Swanning Around

As Vagabond commented, the unpredictability of Liverpool can make it easy to look stupid when trying to identify value. While one match proves nothing, in the end Liverpool had the most comfortable of wins. The Cassini ratings came out ahead with the opinion that at 1.62 Liverpool were value, but we were all wrong on the Unders being value, and this includes Premier Betting who sent in an account bet to back the Under 2.75 Goals at 2.09.

Vagabond's comment in full was:

Interesting that the original poster felt so strongly about the Liverpool lay. They are so unpredictable that it can be easy to look stupid. To be fair the make up of the Swansea team today must have had a bearing on the end result. Does the rating system not take such things into account - I guess not.

While I am aware of some ratings systems that include individual player ratings, this is a step too far for me, and probably most people who are not betting full-time. My ratings are all statistics based, and while it would be judicious to check for any significant team news before putting betting the farm on any one bet, for most of the time it's all about the numbers. Swansea did make several changes, which makes it all the more surprising to me that Liverpool could be backed at 1.62. Punters like Omega who are basing their opinions purely on results drive the price up, which benefits those of us who look at other numbers too. Liverpool out-shot Swansea 33 to 4, a little above their average 24 shots per game at home to non-big teams, but not totally unexpected. Swansea average 10 shots away from home, but today's 4 matched their numbers at Everton and Tottenham Hotspur this season, so again not unexpected at all. I am now kicking myself for not investing more!

I usually ignore Anonymous comments, but this one was polite enough, and perhaps he's just shy:

Great blog!

Why is 1.61 a 10% edge on 1.46? Isn't this including the stake return? Looking at profit, 1.51 would be 10% value as 0.51/1 is 10% higher than 0.46/1 when considering only the winnings.

Otherwise isn't there a distortion between % value at short odds (where the stake return is a large part of the payout) and high odds (where it is minimal)?

I don't know the answer, just a query I've never really sought an answer to.

Your thoughts greatly appreciated!

My thoughts are that yes, this is a great blog. As for the edge, I look at the expected return from backing a 'true' 1.46 at 1.61.

If, and it's a big IF, the true price on Liverpool is the 1.46, this represents a probability of 68.5%. and over 1,000 bets (excluding commission) backing at this price, we would break even. We would win 685 bets for a profit of 315 points, and lose 315 bets.

If I can back this 68.5% shot at a price of 1.61 (Implied Probability 62.1%), my 1,000 bets would be up 102 points (10% of the stakes bet) - 685 bets would win for a profit of 417 points, and 315 bets would lose.

For a 10% edge, needing 1.61 on a 1.46 shot is the same as seeking 2.2 on a 2.0 shot, although 10% is an arbitrary number that works for me. The calculations above don't include commission, but of course in the real world you need to account for this. Backing true evens shots at evens isn't enough unfortunately!

The Last Letter

There is only the one EPL game this weekend, today's Liverpool v Swansea City match, and Premier Edge have Swansea +1.25 a value bet at 1.81.

Alan finds value in the draw at ~4.5 while the Omega Betting blog returns after a three month break with some very bold claims.

Tomorrow sees this weekend's only EPL match and as the title says you should be laying Liverpool. Here's why:

Over the past few years I’ve been working on a ratings systems, which I’m pleased to announce is finally complete. I have been focusing my own betting on correct scores and have made a return of 60.22% of stakes in the season to date – Without a losing week

From next week I will be publishing the figures here, free of charge, but here’s a sneak peak at tomorrows game:

Liverpool are over valued: They have a less than 50% chance of victory and are at 1.62 on Betfair. Lay

Goals will be at a premium: There’s is a 58.9% Chance of under 2.5 goals, available to back at 2.32 on Betfair.

The most likely score is Liverpool 1-0 at 13.7% This is available to back at 10 and so represents value.

It’s also likely that I’ll be shutting the blog down in the near future. I’m working on something new which evidently from the lack of posts here has distracted my attention. However I’ll try to post up when time allows, at least to share my new system.

60% is rather impressive to say the least, and would see Omega well clear at the top of the FTL table were he competing, so I was very excited to read that:

From next week I will be publishing the figures here, free of charge

I was hoping he meant the selections ahead of time rather than the results after time, but in the end it is a moot point as just a few sentences later, Omega has a change of mind, and writes:

It’s also likely that I’ll be shutting the blog down in the near future

Well darn it. a 60% ROI, and without a losing week, is just what I'm looking for. Anyway, to his numbers for the match tomorrow, and Omega claims that Liverpool have less than a 50% chance of victory. There is probably no EPL team that divides betting opinions more right now than Liverpool. For me it is essentially a matter of whether your pricing model is based primarily on results, or whether shot and possession data are included. If the former, you are likely of the opinion expressed above, that Liverpool are a deciedly average team. If the latter, you are more likely to find their price value as results have underperformed expectations.

While Omega doesn't actually reveal his price for Liverpool, only that it is greater than evens, my spreadsheet suggests a price of 1.46. 1.61 is thus the price needed for my bet triggering 10% edge, and the best prices available are close to this. Paddy Power and William Hill have 1.62.

As for Omega's expectation of a low scoring afternoon, my Under 2.5 numbers are very close to his - expectation is close at 56.5% (1.71) with both of us way out of line with the market. I also have 1-0 as the most likely correct score, followed by 2-0 and 1-1. Stand by for a 3-3 thriller!

Here are the other Premier Edge selections today for those following.

11:00 Real Sociedad v Levante - Under 2.5 goals (1.96 at Pinnacle)

16:00 Valencia v Mallorca - Both Teams to Score: Yes (2.0 at Boylesports)

20:00 Real Madrid v Rayo Vallecano - Real Madrid -2.0 Asian Handicap (1.85 at Pinnacle)

Meanwhile, on a completely different subject, the counter for this blog will tick over the 500,000 hits mark some time today, although the real total is already well past this number as the counter (starting at zero) wasn't introduced until some time had elapsed. According to Blogger, the true number is:

Not too shabby.

Trading Solo

The Sultan wrote a post recently about trading on behalf of a third-party, and it’s a subject that is of interest. I know that when I mentioned in a post many years ago that I had placed a bet on someone’s behalf, I was emailed and told by a couple of people that this was not allowed.

There is probably a term and condition somewhere that technically forbids this, although I doubt that the intent is to stop someone from putting a fiver on to save their Dad or whoever from a wet and windy walk to the High Street bookies.

