Blue Moon Rising

Back to the Barcelona v Sevilla match yesterday, and Average Guy from Betfair Trading Challenge wrote earlier today:

Came home from an errand and unbelievably Barca 0 - Sevilla 0 with 15 minutes to go and I laid the draw for €40 @ 2.0.

Stupid me, I had decided there was no issue with the concept but I broke the staking rules(my own), I should have laid three tranches of €10 @ 2.0, 1.5 and 1.25. Max Loss = 17.50 but I blew it of course. By the way Messi missed a 94th minute penalty but a stupid trade is still a stupid trade. I still think the bet was a good one if properly structured but my impulsive behaviour was the undoing of the trade.

I wouldn't agree that the undoing of the trade was impulsive behaviour, but would suggest that the market stayed too short on Barcelona, and that the value was in backing the draw at this stage of the game. Not always the case however. Sometimes for kicks, I look at what games are being recommended for the Football Trading System, aka Lay The Draw, and yesterday included Newcastle United v Wigan Athletic. A little cheeky of me perhaps, but as the price on the draw hit 2.0, I knew that several followers would now be desperately backing the draw to reduce their losses at around this price, which for me made it the perfect time to strike and lay the draw. Newcastle scored in the 81st minute. My point here is that at 2.0 or thereabouts, the draw can be value to back or to lay, and clues as to where the value is can be found if you look around.

The Manchester derby is in-play as I write this, and City lead 1-0, and United are down to 10 men. With the pre game probability (according to the market) of Manchester United scoring no goals 0.18 and City scoring no goals at 0.28, (implying 0-0 should be priced at 19.35) laying the 0-0 draw at 14 seemed good value. Of course it's not that simple, as it fails to account for the mutual dependency on the opponents, a problem that has caused me to put my value spreadsheet on-hold for a while. While it wasn't performing too badly, a system that finds value in laying every short priced favourite, every Over 2.5 in Germany, and every Under in France is not what I am looking for. The basic Poisson distribution doesn't work well for low scores in football, hence the need for a correlation factor, which clearly needs to be a little smarter than what I currently have in place.

City have just won 6-1, which means a second loser for Football Elite this weekend. Two more XX Draw selections in action today, as well as Griff's Blackburn Rovers v Tottenham Hotspur. Green Pullover has decided to join in the fun and compete for the unofficial title of Top Drawpicker, and it is just a coincidence that he picked the weekend of a 9.0 winner to announce his entry. Not so good today though, with a predicted draw at Old Trafford going down in flames by a five goal margin. Results for the season to date updated over at Gold All Over. Pully has Brighton v West Ham as another draw pick tomorrow.