Swinging Low

No football today, and idle hands make light work for the devil it is said, and sure enough, I placed a fun bet on England to beat France in the Rugby World Cup, despite my knowing better. It will reduce the Premium Charge next week anyway, and rather than being fun, actually made England's elimination even more painful.

At least the International break allowed me to get the numbers up to date, and send out the XX Draw selections well ahead of time. Peter Nordsted's Drawmaster dipped into the lower leagues today and came up blank. I'm not sure why Peter does this. Are there value draw selections in the lower leagues only on International breaks? I think we can safely say that the answer is no, so the question then becomes why would one not include these lower league bets on other weekends too? And why stop at three? Value doesn't stop at three. On any one day, it may stop at zero, or it may stop at 99 (unlikely though). My XX Draw selections might be none one week, 12 the next, although six seems to be the most it comes up with from the 49 matches each round.

I've also been playing with the spreadsheet. One of the problems with the three outcomes is whether it is better to back a value selection, albeit at longer odds, or lay the opponent and get the draw on your side. Initially I decided to back selections up to 3.0, but if the price exceeded this, to lay the opponent. The result at the break was as follows:

If I adjust that parameter to a mere 2.0 (i.e. evens), the situation changes to:

While the really important part is the bottom line, and the ROI increasing, I also like the improved strike rate across the board.

Liverpool have somewhat surprisingly moved ahead of Manchester City into second place in the EPL ratings, albeit by a single point. The top eight are actually the same as they were at the start of the season, except for Chelsea who have have dropped from 2nd to 4th. At the bottom, it's Swansea City, Blackburn Rovers and Sunderland who take up the relegation spots.