I’ve also read stories, always with a sad ending, of syndicates being formed, meaning by definition that at least one person is placing bets on behalf of others. The Footsoldiers saga “In The trenches” is possibly the most famous, or rather infamous, and while the exact truth of what happened is not known to me, and probably never will be, the ill-conceived idea ended badly, with moments of black comedy along the way.

Who can forget the unfortunate setback due to the instigator’s brother being unfamiliar with the Betfair screen?

apparently with the 500k investment money he told investors that his brother wouyld be responsible for placing the bets but to wait a few weeks as he had to LEARN BETFAIR FIRST

Or the Champions League game in Lyon where the ‘impossible’ happened and visiting Rangers won 3-0 at 9 to 1 and a sizeable portion of the syndicate’s funds were lost for ever as the lay of Rangers went down in flames. Footsoldiers never understood that value is key to long-term success:

u get guys talking about value all the time....it bores me to death, it's like a disorder with them a cleaning disorder they can't bet unless they think they have this thing called value - now if i turn over 30k a month a 1000 a day by not betting the value what are they going to say ???

yeah thats one of the biggest misconceptions
''keep backing the value, even if they keep losing and in the long run you will win''
i cant get my head around the pro that is happy to back at 3.5 but not 3.4

The subsequent loss of the remainder of a significant amount of money ultimately led to (allegedly) threats of violence, someone living in fear in Glasgow, reportedly broken families, stolen money and police involvement, and the saga proved a cautionary tale for why trusting strangers with your money is not usually a good idea.

Someone said they had persuaded their In Laws to put their life savings in , which was about 50k IIRC .Someone had their house repossessed having taken out a 2nd mortgage also i believe. One guy said his wife had left him over it and from what was said on the deleted thread Footsoldiers was no longer on speaking terms with members of his own family (he blamed his brother in some way from what i recall)

Accepting money from strangers isn’t usually a good idea either – assuming that they want it back of course.

In the early days after finding our edges, probably many of us spoke a little too freely to friends and family about our success, but you soon learn to keep quiet. It all sounds so easy to those we bore with our stories, that there’s the inevitable “If I give you some money, can you invest it for me?” questions.

Well for me, it’s no I can’t. I used to explain that the edge is in making snap decisions which, while they are right more often than the probability suggests, apportioning a profit or a loss to someone else’s investment was nigh on impossible. And the extra money was no use to me.

If you find you have an edge in trading, or punting, you really don’t need any funding other than your initial deposit. The thing about having an edge is that your bank grows anyway and you soon reach the point where the limitations of the betting markets become apparent. Betting markets are nowhere near as scalable as the financial markets, and it is not often that my self-imposed exposure limit of £5,000 has proved to be a problem. My bank is currently in the £20k range, and an injection of cash from a third-party would either be insignificant or unusable. Useless in other words.

 Want £2 on the Clippers -3.5 to beat the Lakers? You might well have no problem filling your order at 2.0, but if you want £2,000 on the same bet? That might not be so easy.

So the extra capital isn’t needed, and assuming our investor wants a profit on his investment, how is it in my interest to generate profits for him, rather than keep them for myself?

Is it even true that we trade better with someone else’s money? I would suggest that when we have someone to answer to, how ever freely they might give you the money, our trading decisions are negatively affected. I think it is human nature to take a little more care of something you are entrusted with than you do with your own, and so you trade a little too cautiously. As if the end of the month were approaching perhaps?

If I am wrong, and we trade better with someone else’s money, then it could make sense to work this way, but only if your cut of the profits that you generate exceeds the money you could have made trading less optimally from your own money. In my opinion, the likelihood is that if you are profitable in the first place, then any improvement is likely to be slight rather than dramatic.

Of course, if the decision making is taken out of your hands, then there is one advantage to placing bets with other peoples money, or there would be were it allowed. It increases turnover and reduces charges, and for anyone with Premium Charges in their future, which should be most of us, the more of this we can do, and the earlier we can do it in our trading lives, the better. Of course this assumes that our 'clients' don't have an edge. If they are consistent winners, it's not going to help with your charges, but not many people can consistently profit from punts. It's more likely to be recreational punters who want you to put bets on for convenience reasons rather than pros looking for another outlet.

Shove It

There are still a couple of matches to come to complete the weekend. Premier Edge has a selection in the Monday night game in Spain and Little Al is looking for a draw in the Liverpool v West Bromwich Albion game, a match I have Liverpool as value for, even at their low ~1.39 on the exchanges, or if you prefer, at 1/3 on their Sportsbook. I am not a fan. An article in The Times in 2003 included this:

Betfair.com is a success story from the madness of the dotcom revolution, now increasingly visible via a sponsorship deal with Fulham for the Barclaycard Premiership. The company was launched in June 2000 via a publicity stunt that is proving as prophetic as it was provocative. Betfair paraded the streets of central London with a coffin in a mock-funeral, to mark 'the death of the bookmaker.'

The likes of William Hill, Coral Eurobet and Ladbrokes sat back and waited for Betfair to fail. Instead, though, the company has gone from strength to strength. A glance at the betting press shows just how much Betfair has upped the ante. Again and again the company's critics seize the slightest opportunity to condemn Betfair as 'illegal', or a 'menace' to the punter. Meanwhile, the punters continue to register with Betfair, happily leaving the industry to play out its debate over whether what it does is legal or not while they take advantage of its revolutionary betting exchange system.

Andrew Black must be turning in the aforementioned coffin, except for the fact that he is very much alive and well. Times have changed and Betfair is turning into the likes of William Hill, Coral Eurobet and Ladbrokes while, somewhat ironically, the latter look to move into the exchange betting business through their purchase of BETDAQ.

Betfair are even reverting to the use of 'traditional' odds, which haven't made any sense since the days of crowns, half-crowns, shillings and (old) pennies, which my parents have told me about. My Dad still dusts off his antique Shove ha'penny board at Christmas, although I can't say it is the most exciting game in the world. It has a surprisingly dodgy past though, with Wikipedia reporting:

In competition games a scoring placement is judged by a referee. In times past considerable sums could be wagered on games of shove ha'penny and influencing the referee – whether actual or suspected – could result in sudden and violent confrontations.

Match-fixing is nothing new, and royalty played it too, although not too well it seems:

King Henry VIII is legendarily alleged to have lost large sums to his more dubious drinking companions: 'The privy purse expenses of 1532 show that in January Lord William won £9 of the King at "shovilla bourde," and "My lord of Rocheforde won of the King at shovilla bourde and betting at the game £45." In the following month Lord Rocheford won £41, 12s. 6d. of the King at the same pastime'.

