down around 2% and the Cassini portfolio clinging on to a small monthly gain, a position I didn't expect to be in when the attack on Ukraine began, but the stock market is heartless, as the linked-to article explains. 

War and Draw

Obviously, there are far more important things going on in the world this week than investing, but the reality is that life for most of us will go on pretty much as usual. 

The final of UEFA's Champions League has, not surprisingly, been moved from St Petersburg to Paris and it's crazy to think that the host nation of the 2018 World Cup is currently attacking the country and city that staged the Euro 2012 Final. 

Russia and Ukraine are both in the play-offs for a place in the World Cup Finals this year, but following yesterday's UEFA meeting, clubs sides from both countries will be required to play their home matches at neutral venues. FIFA meet this weekend to decide on the fate of the national teams. Should they both qualify, FIFA's draw for the Finals could be a little complicated.

As I wrote last week, it was a quiet weekend for betting with no EPL game coming close to being a Draw selection, and of the ten matches played, just one - West Ham United v Newcastle United - finished level. 

Midweek saw one "Close" selection which was Watford v this season's Draw specialists Crystal Palace, but for the first time in six games, Palace were unable to provide followers with a Draw, though at least one person was happy about that. The ROI for "Close" matches drops to 33.9% on the season.  

There should be a selection tomorrow with the Brentford v Newcastle United game currently a qualifier, and Brighton and Hove Albion v Aston Villa one to monitor.

UEFA's club competitions continued this week and the success of Away teams in the second leg of all-square ties continued with both Red Bull Leipzig and Barcelona winning. 

The conventional wisdom is that following an Away draw in the First Leg, the Home team will finish the job in the Second Leg. Of the 218 matches since 2004 where I have prices, 116 were won by the Home side, which is just 53%. Away teams win about 26% of the time, (27% following a 0:0, 25% following a score draw), but the value is on the Away team with an ROI of 11%.

As you might suspect, there is also value backing Away teams who had a comfortable Home win in the First Leg. It appears that Home sides facing an uphill battle give up a little easier than the market estimates.

This Sunday sees the League Cup Final in England, with Liverpool favourites to beat Chelsea. Of the 17 finals for which I have prices, the favourite has won 10 with 6 Draws, and backing the Draw has an ROI of 39% from this small sample. The edge is even greater when no club has a win probability greater than 0.5 (at fair odds), as is the situation for this game.

If we include FA Cup Finals, 5 of 11 matches meeting this rule have finished as Draws.

Finally, in the NBA, the All-Star game on Sunday saw a total of 323 points, which was right around where the books had the total. The record points total in these exhibitions remains the 374 points scored in 2017. Team Lebron won the game by three, just failing to cover the -5.5 points they were giving, but this isn't my kind of event for investing. 

UEFA Changes

With seven of the eight EPL games this weekend having a team at odds-on, and the NBA on it's All-Star Break, it's looking like a quiet weekend for investments. 

The 20 midweek European first leg games produced just three Draws, which wasn't a surprise, especially given how many Home sides were favourite.  However, due to some changes this season, past results aren't necessarily a reliable indicator for what the future may hold.

The big changes are to the Europa League format, which no longer has a Round of 32 as such, but a Knockout Stage prior to the Round of 16 - which effectively is the same thing, the creation of a new third competition, i.e. the Europa Conference League, and perhaps most significantly of all, the abolition of the Away Goals Rule.

HKibuzz commented on my last post:

Interesting. The rule change about away goals will probably have some impact on these figures too. I suspect that in the more balanced games, the team playing away first might just be more conservative and be happy to settle for a draw and complete the job next, at home. They are no longer rewarded for taking risks away in the first leg. That might explain, in part, Real Madrid's very defensive strategy yesterday (along with PSG's good performance).

One of the justifications given by UEFA for scrapping this rule was that:

The impact of the rule now runs counter to its original purpose as, in fact, it now dissuades home teams – especially in first legs – from attacking, because they fear conceding a goal that would give their opponents a crucial advantage.

As HKibuzz suggests, the rule change means that Away teams are now disincentivised from pushing for that away goal, and will be happier with a 0:0 result than in previous seasons. In the past, while a goalless draw Away was often a decent result, it always left the worry of conceding at Home and thus requiring two goals to win, and so wasn't anywhere near as satisfying as a score draw. With the new rule, a 0:0 result is much better. 

From a betting perspective, since at least 2004 there has been a nice edge (ROI 13%) backing Home teams in First Leg games when the team is an odds-against favourite, and where the Draw is second favourite. Whether this continues remains to be seen.

As you might expect, the best strategies for betting on the Second Leg of ties vary depending on the First Leg result. There's certainly been a big difference in Second Leg matches following a 0:0 draw and those following a score-draw in the First Leg. 

