Don't Go Away

The six UEFA tournament Semi-Final First Leg matches produced a small profit for backers of the Home team, with none of the ties looking to be settled, although the markets are predicting an all-English Champions League Final and all-German Europa League Final.

As I shall be away again next week, some comments on the matches next week based on data since 2003-04.

Liverpool are currently odds-on to win at Villareal in the Second-Leg, at the shortest price any Away UEFA Semi-Finalist has ever been. Away favourites don't have a great record so far, with just one of ten winning and none outside of their own country:

For Second Leg Semi-Final matches where neither side has more than a one goal advantage, backing the Away side has historically been a terrible idea. 

There have been 47 such instances, with the ROI on Away teams -49%, By way of contrast, Home teams have an ROI of 14% with the Draw at 20%. Of course it is worth noting that the rules have changed regarding Away goals, Home advantage is declining, and the sample size is still quite small, but it's nevertheless an interesting trend.

In this weekend's EPL, it looks like we will have three Draw selections in the 3pm Saturday games, with two currently Toss-Up qualifiers. 

UEFA Semi-Finals (1)

Another EPL Draw winner last night, with Crystal Palace and Leeds United playing out a perfect Draw, raising the season ROI above 15%. 

Someone on Twitter recently pointed out that Palace have yet to win a Premier League game by a single goal this season, and with five matches remaining, my research finds that should this remain true, it would be the first time this has happened in 130 years , since the 26 match 1891-92 season to be precise:

While not winning an Away game by one goal isn't that rare, not winning at Home by that margin has only happened on 15 other such occasions, excluding the two above. I'll spare you the details here, but let me know if you'd like the full list! 

The UEFA semi-finals start today, and England are again well represented with four clubs in the six matches. Spain and Germany have two each, while Scotland, Netherlands, France and Italy have one each. 

While this is the first season for the Europa Conference League, the data for Champions League and Europa League Semi-Final First Leg matches going back to 2004 shows a clear edge for backing the Home side with a 29% ROI from those 68 matches, a number which increases to 39% when limiting your investments to matches between clubs from the Big 5 Leagues. 

In all matches between clubs from different Big 5 Leagues (England, Spain, France, Germany, Italy) backing the favourite is historically where the value is with a 7% ROI from 573 matches, but when the two clubs are from the same league, the value bet is the Draw or the 'Dog.

Backing the Draw has an ROI of 11.7% from 83 such matches while backing the 'Dog has a slightly better 12% even, but what at first sight looks very exciting, upon closer inspection turns out not to be such a surprise after all, the reason being that all the profit comes from Finals where, as you all already know, the Draw is the value bet. We could see an all-English or all-Spanish Champions League Final and an all-German Final in the Europa League. The 'L' teams all winning their trophies would be rather poetic - Liverpool, Leicester and Leipzig.

Back to Champions League Semi-Final First Leg matches, and here is the record for Home teams starting at odds-on:

Without party poopers Chelsea as the visitors, a 100% winning record. 

Not that there have been any this season, or will be any, but in two leg matches between clubs from the same league, the value bet is to oppose the Favourite in the First Leg (ROI 17%) and back the Home team in the Second Leg - unless they are ahead - (ROI 38%). 

The Sting, Burn and Messed Up Thinking

April hasn't been the most productive month in terms of posts, with the distraction of a rare FA Cup Semi-Final appearance by my club, as well as travel opening up again for work which is great for air miles and car rental and hotel points, but disruptive to my usual routine. My next trip is in early May, one week from today, but despite the lack of new content, the number of hits is higher this month than last. 

A couple of comments on recent posts, which are always good to receive. On the topic of being able to bet on a result that is already known, Terry commented that:

Derek McGovern actually wrote about this in the early days of internet, you could get the results of matches and the bookies were still pricing them up a few hours later.

With new technology comes new opportunities, at least for a while. The film 'The Sting' from the early 1970s featured a similar strategy for horse racing using delayed wire transmissions, but I suspect opportunities these days are rather few and far between as technologies become ever more sophisticated. 

On the topic of the relationship between calories, exercise and weight, Simon M commented:

The book "Burn" by Herman Pontzer (the Associate Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke) published last year is very good on why exercise probably doesn't burn calories (like a car burning through petrol) yet is still healthy.

I thought the book was overlong (although I would still recommend if you are interested in the topic) but his appearances on free podcasts and magazine profiles do a good job of going through his research on exactly how many calories us (and our fellow mammals) burn.

Example: https://www.menshealth.com/uk/weight-loss/a39350294/dr-herman-pontzer-training-for-weight-loss/

I actually bought this book when it first came out, and can also recommend it. While 319 pages is quite a lot, if you're interested in this topic, and let's face it we all should be, it's well worth the time. Not surprising to read that amid mostly favourable reviews:

There have been two areas of pushback: one is people whose careers depend in one way or another on exercise being a great tool for weight loss; the other is the keto and carnivore bros, who don’t want to hear that we didn’t evolve to eat 100% meat.