Who knew that the founder of the world's one true religion was such a well adjusted individual? The womanising and drinking was already enough to convince me of its merits, but now that gambling is added, well that's just icing on the cake. (Along with his seventh wife, Marie Antoinette, Henry was partial to a little cake too, judging by the pictures). I used to love history at school, but it was all so long ago.

I digress. The big winners from the FTL this weekend were the XX Extended HT 0-0 and XX Classic U1.5 selections. There were no winning draws from the XX Classic selections (the losing run extends to 14) but two of the three this weekend finished with just the one goal, while the Extended selections had four winners from nine selections, and nearly a fifth except for the 90th minute draw-buster at Celta de Vigo. Six of the nine matches were goalless at the half, while in the Bundesliga, I fluked a 3-3 draw. One winner from two for the Bundeslayga system as well.

Pete Nordsted's Drawmaster made a small profit again with a winning draw at Norwich City, but drops to fourth spot. Premier Edge's fate for the weekend is in the hands of Real Betis and Rayo Vallodolid. Currently he has a small profit on the weekend, which will either become a bigger profit or leave him with a loss. Neil took a small loss, Premier Betting made a small gain, and little Al needs a Liverpool draw to salvage something from the weekend after four misses.

And then we come to 20th placed Football Elite who, as has been covered elsewhere, has decided this week to add more selections to the Recommended Selections of which there were seven this weekend.

Unfortunately only two won for another losing weekend. What Matt is doing by expanding the number of bets is solid enough. Very similar to my decision to start sending out the Extended XX Draws along with the Classic selections. As it turns out this season, the Extended are up 22 points, softening the disappointment of the Classics being down 9.8 points right now. And the newly (this season) added Bundesliga selections are holding up very well too, just behind the Extended Draws with a profit of 17.3. To date, that has meant an additional 243 bets for subscribers, which they are free to include in their action or not. One thing Matt doesn't do is indicate which Recommended Bets are 'new'.

Here's the table as it stands on Sunday night:

  

Selections For The Weekend (Feb 9-11)

For anyone following the Tipster Table, here are the picks from those currently in the green. 

Premier Edge and Neil are neck-and-neck in 5th and 6th place, up 6.88 and 6.63 points respectively.

Premier Edge go for:

Saturday 9th February
12:45 Tottenham Hotspur v Newcastle United – Under 2.75 goals (1.99 at Pinnacle)
15:00 Norwich City v Fulham – Under 2.5 goals (1.91 at by CouponDropDown"32Red)
15:00 Stoke City v Reading – Over 2.25 goals (1.833 at Pinnacle)
15:00 Swansea City v Queens Park Rangers - Over 2.5 goals (2.05 at BetVictor)
15:00 Mallorca v Osasuna – Both Teams to Score: No (1.95 at 32Red)
17:30 Southampton v Manchester City – Manchester City to win by 1 or 2 goals (2.11 at Ladbrokes). This bet needs separating so you put 0.56 point on Manchester City to win by 1 goal at 3.8 and 0.44 point on Manchester City to win by 2 goals at 4.8.
19:00 Levante v Malaga – 2 or 3 goals (2.08 at 32Red)

Sunday 10th February
16:00 Athletic Bilbao v Espanyol – Under 2.75 goals (1.847 at Pinnacle)

Monday 11th February
20:30 Real Betis v Rayo Valladoid – 2 or 3 goals (1.95 at by CouponDropDown"Bet365)

while Neil's selections are:

Norwich City v Fulham - Norwich City @ 2.4
Sunderland v Arsenal - Draw @ 3.75
Aston Villa v West Ham United - Aston Villa @ 2.61

The Bundelayga system has two selections this weekend, currently up 1.4 points in 9th place:

Eintracht Frankfurt v Nuremberg 1.86
Freiburg v Fortuna Dusseldorf 1.66

Alan is also in the green, up 1.25 points in 14th spot. His draw selections this weekend are:

Tottenham Hotspur v Newcastle United 4.1
Chelsea v Wigan Athletic 5.5
Southampton v Manchester City 4.2
Manchester United v Everton 4.0
Liverpool v West Bromwich Albion 5.3

Fixings And Riddles

Close on the heels of the 'Lance Armstrong cheated' shocker, seriously, who knew?, comes the news, or rather 'confirmation' for those of you who read Declan Hill's blog on the blogroll, that some football matches are 'fixed'. I have a problem with the use of the word 'fixed' when it comes to football, simply because you need so many people to be involved to 'fix' it. You can influence the game, and move the odds in your favour, with a key player or the referee, but fixing a game to end say 2-0 must be incredibly difficult without all players and officials being in on it. 

Anyway, the risk of a game not being played genuinely is always there in dead rubber games, meaningless friendlies, and on games in third-world countries or where player wages are relatively low. Or Germany.

If the numbers quoted are correct, and the:

biggest payment to an individual was in Austria for a total of £121,000

it's fairly obvious that the sums involved are unlikely to interest most players in the top leagues, and if you play games in Eastern Europe, Africa or Asia, you take your chances on how genuinely the game will be played.

It wasn't a good weekend for the FTL table, including for the XX Draws. Saturday wasn't too bad, with three winners from eight selections, but Friday saw a loser, and Sunday was a disaster with goals galore in all five games, and no fluked 2-2 or 3-3 results. The games were all fixed! The Bundesliga XX Draws had three losers as well, although the Bundeslayga did find a couple of winning home lays at Gelsenkirchen and Wolfsburg.

Premier Edge had their worst weekend since September dropping 4.29 points, while Neil went 0 for 3. Drawmaster found two winners from three for the second consecutive weekend, although Premier Betting had a small loss. Little Al joins the big boys in the green finding the Everton v Aston Villa draw at 5.1. Football Elite found a winner to start the weekend off but followed it up with three losers. Talkbet showed a loss too so with rare exceptions, not a very good football weekend at all.

Much to my relief, it does appear that it is not only me who finds trying to post on Peter Webb's blog a little harder than he implies with his

There is really nothing very complicated about how to post a comment.

Tim missed the point slightly, writing:

I can't see the problem? I've just had a look and registering was easy. It's normal to have to register for posting comments isn't it? It seems to me like you are just searching for another axe to grind.