In all Second Leg matches following a Draw, backing the Away team has an ROI of 9.4%, but backing the Away team after a 0:0 has an ROI of 27% increasing to 83% on matches with no clubs from the Big Five leagues involved. My suspicion is that in these games there is basically less interest, and lazy sportsbooks tend to overweight the win probability of the Home team knowing this is where the dumb money will go. It seems reasonable to assume that prices are more accurate for the likes of Real Madrid and AC Milan than for clubs such as Maccabi Haifa, FK Crvena Zvezda and Osmanlispor. 

City, Cincy and Crypto

The Champions League Round of 16 starts tonight, and for those of you wondering if this is a good place to look for Draws, the answer is no. 

Blindly backing the Draw in the 144 first leg matches going back to the 2003-04 season would have resulted in a loss of 11.74 units, (ROI -8.2%), with the damage coming in the past two seasons - with just the one Draw - and from matches where the Home team is favourite. 

In matches where the Away team is favourite, the ROI for the Draw is positive, but in matches where the second favourite is the Draw, the ROI jumps to 14.6%. 

The Sporting Lisbon v Manchester City game does fit this profile, but the current 1.314 price (Pinnacle) is very short with the sweet spot for the Draw in matches where the fair Away win price is in the 1.95 to 2.3 range. 

There have been three previous matches with the Away team at this short a price -  all Manchester City, all in recent years, and all resulting in an Away win. Bayern Munich are a similar price tomorrow.

In the EPL last weekend, we had two winners from four selections with the Brentford v Crystal Palace match the most pleasing from a betting perspective.

As discussed in this post, the match was always a candidate although in the end the price drifted out to 3.28 and nowhere near being a sub 3.0 price which triggered the post. 

Crystal Palace matches have been a selection five times this season so far, and every one has been a winner. Southampton are 3 from 3, and only Norwich City have yet to be a qualifier. Leicester City matches are the most frequent qualifiers, with the West Ham United game making it five winners from 10 games. 

The two losers this weekend were both "Toss-Up" selections, with the two winners both in the "Close" category. ROIs for the season are now 39.7% and 37% respectively.

Any of you treating the Cincinnati Bengals as Road 'Dogs for the Superbowl on Sunday would have been rewarded with a win, although the Los Angeles Rams won straight up, the second consecutive season that the winner has been crowned in their own stadium. The Arizona Cardinals will be hoping to make it three in a row next season.  

And finally, I'm not sure who first came up with this, but I found it quite amusing:

With inflation at 7.5%, you lose half your money in 9 years. The only way to outperform that consistently, that I have found, is crypto. Just this year, I’ve already lost half my money.

Wine in Decline

At the time of writing**, the upcoming Brentford v Crystal Palace game looks like it may be a member of the exclusive sub-3 club, with the Draw currently priced by Pinnacle at 2.99. 

The book is currently at an overround of 104.9% versus the season average of 102.4%, so there's a reasonable chance the price will yet move out, but should it go off at shorter than 3.0, it'll be only the 16th such occurrence in more than 3600 games during the Pinnacle era (2012-date). 

Four of these matches ended in a Draw, but only five matches were Over 2.5 goals so this is probably just the result of a small sample size, given that of matches going Under, 38.2% of the results are Draws. Overall, the percentage is 25.1%.

Of the 8201 matches since 2001 in the EPL, the Over / Under 2.5 goals split is remarkably close to 50/50, with the actual numbers 50.3% to 49.7%.

There was only one qualifier from the midweek matches, with Newcastle United v Everton a "Toss-Up" but unfortunately a loser. The ROI on "Toss-Ups" drops to 57% for the season and for "Close" to 34%. Backing the Draw blindly in all matches has an ROI of 8.5% as Draws look to hit their highest total in six seasons. 

There has been some publicity over the past few days about the number of NBA favourites covering the spread in recent days. Over the past weekend, the split was 13-1, and since then the record is 16-4-1 bot for the season as a whole, the percentage is just 50.7% so this appears to just be normal variance. 

The All-Star break is coming up next week, but if you took my advice from the end of January to be "backing Overs when the total is greater than 223" you're probably quite happy with a 23-14-1 record since. 

On a totally unrelated topic, I was reading a New York Times article about wine, and how millennials aren't consuming it in the same amount as boomers like myself, meaning the wine industry faces a problem as demand drops, but I thought this line was very funny:

As the father of two millennial sons, I am something of an expert on being unable to persuade millennials to do as I suggest.

Any parent can probably relate.

** Since starting this post, I now see the Brentford v Palace Draw has moved out to 3.08, and very close to being a "Toss-Up" selection. 

The 3p Parlay By George

Betfair recently announced that the minimum stake had been reduced from £2 down to £1. Of course it has always been easy to bet less than the minimum amount with a simple workaround that I wrote about in 2012. I'm not sure how much difference this will make, probably very little, and I'm also not sure why the minimum was set at £2 in the first place. 

Another company in the news recently for allowing a stake at lower than their usual minimum was Betfred. In this case the stake allowed was 3p placed on a 10 match Draw accumulator, a story that shows I'm not the oldest lover of the Draw. 