Months with work travel are never good, and with the excesses around big football matches and the Tyson Fury fight, it's not looking like a losing month on the scales, with losses unfortunately currently being achieved on the investing front. We still have five trading days to go, but at the time of writing I am down 1.23%. 

A couple of Draws for Leicester City in the past few days mean that the ROI on the EPL Draw System now stands at 11.2% for the Close selections and 29.7% for the Toss-Ups. With just five rounds left, the two Merseyside clubs are keeping things interesting. Everton have played the most seasons in the top flight, and are the only 'Original 12' club still in the league never to have played outside of the top two divisions. They've been relegated just twice in their history but are now favourites to join Norwich City and Watford in relegation.

In March I mentioned that "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 that "there is also an edge on the Away team when the First Leg was a Draw". 

Hopefully some of you cashed in with 6 of the 7 Away teams winning this month, and a 16.13 unit profit. The one losing bet was a Draw at 5.07 odds.

Of the other five ties, coincidentally all with the Home side trailing by one goal, only one result was an Away win.

One of the blogs on my blog roll is Bob Dancer's Gambling With An Edge. The world of Video Poker isn't an are of interest for me, but I enjoy reading some of Bob's thoughts and in a recent post he talks about how our reactions to profits and losses varies. 

Read the full post here, but essentially he "won" a $10 voucher from a grocery store on the same day as he lost $750 playing (I assume) video poker, and upon returning home, told his wife that he "felt great about that $10 win while the $750 loss immediately afterwards didn’t bother me at all."

His wife's bemused reply was “Your thinking is so messed up!”

I can certainly identify with Bob's thought process here. Some 'losses' are good, or at least healthy and simply part of the natural order of things. A four figure decline in the value of a stock index fund - not a rare occurrence if you have £100,000 or more invested - doesn't feel anywhere near as bad as a far smaller loss that was unexpected (dropping your iPhone and needing a new screen for example!) 

Live, Maybe

In the early days of my second coming as a bettor, having accidentally discovered the betting exchange concept, I found a football (soccer) game that had recently finished, yet Betfair still had it as starting in a few minutes at the original kick off time. I forget the reason why the kick off had been brought forward by a couple of hours at short notice, but I do recall that it was an MLS game and it may have been moved due to the threat of inclement weather, which there can mean death and destruction rather than the UK version of inclement weather which means the rain will be slightly heavier than usual. 

As it was in the early days of being a born again bettor, my account balance at that time wasn't much more than my initial deposit of £98.50, it may even have been a little less, and aware of the popular maxim that if something looks too good to be true, it probably is, my investment was sadly rather modest. In fact I fully expected the bets to be voided, but they never were, and my balance received, in percentage terms at least, a welcome boost.

I was reminded of this anecdote by a story that broke yesterday. I'm personally not interested in betting on mixed martial arts (MMA) events, especially involving little known fighters or organisations which for me included the "Professional Fighters League Challenger Series", but apparently last Friday both fuboTV and the PFL were promoting live fights taking place that same evening:

The only problem was that the fights had been pre-recorded a week earlier and perhaps not at all surprisingly, "suspicious betting activity" was reported. The full story and fall out as reported by ESPN is here. 

As expected, both the Leeds United v Southampton and Wolverhampton Wanderers v Aston Villa games were "official" qualifiers for the EPL Draw System with the former a winner taking the ROI for the season to 17.6%. Both matches kicked-off at the published time, in case you were wondering.

Tonight's Burnley v Everton "Original 12" relegation six-pointer is also a match that looks likely to be a qualifier.  

The NBA Overs have started April strongly with a 10-4 record excluding last night, for which 10 of the 12 matches were qualifiers. Some of you may have noticed that the number of games meeting the criteria have increase quite dramatically during the season, rising from a mere 30 in December, to 78 in January, 82 in a short February, 139 in March and after five days of April, already 24 games. This is because teams are quickly adjusting to the new rules, and the average Total has moved from 215.2 in November to 226.2 in March. The regular season ends on Sunday.

The College basketball season ended on Monday night with Kansas just failing to cover the 4.5 points they were giving to North Carolina, who led by 15 points at half-time. I had the latter to cover and was feeling rather comfortable at the break, but Kansas came back, led by three with a few seconds left and had possession. With North Carolina having to foul, my bet wasn't looking good, but I caught a lucky break with the Kansas player stepping on the line by about a millimeter and North Carolina gained possession missing their Hail Mary at the end. A little early perhaps, but watch out for my Arkansas Razorbacks next season, just 219 days away apparently! 