The point is not the ease of registering, but that you have to register or log in in the first place. Al challenged Tim with:

Tim. Please post a comment on Webbs blog. I've never seen one and I'm registered with WordPress.

but no update from Tim yet.  My old friend, or is that sparring partner?, Big Al commented:

Most of the entries I have read on the Bet Angel blog are written in riddles, presumably designed to generate interest in his product.

I did take a look at his tennis trader thing once and the way I understood it to work missed probably the most important concept of all.

Little Al (no relation) wrote:

I have to agree with BigAl. Most of the entries are riddles and some random posts about how Peter is connected to the markets with VPS, Desktop PC, Laptop, Tablet, Mobile using broadband and a mobile phone connected to the Betfair API and also the website.

I also believe Peter is constantly gathering data from the markets and making graphs, calculating probabilities and making strategies. His first strategy was where he decided to enter a back and a lay bet in the horse markets.

TytteTrading has registered, or tried to:

I tried to sign up, to be able to post on the blog. Still waiting for the confirmation mail - and yes, I did check the spam filter.

And WhyAlwaysMe suggested:

Clearly there is a problem somewhere because there are never any comment's on Peter's blog. It would be great if it could move to a moderated format like Cassini has done. I've often had questions in the past and it would enrich the blog if there was more clarification at certain points.

Regarding the sentence that has caused so much fuss - 'you should have struggled to lose money if you were trading', perhaps he was saying that this was a game that fitted the trading strategy - if you were doing say 20 probabilistic trades in the match the risk/reward ratio was so favourable you should struggle to lose money. He didn't say you would win necessarily but that conditions were very favourable. Like if you did 20 trades and you were getting 4/1 when the true odds were 2/1 then you should struggle to lose money. That's what I think Peter was trying to say.

Again, the point I would like to make is that at any time in the match, the next point could see the end of the game. It is only after it is over that you can look back and determine that a certain strategy would mean you would struggle to lose money. You may have a strategy that happened to work in this match as it played out through a long third set, but where your strategy would leave you had a player withdrawn injured or the third set been a lot shorter is likely a different matter. At least with a team sport played over a time period rather than dependent on sets or wickets, you know how long there is left (with overtime possibly a factor) and you can trade with that in mind. Selecting one game, and suggesting - after it is over - that you would struggle to have lost money trading it, is misleading in my opinion.

On The Defensive

The climax of the NFL season is upon us, with Super Bowl XLVII (47) taking place in New Orleans tomorrow afternoon / evening. The San Francisco 49ers represent the NFC and the Baltimore Ravens the AFC, and Nate Silver of US Election fame has taken a look at this game from a statistical standpoint for the New York Times. Thanks to Scott for forwarding me the link.

Does defense win championships? Stat-geek sports fans like me tend to distrust this old saying. Scoring a point helps just as much as allowing one hurts. And in football, the proposition risks ignoring the role played by the likes of Tom Brady. It is the case, however, that the better defensive team has usually won theSuper Bowl — and done so far more consistently than offensive juggernauts. The Web site Pro Football Reference publishes a statistic called the Simple Rating System (S.R.S.), which evaluates each team’s offense and defense based on the number of points it scored and allowed relative to the league average and adjusted for strength of schedule. Of the 92 teams to have played in the Super Bowl before this year, I identified those with the 20 best defensive and offensive ratings, according to S.R.S. (see charts above).

The defensive list contains teams that you would expect, like the 1985 Bears. These teams have compiled a 14-6 record (.700) in the Super Bowl. Their winning percentage is actually nearly 80 percent when you ignore the three cases, Super Bowls IV, VIII and XLV, when two of the all-time great defensive teams faced each other.

The 20 best offensive teams, however, are just 10-10 in the Super Bowl. There have been successes in this group, like the Saints under Drew Brees, but there have been just as many failures, including two of Brady’s Patriots teams. (During his three championships, the Patriots had a much better balance between offense and defense.)

The reasons that exceptional defenses fare so much better in the Super Bowl are still somewhat murky, but this factor bodes well for this year’s 49ers, whose defense belongs in the elite group, according to S.R.S. (it ranks 17th among Super Bowl teams). The Ravens, despite all the hype surrounding Ray Lewis, allowed a rather pedestrian 21.5 points per game this year.

The 49ers also have the better offense, according to S.R.S., so there isn’t much to recommend the Ravens . . . unless you look at the more sophisticated rankings published by Football Outsiders. Their system, known as Defense-adjusted Value Over Average (D.V.O.A.), accounts for a team’s success or failure on every play it ran during the year and not just on final scores.

Those rankings find that while the 49ers had the better offense and defense, the Ravens had the best special teams in the league this year. If they do pull off the upset, on the heels of Steve Weatherford’s game-changing performance for the Giants in last year’s Super Bowl, perhaps it will be time for a new cliché: punters win championships. But don’t count on that.

A Tangled Webb

I am sure Peter Webb means well, but for some reason he is not being totally forthcoming about the ease of posting comments on his blog. 

I'm beginning to think that it is as impossible to post a comment on his blog as it is to lose money when trading!

While the invitation to leave a reply on his posts appears to be there:

Must - Verb, be obliged to - or not

the requirement to login is clear. "You must be logged in to post a comment". And when you click on the 'logged in' part of the message, you are taken to the following:

Foggy Landing Screen

I suggested in my last post that this was something of a restriction. Not all of us are registered with WordPress and have no desire to be, but according to Peter:

You don't need to be a wordpress user. In fact you actually embedded the key link in your post. I've asked the guys to see if they can mod the landing screen to make it clearer.

So you must be logged in to post a comment but you don't need to be a WordPress user. Clear as mud?

Well, not to me, and while I have my denser moments, I'm usually able to work these things out with my sharp mind, logical thinking - God made me an atheist after all - and years of experience in the IT business, but this one baffles me. Then we get this rather snippy, patronising little comment from the great man:

While I am grateful for the for the huge amount of extra publicity I am getting at the moment. There is really nothing very complicated about how to post a comment.

Now if Peter's posts were all attracting several comments from non-Word Press users I would concede that I am missing something, but if there really is nothing very complicated about how to post a comment, then how come I can't recall seeing any over there?

This issue was also mentioned over at The Sultan's blog, where Peter claimed that:

"I do take comments on the blog, but you are also welcome to visit the forum to chat which is where most of my interaction takes place."