Here's the story in full from Alistair Mason of the Press Association:

An 85-year-old grandfather pocketed more than £2,600 after placing just 3p on a bet at his local bookmaker.

Janus “George” Wagonback put his 3p – a stake so small it would not usually be allowed by Betfred – on a 10-fold accumulator last week, eventually claiming winnings of £2,686.04.

“I’ve had some significant wins on the football over the years, much bigger than this one,” said Mr Wagonback, from Sutton-in-Ashfield in Nottinghamshire.

“But then again, I usually bet more than 3p, which is basically loose change that I had in my pocket.”

Betfred normally operates with a minimum stake of 5p, but were happy to make an exception for Mr Wagonback as he is a regular customer.

He bet that all 10 matches in his accumulator – Millwall-Preston, Wimbledon-Cheltenham, Bradford-Leyton Orient, Colchester-Rochdale, Swindon-Crawley, Dundee-Dundee United, Hibernian-Hearts, Ross County-Aberdeen, St Mirren-Motherwell and a World Cup Qualifier between Lebanon and Iraq – would be draws, at odds just short of 90,000-1.

“I was confident the Scottish games would all be draws, as they often are up there,” he said.

“I didn’t know I’d won until I checked the paper the next day.

“I did feel good, but can’t jump around much these days – only little jumps.”

Mr Wagonback is originally from Budapest in Hungary but moved to the UK as a political refugee in the 1950s.

He is an experienced chess player, having represented his club in Mansfield, and was also named Mr Nottingham in 1969 on the back of his fitness and body-building exploits.

He said: “I have always been a winner because I set my mind to achieve things.

“My ambition is to skin Betfred for a million.”

Betfred boss Fred Done said: “I’ve been in this business for over 50 years, and cannot remember anyone winning so much from just three pence.

“It is a truly remarkable win, with him beating odds of virtually 90,000/1.”

Remarkable indeed, and I liked the comment “I was confident the Scottish games would all be draws, as they often are up there”. They are? We may be missing a trick here. Graeme? We need your input. Put those horses down for five minutes and look at the Draw in your country.  

With only one selection featuring a team priced at odds-on (Swindon Town), Mr. Wagonback may well be a reader of this blog. Using Pinnacle's prices, the accumulator would have been closer to 132,000/1 with the Lebanon v Iraq Draw priced as favourite at just 2.74, one of the shorter Draw prices you'll find.  

Déjà Vu as Draws Rule Again

With a perfect draw in the Final closing out the Africa Cup of Nations tournament, it's another winning competition for the Knockout Draw strategy, not only for the 'no odds-on' system but also for the basic every game system. 

As I mentioned at the start of the year, the small amount of time required to place 15 bets proved to be well worth it:

The result from backing the Draw in all 15 knockout games was +2.69 units, while from the more evenly matched subset, the 7 games generated +7.39 units of profit.

  

With results from the eighth tournament now included, the ROIs increase to 12% and 30% respectively for Africa. 

Even the Third Place Play-off game got into the act, although these aren't included and 3:3 results aren't what we are looking for anyway. 

For Burkina Faso it was a case of déjà vu. Those of us of a certain age, as well as knowing Burkina Faso as Upper Volta, may recall the third place play off in 1998 when they lost on penalties to the (not very) Democratic Republic of the Congo despite taking a 4:1 lead in the 86th minute. 

Twenty four years on, and they suffered a similar fate holding a 3:0 lead into the 71st minute, and were still looking good at 3:1 after 84 minutes. Hosts Cameroon then scored twice in the last six minutes before winning on penalties.

Unfortunately that is it for International competitions until the World Cup but it was pleasing to hear from some of you that you've been playing this system and making money. 

Tight Draws in Africa

If you're playing the Draw in the Africa Cup of Nations knockout stage, you should be guaranteed a small profit with just the Final to come. The 'official' results from backing the Draw in all 14 games so far is 0.89 units (6% ROI) and from the matches with no team fairly priced at odds-on, a more exciting return so far of 5.59 units and a 93% ROI, though as I've written before, ROIs on such a small number of matches are fairly meaningless. 

The Final tomorrow (Senegal v Egypt) is a 'no odds-on' match with Senegal favourites and the Draw at around 2.83, (2.85 on Pinnacle and 2.96 on Betfair.) This will likely be the 8th match of the 15 where the Draw price has been priced at 3.0 or shorter. This is a familiar trend in the Africa Cup of Nations with 7 of 15 in 2019 and 6 of 7 in 2017 (with the one exception priced at 3.04). That 2017 tournament was the first time I have seen the Draw be the favourite, and which actually happened in two matches, neither of which ended as a Draw. We did also see this in the Copa América last year in one game, which did finish as a Draw, but in 8194 EPL matches, the Draw has never been favourite.

Contrast these numbers with the EPL where this has been the case just 16 times in the Pinnacle era, which is 3634 matches, with a shortest price of 2.89 (in a game that did finish 0:0). It's almost as if the sportsbooks are reading this blog, but as always, the average prices used can usually be improved upon.

