A Fine Line

A frustrating opening selection for the XX Draw selections today, with a 90+1' goal taking away winners on both the draw (which traded as low as 1.03) and the Unders. It seems like this happens a lot, but in fact this is only the second 90' goal of 2012, and the fifth of the season from 117 games. The second selection finished 1-0 to Novara, a win for the Under, but a loss of 2.2 points on the weekend. No point crying over spilt milk, but it's a fine line between a decent win and an indecent loss!

Opposing Ian Erskine has meant a good weekend as his Lay The Draw selections included two perfect 0-0s (Stuttgart v Kaiserslautern and Borussia Moenchengladbach v Freiburg) and a 2-2 draw between Valencia and Mallorca, a set of results that sees these selections move to within a whisker of the top of the Friendly Tipster Table. What followers of the Lay The Draw thought of two 0-0 results on consecutive days, one can only imagine. It would be interesting to know whether backing the Overs on these selections is profitable, as logic suggests should be the case. If anyone has this data, it would be interesting to see.

Football Elite is in fine form right now, with six winners from the last eight selections since last weekend, and moves up to third with an ROI now back in double figures.

Geoff's Draws slip from second to fifth after finding no winners from eight selections this weekend, but still in profit overall. You may recall that just a week ago, he had five winners from eight.

Peter Nordsted's Drawmaster was another victim of a 90' goal, as Aston Villa left it late to beat Fulham, and these selections drop into the red just below Mark J's selections, for which there were none this week.

There was one Value Under tweeted on Friday, Chievo Verona v Internazionale, which was a winner at 0-2, although both goals came late to make it a slightly tense finish.

The full table is shown here (commission not included):

There were a couple of comments on my last post questioning what was meant by "being 75% certain of an even money shot". Webbo wrote that

The shorter the odds the less likely the selection is to have value long term. It's so much easier to price up clear favourites and you will make more money backing the even money shot but the 1/5 shot will have less variance.

I did some calculations recently and the price that shows the most value based on odds alone in English football are selections around the 1.9 mark.

I guess it all depends on your style of betting and stakes etc. If I was a big stakes player like this John Wilson geezer I would prefer to go for the 1/5 shots. The ROI would be less but so would the variance and betting at such huge amounts you only need a very small edge to make a lot of money.

I remember Matt from Football Elite gracing the comments on this blog a couple of years ago on this subject, saying how hard he found it to find value bets at odds-on. Big Al concurs, writing:

Would have thought it's pretty obvious to anyone what he's trying to get at to be honest. More fun to mock though I suppose.

Anyway, and there are different ways of looking at this, I don't often think there's much value in, say, 1.0x shots. As someone who looks for 5% value minimum on any bet, simple maths dictates it's not easy to find sufficient value for me at those prices. Perhaps other people work out value differently though.

From the two comments, I am guessing that the understanding is that the original blogger was comparing a selection available at even money (2.0) where the calculated probability is 75% (1.33) with a selection available at 1/5 (1.2) where the calculated probability is 99% (1.01) and questioning which bet offered the better value. If this is the case, then indeed, as the comments from BigAl and Webbo imply, the better value bet is the 75% shot available at evens - by some distance. What the "conundrum" is, I'm not sure - it's mathematics.