And The Sultan replied:

I have often wanted to comment on your posts but have never been able to do so as they've always been closed off (maybe I need to be a member?). If I'd been able to, I would never have written a blog post in the first place! Over to you, Peter :)

Indeed, over to you Peter, and please, would you spare us the sarcastic and patronising attitude next time, even if we're missing something incredibly obvious? It is unnecessary, it is not becoming, and it does nothing to enhance your reputation as the trader's friend, already a little tarnished following the, in the opinion of several people, at best poorly phrased, and at worst, intentionally misleading statement, that there are events where:

you should have struggled to lose money if you were trading.

That is simply not true for reasons The Sultan has detailed, and I have touched on. I can lose money on ANY event, and so can anyone else. Exchanges work that way - winners need losers and vice versa. we can't all 'not lose money'. 

Comments welcome by the way - and I've had 2,847 so far, which makes me reasonably confident that you can do it. After all, there is really nothing very complicated about how to post a comment, is there?

FTL Table Update And More

Without further ado, here are the latest standings in the FTL:

With five draws from ten selections, (one of them a fluked 3-3), the XX Extended draws were the big gainers this weekend, moving up from 7th to 2nd, although the Bundesliga draws pulled further clear at the top with two perfect (0-0) draws from three selections. 

Premier Edge had a great weekend with all five selections winning, but lost some of those profits in the midweek games. Nevertheless they are a creditable fourth right now, with Neil not far behind in 6th. 

Peter Nordsted's Drawmaster and Premier Betting were both profitable, and the pro category is now up by 4.71 points, although Football Elite (-5.29 in 21st place) continue to hold this group back. The total loss on the season was significantly reduced from -62.33 last week to -29.76 right now. A couple more weeks like this and we'll have something to shout about. Still a lot of 'in-the-red' entries, but several have quit, so at least they won't get any worse! 

The XX Classic selections went 0 for 2, with the Malaga v Mallorca game one of those matches where the result was undeserved, and offers me a chance to reply to a question on this subject. The result was Malaga 2 Mallorca 3, but Malaga had 23 shots to Mallorca's 5, and both had just three each on target. The corner count was heavily in Malaga's favour too, by 13 to 3. Anyway, the question from Laurie was this:  

Can you tell me how I can add shots:shots on target:goals to my Elo model? I'd be most grateful.

The way I go about it is to convert the shots and shots-on-target numbers into 'goals'. If your research shows you that, on average, Malaga score one goal per ten shots against a team with the rating of Mallorca, then they could be expected, on average, to have scored 2.3 goals on Sunday. If, on average, they score one goal per 5 shots-on-target, then you can convert this number in the same way, e.g. 3 / 5 or 0.6. So you have three numbers for goals actually scored, goals expected from shots, and goals expected from shots-on-target, e.g 2, 2.3 and 0.6 which you can average to give one number. A straight average (mean) would give you 1.63 which is a start, although you might want to weight these. So the score for the home team goes down as 1.63 and if you do the same sums for Mallorca, you might have 1.2 for them, so for Elo purposes the game goes down as a win for Malaga, even though they actually lost. This is not perfect of course, all shots are not equal for example, but for those of us with other things in our lives such as a day job, it's a good starting point.

I don't really want to get dragged into the Webbgate affair, that's between the Sultan and Peter, but Al threw this in:

I do think its a bit harsh on Peter Webb that he didn't word something on his blog exactly how some people might like it, but Webbgate has been an interesting read in an otherwise dry few months!

Peter himself added:

It’s laudable that people are pointing out that you can lose money trading, I think that’s pretty obvious really and have never denied this. But in my experience readers are always more interested in spotting favourable opportunities than finding easy ways to lose. Which is why I post up interesting stuff when it happens. It’s never an attempt to mislead, just educate and make people think.

I trade so much volume through the markets selling another copy of Bet Angel isn’t really going to make any material difference to me, so it’s not fair to imply that I did it for that reason. But I can see how that’s a massive incentive to others. Especially those who sell advice but do little or no actual trading.

It would be nice if somebody would hit the reply button on the actual post itself. I’m happy to enter into dialogue there for benefit of future readers of the post.

Unfortunately, when you try to leave a reply, you get this:

 You must be logged in to post a comment.

which is rather a restriction if you are not a Word Press user! 

Webbgate

While no one stopped by to say they made money from my Lakers tip on Sunday night, I did have a couple of comments. First was:

Hi Cassini!

I also find basketball almost the perfect sport for trading and was wondering, do you also trade EuroLeague games or only NBA games? From my experience the level of competition in EuroLeague is no worse than in many NBA games and there is also good liquidity on these games.

BR

Grega

Almost the perfect sport? Do tell which sport is the perfect sport for trading. Not much has changed since I wrote in 2011:

I do occasionally watch/trade Euroleague, but the NBA is just better for both activities. Playing in NBA stadiums, with NBA rules and officials, NBA teams are 27-2 v Euroleague teams, and 36-7 overall so there's no debate about the quality. And English is my first language - far gooder than my Turkish, Russian, Greek, Polish, Croatian, Israelish, Serbian, Lithuanian and Slovenian.

The best players still play in the NBA, and once you get used to the NBA, switching to the Euroleague is a little like heading down to Fratton Park after you have been used to watching Crystal Palace for all your life. Well, kind of. 

And then a visit from the great man himself, Peter Webb, who commenting on my provocative 'in this particular match you should have struggled to lose money if you were trading'. Surely no one has missed the Webbgate controversy?

Peter wrote: 

TBH Cassini, I'm surprised that people are getting upset at the suggestion that if you back or lay something in a two selection market, you can profit if the lead changes hand. A fairly simple observation I would have thought and not particularly controversial, or that's what I thought at the time.

I can see the appeal of all two selection markets. But with its potentially unlimited length, Tennis is my favoured market.

I think that the reason for any upset was the statement from Peter which actually ignited this 'controversy' was actually a little different to saying that you 'can' profit if the lead changes hand. (You don't even need lead changes to profit in a two selection market incidentally). Specifically, the comment was this:

"So in this particular match you should have struggled to lose money if you were trading. This was purely on the basis of the very large number of opportunities to profit or exit for no loss, a direct function of a competitive match playing out over a long time period." 

It's very easy in hindsight to say how perfect a game was for trading if it meshed with your trading style, and you called your entry and exit points almost perfectly, but there would have been plenty of losing traders in the game in question (Kvitova v Robson) who didn't read the game well, and who found it all too easy to lose money.