The Third-Place game isn't a knockout / elimination game so it's not a candidate, but if you're interested since 2006 the return is -0.60 units from 24 matches, a number hugely inflated by the 100% winning record for the Draw in the now extinct Confederation Cup and the one Gold Cup playoff in 2015:

The Nations Cup is too new, but looking for the Draw in World Cups, Euros or Africa hasn't historically been a great idea. 

Rounding Up The 'Dogs

The NFL Conference Championship games this past weekend were both winners for the Road Teams, although only the San Francisco 49ers were Small Road 'Dogs, covering the spread but losing to the Los Angeles Rams who will now play the Cincinnati Bengals in Superbowl LVI which really should have been hosted at Levi's Stadium in San Francisco to make the most of those roman numerals. 

After 54 years without an NFL team playing in its home stadium, the Rams will be the second team in two years to do this, following the Tampa Bay Buccaneers who won at home last season. 

The opening line is the Rams by 4, so arguably the Bengals, playing in their first Superbowl in 33 years, will be a Small Road 'Dog but the site is officially classified as neutral. 

Including post season games, the Small Road 'Dogs ended the season with an 'official' record using Killer Sports of 48-27, 24.9% ROI. The alternate GimmeTheDog site has a record of 48-28 reducing the ROI to a mere 23.3%. 

In the Africa Cup of Nations, the four quarter-finals produced just the one draw, Egypt v Morocco, officially at 2.94 but available at 3.0 on Bet365 and exchanges. The semi-finals are on Wednesday when Senegal will be odds-on to beat Burkina Faso, and Thursday, when hosts Cameroon play Egypt.

This is the seventh consecutive tournament where the average goals per game has declined, with this year's current 1.88 some way down from 2008's 3.09.  

I mentioned excluding matches where the fair probability of the Draw is low in my last post and there's another way of increasing the ROI which is to exclude matches where the favourite is odds-on. The table below shows three sets of results, all matches, matches where the Draw probability exceeds 0.285 and matches where there is no odds-on favourite. 

The individual tournament numbers of games are still fairly small, and there are some interesting results by tournament but overall, incorporating either parameter increases ROI.

The Nations League has very few matches as does the Confederation Cup which has now been discontinued. The Africa Cup of Nations has the biggest sample size, and appears to be the tournament that benefits most from excluding lop-sided games. 

Only CONCACAF's Gold Cup bucks the trend with a negative ROI across all matches, and a worse record when selecting based on the Draw probability and an improved record when excluding odds-on games. I suspect the reason is the poorer quality of this tournament, but again with fewer than 50 matches in the sample, a couple of results can make a big difference.

The higher quality World Cup, Euro and Copa tournaments, and I expect the Nations League to join them as this competition becomes established, all have very high ROIs, and even Africa's baseline 8.25% is decent. 

The January results for the EPL Draws were positive with three winners from seven "Close" selections, and two from five for the "Toss-Ups". 

This is definitely a system of two halves, with the first half of the season (August through December) having an ROI of 15.9% while the second half (January onwards) is actually down by 1.1%. 

For "Toss-Ups", the discrepancy is even more stark, with the respective numbers 26.6% and -0.08%. Here are the numbers by month since 2000:

As for January as a whole, for much of the month it looked like being the worst month ever, but a strong couple of days at the end means that the month ends up as the third worst month ever in actual money but only the 10th worst in percentage terms with a loss of 2.85%. Given where I was last week, I think it's fair to say that never before, in the history of my spreadsheet, has a six figure loss felt so much like a win. 

My retirement funds lost 4.5%, Tesla dropped 11.4% and the stars of the January show were those promising young growth stocks (I jest) Lloyds Bank (+7.5%) and Berkshire Hathaway which gained 4.7%. 

I was told last week to increase my share holding in Boeing to a minimum of 100 via a "Voluntary Corporate Action" request, which I had never heard of before. Apparently the "voluntary" part of it was that I either buy 40 more to make it up to 100 or sell the 60. Otherwise the company would buy them off me. I decided to buy, and the stock took off yesterday with an increase of 5.1%. 

To keep perspective during these market swoons, it's reassuring to see that I am currently within a few thousand of where I was at the end of October. March isn't far away and that's not only a milestone birthday if I make it that far, but it's also my bonus / stock options / RSUs month. At my age those are far more important than the percentage increase on my salary since I won't be there to benefit from that for too much longer, but a decent bonus and other equity awards would be nice.  

It's a Knockout

The Africa Cup of Nations Round of 16 is now complete, and three draws from the eight matches means that the record for this stage of International Tournaments now looks like this:

This includes the Cameroon v Comoros game which started after at least eight people had died in a crush with the hosts at an unofficial 1.05 and the Draw at 14.93.

In International Knockout matches, (or any matches for that matter), when the fair probability of the Draw is under 20%, backing the Draw generally isn't a great idea with the loss from 30 matches 11.42 points.

