FTL Table Update And More

Without further ado, here are the latest standings in the FTL:

With five draws from ten selections, (one of them a fluked 3-3), the XX Extended draws were the big gainers this weekend, moving up from 7th to 2nd, although the Bundesliga draws pulled further clear at the top with two perfect (0-0) draws from three selections. 

Premier Edge had a great weekend with all five selections winning, but lost some of those profits in the midweek games. Nevertheless they are a creditable fourth right now, with Neil not far behind in 6th. 

Peter Nordsted's Drawmaster and Premier Betting were both profitable, and the pro category is now up by 4.71 points, although Football Elite (-5.29 in 21st place) continue to hold this group back. The total loss on the season was significantly reduced from -62.33 last week to -29.76 right now. A couple more weeks like this and we'll have something to shout about. Still a lot of 'in-the-red' entries, but several have quit, so at least they won't get any worse! 

The XX Classic selections went 0 for 2, with the Malaga v Mallorca game one of those matches where the result was undeserved, and offers me a chance to reply to a question on this subject. The result was Malaga 2 Mallorca 3, but Malaga had 23 shots to Mallorca's 5, and both had just three each on target. The corner count was heavily in Malaga's favour too, by 13 to 3. Anyway, the question from Laurie was this:  

Can you tell me how I can add shots:shots on target:goals to my Elo model? I'd be most grateful.

The way I go about it is to convert the shots and shots-on-target numbers into 'goals'. If your research shows you that, on average, Malaga score one goal per ten shots against a team with the rating of Mallorca, then they could be expected, on average, to have scored 2.3 goals on Sunday. If, on average, they score one goal per 5 shots-on-target, then you can convert this number in the same way, e.g. 3 / 5 or 0.6. So you have three numbers for goals actually scored, goals expected from shots, and goals expected from shots-on-target, e.g 2, 2.3 and 0.6 which you can average to give one number. A straight average (mean) would give you 1.63 which is a start, although you might want to weight these. So the score for the home team goes down as 1.63 and if you do the same sums for Mallorca, you might have 1.2 for them, so for Elo purposes the game goes down as a win for Malaga, even though they actually lost. This is not perfect of course, all shots are not equal for example, but for those of us with other things in our lives such as a day job, it's a good starting point.

I don't really want to get dragged into the Webbgate affair, that's between the Sultan and Peter, but Al threw this in:

I do think its a bit harsh on Peter Webb that he didn't word something on his blog exactly how some people might like it, but Webbgate has been an interesting read in an otherwise dry few months!

Peter himself added:

It’s laudable that people are pointing out that you can lose money trading, I think that’s pretty obvious really and have never denied this. But in my experience readers are always more interested in spotting favourable opportunities than finding easy ways to lose. Which is why I post up interesting stuff when it happens. It’s never an attempt to mislead, just educate and make people think.

I trade so much volume through the markets selling another copy of Bet Angel isn’t really going to make any material difference to me, so it’s not fair to imply that I did it for that reason. But I can see how that’s a massive incentive to others. Especially those who sell advice but do little or no actual trading.

It would be nice if somebody would hit the reply button on the actual post itself. I’m happy to enter into dialogue there for benefit of future readers of the post.

Unfortunately, when you try to leave a reply, you get this:

 You must be logged in to post a comment.

which is rather a restriction if you are not a Word Press user!