The suggestion that the match playing out over a long period is a huge benefit to traders is true, but also rather after the fact. Yes, if we knew that the game would go to a lengthy deciding set from the start, we would adjust our strategies, but we don't know that. In fact, arguably tennis is a poor sport to trade in this regard, because matches can be short, and in the case of injuries, very short. At least with team sports, you know as a trader how long you have to work with, and sometimes you get a few more minutes thrown in with overtime.

So back to tennis, and a trader who sees the favourite start poorly decides that from an SP of 1.05 the 1.2 now available is value, only to see the price drift out to 1.4. They red out at this price, and then see the price come in again. The favourite appears to have recovered, but if they stay out, they are a loser, and so they go in again at 1.2 confident that this time they have got it right, only to see the favourite stumble again and the price then move out to 1.5. Rinse and repeat... It's not as simple as choose your entry point and wait, because the art of trading is to cut your losses short and let the winners run, not the other way around which is just gambling. In fact most traders in my example would probably have cut their losses before 1.4 or 1.5 was reached if possible.

I think the concern was that you [Peter] have a vested interest in promoting the idea that successful trading is easier than it really is, and that your statement was open to misinterpretation. I'm hoping that not too many people quit their jobs after reading your post.

FTSE 100 (5 Years)

The example I gave reminds me of what actually happens time and again in the rather longer term stock market. People get in just as they should be getting out, and get out just when they should be staying in. As is happening right now, shares are on a roll, and money from the unwashed massed is starting to pour into the stock market again. After taking a beating back in 2008, and cutting their losses, many people have stayed on the sidelines for years, missing the upward move that the markets have made in the intervening four years. But fingers burned in 2008 are healed now, and memories are short. People love a bubble, (the Madness of Crowds), they always have, but unfortunately bubbles have a tendency to burst.

From the USA:

The big gains seem to have caught the attention of Main Street investors, many of whom have turned ultra-defensive with their investments since the 2008 financial crisis and sought comfort in more conservative, yet lower-yielding investments, such as cash and U.S. Treasury bonds.

The latest weekly sentiment survey released by the American Association of Individual Investors found 52.3% of investors were bullish, the highest reading since January 2011. A closely watched Wall Street "fear gauge" is trading at its lowest level since April 2007.

The combination of falling fear and rising bullishness has translated into retail investors putting some money to work in U.S. stock funds, after consistently yanking money out of these funds since the 2008 financial crisis. In the past two weeks, domestic stock mutual funds have enjoyed cash inflows of $11.3 billion, the best two weeks since April 2000, says fund-tracker Lipper.

For the record, I am not suggesting anyone quits the stock market any time soon. Far from it. My point is that if you were in prior to 2008, you should have stayed in, and continued to invest, and ridden the escalator up in those four plus years. From 3530 to 6339 is a huge jump that I know many people missed out on because they became disillusioned and gave up with shares. Until now.

Bad Sport

Average Guy writes on his blog that he:

placed bets on Snooker and Basketball (not real sports IMO) for a few mates during a particularly mental drunk night during the week.

While I am with him to some extent on Snooker, (I like my sports to require some kind of physical effort beyond walking around a table and sitting down), he clearly has absolutely no idea about Basketball, the world's second most popular and widely viewed sport. As the BBC reported:

When Dr James Naismith invented basketball in 1891, he couldn't have dreamed that the game would become the world's second most popular sport, played in more than 200 countries, and a multi-billion dollar industry.

It's also one of the finest sports for pure trading, as I have written many times before. In fact, it is probably the finest, with the possible exception of tennis, which for me has several limitations. While football markets move predictably given the current game situation, basketball markets do not. Basketball is very much a game of momentum, and markets ebb and flow accordingly. If you study the game, watch how markets move, and take the time to learn some of the nuances of the sport, it offers far more in terms of trading opportunities than a low scoring sport such as football.

In fact, most nights see at least one game where you can look back and say that:

in this particular match you should have struggled to lose money if you were trading.

But it's good to know that money is coming into these markets from ill-informed and inebriated sources!

I jest with my suggestion that any game all but guarantees a profit, and anyone following the discussion between The Sultan and Peter Webb will know what I am referring to. From my own experience, there are games when you read everything close to perfectly, and there are games where you get every decision wrong. It's all too easy after the former to get carried away with the thought that every trader must have been like you and made money, but for every entry point of yours, someone was exiting, and vice-versa. On an exchange, we can't all be winners, and the trick is to maximise your winners on a good day, and limit your losses on a bad one.

And on that note, it's time to set up for the NBA double-header on Sky Sports in a few minutes, featuring the Boston Celtics v Miami Heat, followed by the Los Angeles Lakers v Oklahoma City Thunder. If the Thunder don't drift higher than their 1.66 price, I shall be quite surprised. The Lakers like the spotlight, played far better in their last game than they have been, and the Thunder have the best record in the NBA, which augurs well for a closer game then the price suggests. Dwight Howard's shoulder may yet be an issue though, and one negative against basketball is perhaps the effect on the market that one player can have.

Update: Hope you took my advice. The Los Angeles Lakers won, in a game that you would have struggled to lose money on if you were trading ;) 

Odd Odds - Quite Peculiar Really

Late on Friday night, I happened to notice that the price on Queens Park Rangers to beat Milton Keynes Dons was ~1.7. On the face of it, rather generous I thought. A Premier League side, albeit a struggling one, at home to a League One side 32 places below them, but the market had, what I call a 'loose' look to it. Most big games would see four figures plus to back at say 1.7 and similar to lay at 1.71, but not this one. As many of you will have seen, the price then drifted out to above evens, and if what I read on the Betfair Forum is to be believed, (a big if), quite a substantial amount was being layed. I stayed away from this game, as I do most Cup games, but this was a very strange market. The argument that QPR weren't bothered about the FA Cup is less credible when you think that QPR made the effort to beat West Bromwich Albion in the Third Round, equalising with virtually the last kick of the first match, and scoring late (75 minutes) in the replay. Yes, Harry Redknapp made nine changes, but there was still a team out there in blue and white hoops that should have been able to win quite comfortably, but as everyone reading this probably knows, QPR went 0-4 down before pulling two back in the final ten minutes.

The Ladbrokes takeover of BETDAQ has been covered elsewhere, but the most interesting aspect for me is whether or not the new LADDAQ will become a serious competitor to Betfair, and serious enough to make the latter change some of their more egregious charges.