At least one reader is paying attention, and the Quarter-Final stage is usually good for the Draw also.

Fotballinvest tweeted:

I promised to take a look, hoping that perhaps the markets have settled down after teams have adjusted to the new rule and new ball and Killer Sports are back, albeit in testing mode. 

The average number of points this season is currently 217.2, which means that the steady increase in points since 2011 is over. The rule change mentioned in this post which was introduced to...

discourage offensive players from making "overt, abrupt or abnormal non-basketball moves"

has clearly had a significant impact. At the start of the season, the Overs System Total was set to 234.5 points, and while this has a strike rate of 60% for the season, with only 10 qualifiers, this isn't much good to us.

In all matches this season, the Under has been the outcome in 52.9% of matches, so anyone playing the Overs has been swimming against the tide. However, the edge to Unders appears to have evaporated as the season has unfolded, with the percentage up to, and including, November 5th peaking at 65.2%. Since then. Overs has been the winner 50.2% of the time. For the rest of November, the split was exactly 50/50, while in December it was 53.7% and so far in January, 51.2%.

The logic behind behind backing Overs when the Total is 'high' (high being a relative term) is that unsophisticated bettors are put off from backing Overs when they view the Total as, well, high. It's early days, but if the average for this season is going to be around the 217 mark, then perhaps we will find an opportunity shooting for a few points above this.

Since that early November date, backing Overs when the total is greater than 223 has a 53.8% record, (64-52-3) and when the Road team is a Western Conference team (remember in the NBA that conferences are not created equal), the record is 58.6%. 

So to answer the original question, "is the NBA Overs back now?", the verdict is a cautious yes, but with less than three months data, tread carefully. 

In the NFL tomorrow, only one team will qualify as a Small Road 'Dogs System, with the San Francisco 49ers getting 3.5 points against the Los Angeles Rams. The two teams played each other just three weeks ago in LA, with the 49ers winning in overtime. They also beat (thrashed?) the Rams at home in November 31-10, and so two of the Rams five defeats this season have been to their California rivals.

Two Minute Wrap

A busy weekend with no fewer than three selections this weekend for the EPL Draws. The lunch time game on Saturday was Everton v Aston Villa, a "Toss-Up" selection followed later by Brentford v Wolverhampton Wanderers, which was a "Close" selection. Unfortunately neither was a winner, but Sunday's Leicester City v Brighton and Hove Albion game, a second "Toss-Up" selection, was a winner for us.

Results for the season to date:

I did get an email from James Dean, possibly not THE James Dean, saying:

Hi, Can't seem to find where you define what is "close" or a "toss-up" in terms of the draw system. Do you have a post on this?

I'm sure the parameters have been mentioned more than once, but this post is one from last year that discusses them. Basically you compare the win probabilities of the two clubs after stripping out the overround. I use 25% and 10%, but there's nothing set in concrete about these numbers. There's also no need to have two sets of results, but I have higher stakes on the "Toss-Ups".

The knockout stage of the Africa Cup of Nations also got underway on Sunday with two matches and one winner which was Burkina Faso v Gabon. (Probably unrelated, but  reporting today suggests the military in Burkina Faso has seized power and overthrown President Roch Kaboré in a coup. 

More importantly, the draw price was short at an "official" 2.77 although better odds were available on Betfair, but this isn't unusual in this tournament. Two matches in the 2017 version saw the Draw actually start as the favourite which throws my spreadsheet into convulsions. The one selection today was Guinea v Gambia, but this finished 0:1.  

The NFL playoffs continued with the Division Round, and for anyone playing the Small Road 'Dogs, it couldn't have gone any better. Depending on where you source your selections, you may have had three or even four qualifiers, and possibly three winners.

On Saturday, both top seeded (and rested) teams were beaten. First the visiting Cincinnati Bengals won at the Tennessee Titans, followed by the San Francisco 49ers winning at the Green Bay Packers. 

Sunday saw the Los Angeles Rams win in Tampa Bay and dethrone the reigning Superbowl champions. followed by a rather thrilling Buffalo Bills @ Kansas City Chiefs game which saw an amazing final two minutes - which being the NFL took a lot longer than two minutes!

Using Killer Sports, their system qualifiers were the Bengals, Rams and Bills missing out on the 49ers as they were +6. 

Anyone using GimmeTheDog would have had the 49ers, Bengals and Rams which is what I myself had, since the 49ers on Betfair were +5.5 and the Bills were +2. 

Anyway, at worst you should have had both the Rams and the Bengals to guarantee a winning weekend.

Regarding these selections, Dr Tsouts clarified why he had fewer SU selections than handicap selections:

I started with handicaps and later I added the straight wins, this is the reason there are less selections. Medicine career is working fine at the moment but who says no to an extra income if possible?

Unfortunately this weekend's extra income won't make a dent in the losses in the stock market this year. Still five trading days to go, but right now this month ranks 130th out of 133 in percentage terms, and 133rd in actual money, since I started tracking this in 2011. 