Slightly closer is the start of baseball which starts tomorrow (Thursday). There's a new name to get used to with the Cleveland franchise becoming the Guardians (formerly Indians) and a few new rules to check out before investing too much. The Designated Hitter Rule will be in effect in both Leagues, and the extra inning rule of starting a runner on second has been restored after earlier reports that it would be discontinued. 

The Los Angeles Dodgers are favourites to win the World Series. 

But Weight, There's More

Oh, to be in England, now that April's there

After a couple of negative months to start the year, March turned things around more than enough to make the first quarter a positive one. A negative quarter is a rare event with just five in the 45 since 2010, the most recent being the pandemic driven flash crash of Q1 2020, but while this one will go down in the books in green, the gains were driven by a few stocks rather than the broader market. I have six figure holdings in two companies, one is my employer, the other being Tesla, and both are now positive on the year after early struggles. A stock split is being discussed for Tesla which may in part explain the recent climb in price. 

Berkshire Hathaway also had a huge Q1 up 18% so far this year and while my property equity is also up, with valuations not always particularly accurate and the asset highly illiquid, I only use a percentage in my numbers. It also helps that I get my annual bonus in the first quarter which reduces the chances of a red in this quarter and all-time March was the 4th best in actual money and the 15th best (since 2010) in percentage terms. 

My sports betting was rather quiet this month. I was travelling for business early in the month, and the EPL Draw System is never good in March anyway as I wrote in January. The ROI on "Close" games in March prior to this year was -15.4%, a number that has declined still further after seven straight losses to -19.7%. 

Fortunately, results typically improve in April and as so often happens with these things, the calendar turns over to a new page and we immediately have a provisional winner with the Leeds United v Southampton game finishing 1:1. I need to wait for Football Data's 'official' Pinnacle closing prices before including this one. I was also on the Draw in the Wolverhampton Wanderers v Aston Villa game, but this game finished 2:1. 

Here is the breakdown by month as of March 31st as we enter the final few weeks of the season:

Backing the Away teams in the UEFA club competitions was again profitable, but the NBA Overs System had a poor month with a 65-72-2 losing record, but still a 53.5% winning record since I mentioned this in late January. There are only 10 days remaining of the regular season so this should be another profitable season.

Regular readers will not be surprised to know that along with keeping a record of my financial standing, updated pretty much every day, I also track my diet and exercise numbers.

A little over 18 months ago I purchased an Ōura ring, which tracks your sleep and measures the calories you burn as you go about your daily business. I'm never too sure how accurate these things are, but it seems to be producing some pretty reliable data. I believe Apple's Fitbit does a similar thing to the ring, but I've not used it. 

When I exercise, I usually track it using a Runkeeper app or similar, but these invariably overestimate the calories burned, which somewhat balances out the lack of calorie counting for the rest of the day but on some days I'm lazy or the weather is inclement and don't exercise at all. 

Anyway, with the Ōura ring estimating my calories burned (Kcal Ex) and my diligently tracking calories ingested - not always perfect, but reasonably close - I've been able to see how closely correlated my net calorie intake is with my weight changes each month.

The table below is sorted by Net Cals (daily) with a clear pattern emerging. 1500 or fewer net calories a day and my weight goes down; 1900 or greater, and it goes up. Ignoring the calorie burn, simply ingesting fewer than 2200 calories will see a drop in weight, but the correlation with weight lost is closer when using the Net Calories.

The bottom line appears to be that while exercise helps, weight loss or weight management is mostly about how many calories you consume. Perhaps no big surprise, although the minimal impact of exercise is maybe slightly unexpected. 

While I wouldn't call myself a vegetarian, I do consume very little red meat these days and I also do almost everything I can to avoid sugar.  

The "AUs" column is Alcohol Units and unfortunately (from a health perspective) I quite enjoy the social side of drinking. While I never drink at home - my wife isn't a drinker - I do tend to cram my drinking sessions into one or two days a week rather than spread it out over the week and yes, March just gone wasn't great due in large part to a significant birthday. No judging me please! 

Going 'dry' for the month and there's always a double digit weight loss (weight is in pounds by the way), but those months are usually ones where I'm fastidious about exercising too, unless I'm laid up in bed with a broken leg as was the case for the whole of February 2021.

Regarding exercise, I have a goal this year to covering 1,200 miles on foot. Last year I managed 1,050 with ten weeks lost because of the broken leg, and the usual target of 1,000 miles seemed too low. With 525 miles completed in the first quarter this year, 2,000 miles looks a little soft for a goal. 

The blue months are those from October to March and appear to be better than the 'summer' months, in part due to my habit of sometimes doing 'Dry January' and 'Sober October', although apparently not in October 2020.

Anyway, a little off topic with this and I promise not to update this too often, but I did find the correlation between weight, calories and exercise to be interesting.  

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.