The email I received from BETDAQ suggests an expansion of the events they will cover, which one hopes might mean offering more markets in-play rather than adding ridiculous sub-markets to events they already cover:

Whilst ensuring that the integrity of the exchange is fully protected, we believe that combining the strengths of Ladbrokes with the expertise of BETDAQ will have a hugely positive impact on the betting experience for our customers.

On completion, Ladbrokes will work with BETDAQ to further enhance the competitiveness of the exchange, focusing initially on growing liquidity and event coverage, as well as expanding the range and depth of markets covered.

While I have no numbers to back up my feeling, it does seems like liquidity on Betfair is falling. I noticed last night that one of my PC reduction churning bets on the NBA (Portland Trail Blazers -1.5 v Los Angeles Clippers) alone comprised a large percentage of the total market.

The screenshot was taken pre-game, but the liquidity in-play is almost non-existent on the handicap markets, not helped when they offer three on the same game, plus two Totals markets one point apart!

Perhaps Betfair won't miss players such as myself who will walk (for obvious reasons) as soon as a viable alternative exists, but other players might miss us, and that viable option is only going to look all the more tempting to them too.

With no EPL action, the FTL tipsters were a little quieter than usual this weekend. With the Premier League in action next Tuesday and Wendesday, I shall probably delay the update until those results are in.

Pinnacle's View

An interesting article on the Pinnacle site, looking at Betfair's liquidity woes, while at the same time banging their own drum a little of course. 

Internet forums are awash with theories as to why liquidity may be lower for the Australian Open, with suggestions falling into two categories: event specific issues and general changes to exchange betting conditions:

Declining Tennis Liquidity – Event Specific Factors

Betfair is by far the dominant betting exchange in terms of volume with its customer base skewed towards the United Kingdom – generating 53% of all volume in 2012. With many Australian Open games played between 1am and 5am GMT it’s almost certain that available liquidity is impacted by the unfavourable timing for Betfair’s core player base. This is particularly acute for those bettors interested in betting in-play, on peripheral courts and on games without star appeal.

On top of the time zone issue, television coverage in the UK of the Australian Open is the patchiest of all the Grand Slams, with neither of the main broadcasters – BBC or Sky – showing early round games live. With exchanges, there is a direct correlation between live coverage of an event and volume/liquidity.

To make matters worse, Betfair also has a special arrangement with Australian betting regulators, which requires customers betting on events taking place Down Under to transfer funds to a specific Australian Wallet. This impractical step may also be enough to put off some bettors.

Declining Tennis Liquidity – General Exchange Factors 

Alongside the event specific issues, discussions around declining exchange liquidity are a daily feature on forums and are relevant for the Australian Open problem. The following points are structural issues that many bettors feel are impacting liquidity.

In 2008 Betfair introduced a Premium Charge on bettors whose winnings were deemed to be disproportionately high, when compared to the amount of commission they pay. In 2011 this was as high 60%, and these draconian measures are seen by many as the root cause of drops in liquidity. Big players may be mitigating their exposure to the Premium Charge by reducing the amount of backing and laying that they do, which depletes the available action in markets.

One of the main online betting forum threads that often re-occurs, is the suggestion that a lot of so-called ‘market-makers’ have reduced or stopped their activity. This is especially relevant for the peripheral games in the early rounds of the Australian Open where the lack of liquidity has been so noticeable.

Declining Tennis Liquidity – Poor Liquidity & Value

In theory, an exchange should offer a free market for betting on any given event, and free market economics suggest that the odds should quickly move to a ‘true value’ position. Backers and layers both seek optimal returns so the differential between the two should diminish, and this should produce close to a 100% market – one with no margin.

If there is enough volume and the market is efficient, this may be true. But unfortunately for successful exchange bettors, they are then slapped with a 5% commission on winnings. Unfortunately for Australian Open bettors, this commission still applies even when the market is inefficient, such as when there is a lack of volume.

And on top of the reduction in value that poor liquidity brings, this situation also restricts what should be one of the greatest attractions of exchanges: the freedom to hedge positions to lock in profit. Without the money on offer, bettors are either forced to take whatever odds are on offer, or sit on their hands.

Declining Tennis Liquidity – Not at Pinnacle Sports

While liquidity appears to be declining on exchanges like Betfair, it is going in the opposite direction at Pinnacle Sports. We have a long-standing reputation for offering the highest fixed odds limits online, yet these have been raised even higher for the 2013 season.

You’ll find Win Odds (Money Lines) and Totals increased by 25% and Handicaps brought in line with Win Odds, which is an increase of at least 50%. As bettors can re-bet at the maximum limit, Pinnacle Sports offer almost unlimited potential liquidity and the ability to build positions.

Higher limits aren’t the only reason Pinnacle Sports are a much better option for tennis bettors than an exchange; our margins are far lower after commission is factored in, so we offer far better value, providing a better chance to win more. This is especially true for tennis with margins as low as 2%.

Unlike exchanges, there is no sting in the tail at Pinnacle Sports as we do not levy any commission or charges on successful players, nor do we close or limit the accounts of successful players; our high volume/low margin business model needs sharp players.

So if you are looking for better tennis liquidity for the Australian Open, free of commission and Premium Charge, Pinnacle Sports will stand your bets, and win or lose, you can come back and keep betting with guaranteed high limits.

Weekend Summary

The 'weekend' ended with the games tonight at Southampton (v Everton) and Real Betis (v Athletic Bilbao), and the updated FTL table is above.

Still atop the table are the Bundesliga XX Draw selections, for which there was one selection and a perfect 0-0 this weekend, but the lead is less than a point over the XX Extended Draws Under 2.5 bets, which saw the first two selections have five goals, but the following nine all winners with two goals or less. Three of those nine ended as draws. The Classic selection I covered a couple of posts ago.

The next three spots are taken by Neil and Premier Edge whose bets I put up here a few days ago, and then comes backing the Lay The Draw selection which had another profitable weekend finding two draws from four selections. 

Peter Nordsted's Drawmaster continues it's slump, dropping to 11th place, but still in profit, while his Premier Betting service had a small profit and is basically level on the season. he Bundeslayga had two losses, while Little Al had a winner midweek (Chelsea v Southampton) but two losses on the weekend. 

Football Elite had two losing recommended bets, and drops to 22nd, ahead of the Free Over / Under picks, Talkbet, who had a winning weekend, and Football Formbook, who haven't had a profitable weekend since November. 