Not the start to the year I was hoping for, but to keep things in perspective, I'm back to where I was in October last year, though of course things can always get worse.

To say the markets were interesting today would be an understatement. The S&P 500 dropped 3.99% and hit a low just after noon (ET), before recovering to end the day slightly in profit +0.28%. That'll do nicely. 

$TSLA was down 9.8% at one time, before recovering to just 1.5% down. (The green was intentional to indicate when a loss can be seen as a win!) 

Tomorrow could be interesting.

Back to sports, and Peter emailed me to say:

On 28/02/20 you posted "NBA where Home Favourites of 13 points or more have a 64.5% record ATS since 2013".

After failing to achieve success here I've just done some backtracking and find that since this post the record for these big favs is 24-27-1

I just checked Killer Sports, and the record they have for these is  31-29-3 which isn't great but at least it's a positive ROI though 0.8% isn't too exciting. As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, where and when you make your selections is always going to influence results, which is why two people are never going to have the same results.

The other thing is that Big Home Favourites at this level are fairly rare, as shown by 63 selections in just under two years, and so variance is likely to be a factor. 

The Potential Cost of Easy

While not yet in the league of Morgan Housel, at least in my opinion, Nick Maggiulli who writes the of dollars and data website has some interesting posts.

His latest hit close to home, although I'm a little older than the subject (28) of the original Reddit post (above), and I can't claim do have done as little as 50 hours "real work" in the last 6 years. Heck, I've probably done that many in just the past six months, although the use of the term "real work" is subjective.

With the exception of a few work trips, for almost two years I've "worked" from home with a typical day requiring me to join two or three Zoom meetings, quite often as an observer rather than as a participant, and either delete or file away some emails. (Unlike some people, I like an empty Inbox).

Some months are busier than others of course, but even on a fairly busy day, any more than four or five hours of work is a rarity.

Last night, before I saw this article, I checked my calendar to see what awaited me today, and jokingly told my wife that I had to work from 9am to 11am with only 30 minutes for lunch. But that's really how it's been for a while now. (One of those 30 minute meetings was postponed, so I did get my lunch hour after all).

While I haven't "automated" my job like the protagonist of the story, I have put people under me who take care of almost everything, meaning that I only need to get involved if there are any escalations or my boss needs something, and with several peers and, say it quietly, mostly stable applications, his attention is not usually focused on me. 

As I'm at the end of my career rather than at the start of it, using my free time on non-career activities doesn't have the same potential hard consequences that Maggiulli talks about in his article.

Personally, I've get a head start on some of the activities planned for retirement, or indeed planning retirement given the amount of books and articles I've read on the subject! Travel beyond a few miles from home isn't a realistic option right now, given the challenges of navigating the rules around COVID and never knowing when the boss may need something, but reading and research and updating various spreadsheets can be quite time consuming. These profitable sports investment strategies didn't just throw themselves at me.   

Anyway, here is the post in full, The High Cost of an Easy Job - click on the link for the original:

I recently saw this Reddit post about a guy who automated his job and collected a paycheck for 6 years while doing basically no work. Sounds like a nice gig, right? Who wouldn’t want to get paid to do as little as possible? Who wouldn’t want to make money while browsing the internet or playing video games all day?

I can see the appeal. Compared to putting in 70+ hour weeks or working a job that you hate, this is a far better situation. But, most people who idealize this lifestyle probably haven’t considered the costs associated with it. You might be thinking, “What costs? How could getting paid to not work be a bad thing?”

Because, when you get paid to do very little, you end up giving up two of the most important things in your life—your time and your purpose. Ex-U.S. President Richard Nixon summarized this idea beautifully in this interview:

The unhappiest people of the world are those in the international watering places like the south coast of France, and Newport, and Palm Springs, and Palm Beach. Going to parties every night. Playing golf every afternoon, then bridge. Drinking too much. Talking too much. Thinking too little. Retired. No purpose.

As so, while I know there are those who would totally disagree with this and say, “Gee, if I could just be a millionaire that would be the most wonderful thing. If I could just not have to work everyday. If I could just be out fishing or hunting or playing golf or traveling, that would be the most wonderful life in the world.”

They don’t know life. Because what makes life mean something is purpose. A goal. The battle. The struggle. Even if you don’t win it.

Unfortunately, our society has glorified leisure for so long that we’ve lost our way. This is why some people said that the guy who automated his job to collect a paycheck had “won the game.” But no, he didn’t win the game. He may have won the battle, but he surely lost the war. After six years of doing nothing at his company, he was fired and immediately experienced an existential crisis about his future.

Where did he go wrong? It wasn’t when he automated his job. That’s actually admirable and I support it. No, he went wrong with how he spent his free time after automating it. Because you can spend your time doing something that provides you with deep satisfaction or you can waste it in endless entertainment. I know what it feels like to do both.

From age 22-27 I spent far too much time on the latter. Whether it was wasting time on social media/YouTube (while rarely contributing to these platforms) or getting drunk at parties, I was on a leisure binge. While I don’t regret hanging out with people or learning stuff on YouTube, I know I could have used my time more efficiently.

