Another weekend of football action and a different approach. One of the benefits of tweaking my Elo ratings recently is that I am now able to easily calculate an expected result, or at least an expected margin of victory.
I trialled this last Tuesday on the 12 Championship games, and they were reasonably accurate. The ratings predicted 7 home wins and all 7 resulted in home wins, 3 by the exact margin expected. Of the 5 draws predicted, 1 was a draw, 2 were away wins, and two were home wins.
Of course, this is all meaningless since I didn't record the match odds at kick-off, and all home teams may have been "1.01" shots, but it does show promise with regard to perhaps using the Correct Score markets.
I'm bored with trying to find the value in every game, so from now on I'll just pick the stand-out bets. So for tomorrow's Premier League matches, the best value bets are Aston Villa (2.18) to win at Wolverhampton Wanderers, Burnley (2.54) to win at home to Wigan Athletic, and Tottenham Hotspur (1.46) to beat Stoke City.
In the Championship, Preston North End (2.7) at home to Middlesbrough are the pick along with the draw at 3.6 Coventry City v West Bromwich Albion.
League One: Bristol Rovers (1.84) v Yeovil Town and Exeter City (2.22) v Wycombe Wanderers.
League Two: Shrewsbury Town (2.2) v Aldershot Town.
Warning: Your capital is at risk when you invest in Cassini's tips – you can lose you some or all of your money, so never risk more than you can afford to lose. Always seek personal advice if you are unsure about the suitability of any investment. A full portfolio is available on request. Past performance and forecasts are not a reliable indicator of future results.
About Me
- Cassini
- I have had a life-long interest in sports and after studying Pure Mathematics with Statistics at secondary school, have been fascinated by odds and probability. The first system I came up with was a simple one - back the favourite and double up after a loss until a winner. Simple enough in theory, and I told my Dad about it. Not being a betting man himself, he ran it by some of his colleagues, and came home to tell me that it wouldn’t work because a long losing run would mean that the bank would be empty. Then there was always the possibility that the winner would be returned at odds-on, meaning that the total returns would not match the outlay. Not what a ten year old wants to hear! Only slightly daunted, I then went on a search for the Holy Grail, the secret to riches that I knew was out there somewhere. Finally in 2004 I stumbled across an article about Betting Exchanges and four years later I was able to make a steady profit.
Hi there! Nice betting blog, always interesting.
ReplyDeleteJust one thought regarding one of your previous posts. "When something looks to good to be true, it probably is". I remember you saying the key word here is 'probably' and the level of confidence given to the information you get. Well, something interesting happened in tennis this week. First, the talk of a fixed match, with a young very highly ranked russian playing starace, a far much better player. The russian was being backed, even heavily, trailing all along, and talk araised about another 'davidenko case'. The informator here were the odds. 'Odds dont lie' was the word repeated over and over in the forum. What happened? Starace won and people backing the russian probably felt very stupid. A few days later, the informator this time was a forumite catching live the talk in polish about wozniackis father telling her daughter to forfait the game when she was 5-0 up in the second set, having won the first set. This time the information was really too good to be true, imagine, earning 10 000 euros with a liability of just 100! And this time the informator was correct! I wonder how many people really thought this was 'probable' to happen. I suppose it was worth a go, but thats easy to say afterwards when you know the result. Probably more people gave more credibility to the 'odds not lying' than the 'i speak polish and her father said that'. 'Probably' is really the key word in the betting world, either when trusting the information about games or when choosing value when backing or laying a match. Another last thing about all those people being burned backing low odds. Is it really worth it? Do you really make money? I suppose you must, seeing the amount of money being matched, although, as you said, whats unbelievable sometimes is to see very low odds being matched even at the beginning of some games! The tough part is to see the value when laying those low odds, I suppose thats one the main reasons why youre successful in your betting.
Keep updating the blog.
All the best
Labro
Hi Labro - thanks for your comment. I was planning on writing a post about the Wozniacki game anyway. A very unusual game. I must learn Polish! You mention that finding the value in laying low odds is tricky, but actually in some sports it's not that hard. The best seem to be the American sports, NFL, baseball and NBA where you can often see people trying to back at too short a price. Fear and greed drive the market. "Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful." Not my quote, but very appropriate. Good luck.
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