Xpertcentages

I spent much of yesterday afternoon in conference with the Green All Over lawyers discussing options for handling the latest challenge to the prestigious XX Draws Service. As some of you may have noticed, Graeme Dand aka The Football Analyst, has started to publicise a new set of selections targeting the draw.

A cease and desist notice is now on its way to Graeme, not because the new selections are any threat to the long established XX Draws service, but because finding draws is an extremely specialised and potentially treacherous area of football betting that is best left to the Xperts.

On a more serious note, Graeme did have a couple of things in his post that are worth discussing here.

On the topic of his new draw system, he writes:

Am I as confident in the draw systems as I was in the Home/Away systems? Well, no. Simply, I don’t know how easy it is to find an edge on draws and given the fact there aren’t lots of people running algorithms in the UK leagues on draws, my concern is similar to the Euro systems in a way. If it was easy as it appears to back draws in these leagues and make a profit, surely everyone would be doing it?

Everyone isn't doing it for two main reasons - 1) backing the draw is not popular, and 2) it takes a very disciplined kind of investor to handle the inevitable long losing sequences that are inevitable when the average price is around 3.5 implying that you will lose over 70% of your bets. But it's for those reasons that the draw, in my humble opinion, offers value.

I mentioned the favourite-longshot bias yesterday, and in football, when backing at average odds in the typical draw price range, the return is ~87.5%. (By comparison, when backing at less than 1.5 the return is 97.74%).

Average Betting Price

Highlighting the importance of getting the best price available rather than settling for average is the return when achieving that maximum price. Admittedly you are unlikely to get the best price all the time, but it is astonishing to me how many serious imvestors happily settle for say 3.45 rather than ask for 3.5 or 3.55. The differences add up.

Maximum Betting Price

Graeme’s numbers are interesting too. While it may appear hypocritical to suggest that Graeme has too many systems, and that his methods get a little confusing, it’s worth taking a look at his bottom line. While Graeme operates in different leagues to myself, his numbers over five years are very impressive:

A strike rate of almost 36% is quite amazing, although Graeme does make it clear that some results are back-fitted. If he can continue that strike rate and get an average price of 3.42, this time next year we'll be millionaires Rodney.

Looking at the Big Five leagues in Europe over the last five seasons, draws make up 26% of the results.

The key to profitability is not the percentage of winning selections per se, but that the percentage of winning selections exceeds that implied by the odds, which makes it essential to obtain the best price.

If we look at Spain, the league as a whole has a strike rate of just 22.9%, but the XX Draws hit at 31.3%:

I did think that my XX Draws (all three systems combined) strike rate last season of 30.6% was good (158 winners from 517) but perhaps I should focus on the top five leagues in England and the Scottish Premier League?

Due to overlapping, Graeme's number of selections is also significantly higher than mine. After three full seasons, the XX Draws (combined) are hitting at 31.1% with a grand total of just 1,705 selections - full numbers for all leagues:

The 3.21 is of course the required price to break even, excluding costs, commission, taxes and fees, and while that price is, in my opinion, almost always beatable, it does still matter in the long run if you beat it with a 3.45 or a 3.55.

I'm planning to have a breakdown by league and month of last seasons results in the next few days, if time permits, certainly by month end when the early-bird price of £99 for next season's XX Draws service will expire.