I only know this because of how I’ve used my time since turning 27. It only took five years to get on a completely different path. This made me realize something—it’s not about how much time you have, but how you use it. It reminds me of this quote from On The Shortness of Life by the Stoic philosopher Seneca:

It’s not that we have a short time to live, but we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested.

The more I write about investing, the more I end up talking about time. Because everything in investing, ultimately, leads back to time. A decision you make today could have a huge impact on your future. That’s what compounding is all about—decisions and how they move through time.

Compounding also explains why you shouldn’t settle for a nice paycheck from an easy job. Because every second you spend doing something that you don’t find fulfilling is another second you aren’t doing something that you do find fulfilling. It’s another second without challenge, without drive, and without purpose.

Once you understand this, it completely changes how you look at the world. You quickly realize that life isn’t about maximizing reward while minimizing effort. It’s about finding what you like to do, and doing it for as long as you can. Much like investing, it’s all about staying in the game.

Unfortunately, so many people don’t. Benjamin Franklin said it best:

I’ve seen men die at the age of 25, yet buried at the age of 75.

Don’t be one of them. Don’t let the world prevent you from doing what you were meant to do, from becoming who you were meant to become.

This is easier said than done. Trust me, I know. Because along the way there will be plenty of things to tempt you off the path. There will be easy outs, get rich quick schemes, and an endless array of mindless entertainment. There will be cheap dopamine and shortcuts for every occasion. Why do work when you can not work, right? Why build something when you could not build it? The choice seems obvious, doesn’t it?

But the easy choices come with hard consequences…later. They show up where you might not expect them. With regret. With nostalgia. With sadness. The easy way out always has hidden costs. The question is: are you willing to pay them?

Thank you for reading!

Opinions and Reactions Galore

A veritable feast of comments related to my two most recent posts, and in time sequential order, here they are.

First up was AT on the Killer Villa post, pointing out that:

Hey mate the Betty Blogger link is broken. Would love to read it!

Well that's an easy one to fix, and I'm glad someone pointed it out. The link is now correct, but to pre-empt any disappointment, I should caution that the link was to Betty's Twitter feed and not specifically to his (her?) research into the other major leagues in Europe which I believe hasn't been publicly shared. But despite his unfortunate choice of football club, he's a decent chap so a polite request might work.

Next up on the same post, and my old friend Dr Tsouts commented:

I believe there are more than one readers who are betting on draws, at least two including me! I also started to track draws in Serie B and top 2 Spain leagues. There are some Twitter accounts with draw picks and one of them also suggests the 1-1 correct score with good returns.

Again, here is the Twitter link for the good doctor and if you want further details on Serie B or the Spanish divisions, or indeed want to follow some of these Draw suggesting accounts, you can always ask. 

I haven't looked at Serie B for a long time. A league where the Draw can be odds-on towards the end of a season makes me a little uncomfortable. As for La Liga, this comment supports Betty's findings, but I can't vouch for the Segunda División claim.

Finally, while apples are supposed to keep such professionals away, my post on Comparing Apples had the opposite effect with the Dr. showing up again, this time to say about the NFL Small Road 'Dogs and the variations in ROI to be expected:

Currently with a 44-24 record for me and a ROI almost 29% I am happy to leave it here and wait for next season! But this is not the whole picture. I also played straight wins with a record 21-19-1 (there was one tie, right?) and an extraordinary 39% ROI! Thanks Cassini!

Music to my ears! An unsolicited, but nevertheless very welcome, independent verification of the numbers. If the career in medicine doesn't work out, might I suggest a move to auditing, although I'm not understanding the SU record of 21-19-1. The 68 Small Road 'Dogs went 37-31 straight up, and I'm not seeing where the 41 selections come from.

Nevertheless, it's very pleasing to hear / read that someone is making money from this system.  

Comparing Apples

It was a rough weekend for Road teams in the NFL Wildcard Weekend matches, with only one of the six teams winning or covering (San Francisco 49ers who did both). If you are playing the Small Road 'Dogs in the playoffs, then at least if you followed my advice to stick to the NFC you had this winner and just the one loss, so minimal damage. As I've mentioned before, playoffs are a different beast to regular season games, and with far less data, so caution is advised.

Wildcard games are historically good for road teams, with a record since 2001 of 48-33-5, before this season and 21-13 for those in the Small 'Dog range. 

We have another slate of matches next weekend with the four Divisional Round matches. All four matches currently look like they may be Small Road 'Dogs, with the NFC games being the Green Bay Packers v San Francisco 49ers (+5.5) and Tampa Bay Buccaneers v Los Angeles Rams (+3) games. The Packers have the additional advantage of not playing this past weekend, reward for the best regular season record in their Conference.

Historically Division games aren't great for Road teams with a 42-41-1 record against the spread which isn't profitable. For matched in the Small 'Dogs range, the record is even worse at 13-14-1. 