14 of 30 are in profit, and a profit of 17.28 points for anyone backing everything this weekend, which would be no one!

The entries in italics are those who appear to have given up. As always, let me know if I have messed anything up. I am human.

Harbaugh Lights

Most of you should be familiar with Nate Silver by now. I went on about him enough during the US Presidential Election and have recommended his book The Signal And The Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail - but Some Don't, but having made his name with political and baseball predictions, he turned his talents to the NFL a few weeks ago, predicting a Superbowl between the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots. Seattle were eliminated last week, and yesterday the New England Patriots followed them in something of a surprise loss to the Baltimore Ravens. 

His reputation is hardly tarnished though. Silver ran the numbers and came up with his selections as the most likely match up, but small sample sizes are essentially meaningless. As the excellent Mark Taylor says in his Power of Goals blog:

Nate Silver was brave enough to put his predictive credentials gained in the field of politics and to a lesser degree baseball on the line on TV this weekend by plumping for a Seattle/New England Superbowl on February 3rd. That prediction is no longer an option following Seattle's demise in Atlanta and predictably Silver's reputation as a soothsayer is seen as tarnished in some quarters because his prediction was wrong. However, all any predictive model can do is produce estimates of how likely an event is to happen. An event may be predicted to happen 60% of the time, but that also means it won't happen 40% of the time. 40% is the minority event, but it is still going to happen fairly regularly.

A couple of statistically based models made Seattle narrow favourites in Atlanta, (I made them 52% favourites), but the numbers were close enough to call the game a coin toss. So if we called heads and saw a tail, we wouldn't be too surprised. Disappointed maybe, but not surprised. That's pretty much what occurred in Atlanta, a single trial on a coin flipped failed to go that extra half revolution in the last 25 seconds. A failed prediction on the day, but only time and numerous repeats of similar predictions can validate the model from which the single prediction originated.

Silver himself tweeted a version of Billy Beane's famous quote from Moneyball, "my sh*t doesn't work in the playoffs" at the end of the regular season. The truth is that no one's sh*t works that well in small sample sizes, which is what the playoffs are. Ten games and a (usually) neutral venue, inter conference showdown is all there is and random luck and a sudden death format is going to have a huge influence on individual games and the final destination of the Vince Lombardi Trophy.

Americans Can't Spell Harbour

Last night's results mean that the Superbowl will be between the Jim Harbaugh coached San Francisco 49ers from the NFC and the John Harbaugh coached Baltimore Ravens from the AFC. What a dream for the media. And both are Catholics. What are the odds on that? As Yahoo Sports says:

Jim and John Harbaugh will coach against each other in the Super Bowl after San Francisco beat Atlanta and Baltimore beat New England in the NFL conference championship games. And if you thought the Harbaugh vs. Harbaugh story was given a lot of ink for a regular season game last season, just wait for this two-week lead up to the Super Bowl. 

Legendary

While legendary is probably one of the most overused words in the English language, occasionally its use is appropriate. Writing about his Tipstertable which I mentioned yesterday, Webbo of Betfair Banter writes:

I’ve got a few others involved already and the Legendary Cassini from GreenAllOver has also expressed an interest!

My XX draws, or related markets on those selections, are the majority of my football betting, but I do occasionally find a value bet such as Crystal Palace v Ipswich Town at evens (5-0), and last weeks top value bet was Sunderland v West ham United at 2.58 (a 24% edge, won 3-0) and yesterday's was Swansea City v Stoke City, a game I had Swansea priced at 1.68 to win, (Stoke are shipping a lot of goals recently, while Swansea can score at home) yet was matched at 2.28, 35% edge. Swansea won 3-1. I seem to need a 20%+ edge though, because the next three EPL value bets all in the 15% to 18% range were West Ham United (drew with QPR),  Newcastle (lost to Reading), and West Bromwich Albion (drew with Aston Villa).

There was just the one XX Classic selection this week, but Brest went down by a single goal at home to St Etienne, At least it was a winner on the HT00 and Unders markets, so I wasn't too disappointed, although Football Elite probably were, as Brest (DNB) were a recommended bet.

A fuller write up after the weekend is wrapped up as usual, but the Extended draws stopped their losing run at 21. It could have been only 20 but for a 90th minute Marseille goal, but Getafe and Sevilla drew 1-1 to my immense relief. I've written before that with draw betting, these kinds of run are guaranteed, but an example of how quickly fortunes can change can be seen with Ian Erskine's Lay The Draw selections. Backing the draw, he started off with one 'winner' in 24, including a run of 19, at which point we were -19.70 points, -82% ROI. since then we have had 16 selections, with 10 ending as draws, and this entry is now up 9.51 points with an ROI of 24% and currently sits in third place in the FTL table.

A rarity these days, but one post on the Betfair Forum caught my eye the other day. A Nigelpm1 wrote:

For my money there are two types of gamblers.

1) The ones who only bet with the high street bookies in their shops - that market will probably always be there.

2) The ones (like us) who bet at the best price on-line with no affection towards any particularly bookie.

I think there's probably a third group which is those who bet on line, but who have a favourite bookmaker. Tech savvy enough to be able to have the convenience of betting on-line, but too lazy or not bet-savvy enough to look for the best prices all the time.

How true is the statement that the High Street bookies market will always be there? The number is certainly increasing, especially in areas of poverty and high unemployment, and unless there are some regulatory changes, the big bookmaking corporations will continue to open up new casinos, I mean betting shops. It's unfortunate, but there will always be those drawn to FOBTs and who want to bet with no regard or understanding of value.

Type 2 is probably a small percentage, given that bookmakers soon restrict or close winning accounts, but the subset of this group, those who understand value but who have few options other than exchanges or a few bookmaker accounts, is probably larger. Most people reading this probably fall into this category.

The thread was actually about Betfair restricting people on their Fixed Odds product, and their true bookmaking colours show through here. Unless they can immediately lay your bet off, i.e. match it with someone else on the opposite side, Betfair's appetite for risk is minimal.

Two Conference Championship matches from the NFL today, the NFC's Atlanta Falcons v San Francisco 49ers followed by the AFC's New England Patriots v Baltimore Ravens. It will be hard to match the excitement of last weekend's games, but play-off games rarely go without some kind of drama. Favourites (i.e. Patriots and 49ers) have the edge in these Conference Championship games, beating the spread 57% of the time over the last 25 years.