Simple Rules

Always nice to come back from a trip and find more money in your account than when you left. Thanks to a 90' goal for Stade Rennais v Lille on Sunday, this was the case after the XX Draw Selections had another good weekend.

Saturday's Koln v Bayer Leverkusen wasn't quite so good as Sunday's 1-1 in France, but a result of 0-2 meant a winning Under at 2.12 for a small profit. The ROI on the Draws stands at 10.5% from 106 bets, with the Unders at 15.8% - excluding commission. The Unders are on a hot streak right now, with 14 of the last 16 winning. That strike rate won't last of course, but it's a good sign that we are finding matches where we want fewer goals than the market expects.

I'm still catching up with blog posts from the weekend, but I did read a couple mentioning the draw. One was titled Does The "Lay The Draw" Football Trading Strategy still work? with the conclusion that "Lay the draw still works but its not the holy grail!" A little misleading, because if it still works, then it is a Holy Grail. The truth is that it works on some matches, it doesn't work on others, and if you tried it on all matches, you would lose. Laying the draw is no more magical than backing home teams or laying 0-0. If you pick the right matches, any system will be profitable.

There seems to be the idea in football betting that the more complicated you make the system, the better it is. Redimp's blog linked me to this:

Clever score strategy is a low risk method, which covers many different scores in a football match and gives you flexibility of approach to an individual football match. Let's see the method below:

The method:

Choose a football match with a clear favourite with odds about 1.3-1.6

Go to Under 2.5 goals market and make sure the odds are above 2.50

Go to Correct Score market and look for scores 3-0 and 2-1 to the favourite

Choose your stakes to BACK Under 2.5 goals and scores 3-0 and 2-1.

Please note, that for this strategy you don't want a favourite that is in a deadly form. In other words, you don't want them to score 2 or 3 goals very early in the match.

First, a low-risk method means low profits as well. Second, whatever 'flexibility of approach to an individual football match' means, to me the approach detailed is anything BUT flexible.

We're backing the Under (scores of 0-0, 1-0, 0-1, 2-0, 0-2 and 1-1) and then hedging by also backing 3-0 and 2-1 (which makes no sense because the Unders back price includes a lay of the 3-0 and 2-1 scores) but we're 'hoping' that any goals don't come early. "We don't want a favourite that is in deadly form?"

Crikey! Do we want goals or not? I like to know whether a goal is a good thing or not when I'm betting, without having to check my watch and curse my luck that the goal is six minutes early, or be in a state of confusion if a penalty is awarded - do I want it scored, or missed / saved? (Not that my 'wanting' is going to make the slightest difference to the outcome).

Seriously, wouldn't it just be easier to find games where the Under or the Over was value and simply go with that? And if you are finding value on the Unders, you should be finding value on the draw too. And if you notice the Under price moving pre-game but the draw price staying steady, there is value there too.

I believe the Tipster Table is now caught up. The highlight from the weekend is Football Elite's climb back to profit and up to fourth place from seventh after finding three winners from five selections. There is a three-way battle for fourth spot, and currently in third, Geoff's Draws seem to have gone dormant. Modesty prevents me from saying too much about the current top two.