The AFC games are the rested Tennessee Titans v Cincinnati Bengals (+3.5) and Kansas City Chiefs v Buffalo Bills (+2.5).

Currently all four matches are Small Road 'Dog qualifiers, but two are just a half point move away from exclusion.

It's also important to note that after being consistent from 2002 to 2019, the NFL format has changed for the last two seasons with the playoffs expanding last season, and this season with the addition of a regular season Week 17, and these changes make it questionable whether we are comparing apples with apples. Small changes can sometimes have unforeseen consequences.  

As I write this, the stock markets are a sea of red, with only $TSLA presenting a glimmer of hope as it flirts with being positive on the day. 

As I mentioned last week Tesla has scheduled its Q4 earnings call for next Wednesday, January 26th.

One barrier to an even higher Tesla stock price is that some mutual funds can only buy a company if its credit rating is at least "investment grade". 

The importance of a company's credit rating was seen when Tesla was given a BB+ rating in October last year, and the stock jumped 21.6% in three days. 

If the Q4 results are as expected, (cash flow, low debt, strong EBITDA margins > 18%), it is possible that in February, S&P Global Ratings may raise the rating to "Investment" grade (BBB-). 

The 18% figure is currently easily being beaten, and interesting that Tesla is the only $1 trillion company that is currently "junk" rated!  

By way of comparison, $AAPL (Apple) is rated AAA so there is still plenty of room for improvement.  

Killer Villa

Possibly some very good news this afternoon, with delek reporting that:

as per their email seems like Killersports is back with full functionality

A quick look at their site and it does appear that at least some of my old queries are now working, though not all. Parameters for the NFL, where most of my sports investment attention has been this weekend, such as Division and Playoffs are two obvious ones, so as with the replacement gimmethedog site it's proceed with caution, but definitely good news. 

The 'official' results for the NFL's Small Road 'Dogs System are also slightly improved as the Killer Sports record is 44-24 compared with that of gimmethedog which had a record of 43-26. 

Differences are to be expected since lines vary from book to book and determining the line to record against is often subjective. In the same way that each of us has our own inflation rate, which may or may not be close to the 'official' inflation rate, every person playing this system would likely have had a different precise outcome, though there is no doubt that everyone would have been nicely in profit. 

The differences between the two sources for the season are shown below:

The EPL Draw System had one selection and one winner this weekend, with Aston Villa and Manchester United playing to a 2:2 finish. At least one reader (a Manchester United fan who must have had mixed feelings about the Villa comeback) was on this one, and again, depending on where and when you source your prices for this system, this was either a "Toss-Up" selection or a "Close" selection. The 'official' results use the Pinnacle Closing price as recorded by Football Data, but when I ran the numbers on Saturday, this was a Toss-Up although the official category is "Close". 

This brings the ROI on these selections to 40%, which exceeds the previous best season of 2012-13 but still almost half of the season to go. 

Also a record so far for the Toss-Ups, so hoping more than just one of you are riding these this season.

I hope Betty Blogger won't mind me revealing that he's been doing some work looking at the Draw in other top leagues, with some interesting findings, especially in La Liga. 

One reader wrote to me, I shan't use his name a wrote an e-mail rather than posted a comment, saying:

Hi, I've been reading your blog for a long time. Have you ever wondered what the impact of a draw in a match is related to the fact that it tied in the previous match? I noticed or it seems to me that sometimes a draw occurs more often than there was a draw in the previous game. What do you think about it.

I'm not sure if this thought refers to the idea that we should take into account the previous season's result of the game between two teams, or whether it's that we should look at the previous game for each team. I think it's probably the former, but either way, I don't believe there's any evidence that a Draw has any predictive value. As I've written before, clubs change from week to week, never mind season to season, with managers, playing styles, players / injuries as well as external factors such as weather and how critical the game is to both sides. Some people put a lot of weight into past results but I'm highly sceptical to say the least. Unfortunately finding an edge isn't this easy.

It was a busy weekend, as I had another e-mail, this one from Milan.

Hello!

I was searching for some articles about arbitrage today and I came across this page https://green-all-over.blogspot.com/2015/03/place-your-bets-plural.html

I noticed that you linked to one of my favorite articles about arbitrage
betting.

I just wanted to give you a heads up that I created a similar article.

It’s like arbitrage betting, but more through and up to date:

https://www.winmakingsters.com/sport-arbitrage-betting/

It might be worth a mention on your page.

Either way, keep up the awesome work!

Cheers, Milan from WinMakingsters!

If arbitrage is your thing, and good luck keeping your accounts open if you're doing this, it looks like Milan has taken some time to create a decent looking page, so check it out.

The financial markets in the US are closed today for the Martin Luther King Day holiday, which always means plenty of NBA games, but the FTSE and Nikkei had solid gains which is a promising sign. I'm currently down overall by 2.01% for the year, not quite the worst January on record which was -2.44% in 2016 but in actual money the worst ever. Onwards and upwards.