FTL 2013-14 Wrap

It's over. Not Green All Over by any means, but the 2013-14 Friendly Tipster League is at an end.

And the winner is... Cassini Value Selections, with a profit of 24.77 points and a 20.47% ROI. No money though (it's considered poor form to enter and win your own competition) so the money goes elsewhere.

As many as 23 entries joined the party, with a prize fund of £500 to be had, as well as a £25 bonus for anyone finishing ahead of  a very confident The Football Analyst.

With The Football Analyst (Graeme) finishing ninth, five qualifying entries managed to do just that, Skeeve, Webbo, Fedslam and my own Bundeslayga and XX Under selections.

The pot prize money goes to:

1. Skeeve (£250) 
2. Webbo (£125)
3. Fedslam (£75)
4. Bundeslayga (£50)

In a moment of madness back in the Summer, I donated £50 to the pot to get the ball rolling, so it's nice to get it back!

Graeme - when you read this,  £125 via PayPal to calciocassini at aol.com would be in order, and I shall then redistribute the funds to the other winners.

Other than messing up Jamie A's numbers several weeks in a row, everything went pretty smoothly considering the total number of bets was close to 6,000! Unfortunately, the number of winning bets was quite a bit short of that, at just over 2,000 but the more relevant number is that combined, the entries lost 381.22 points. Only 7 of the 22 entries present at the end were in profit.

Here are the profitable entries with no positional changes:

Only the Cassini Value Selections and XX Draws were in action on the final weekend, although both wish there was a release clause excusing them from making end-of-term selections as both made losses.

The lower two-thirds of the table looks like this:

Football Elite had one final selection, which lost, and Jamie A dropped from 17th to 18th with a poor final weekend. Rubicon had one selection, a lay of Barcelona, and was the only profitable entry. Down 60 points in January, Neil could easily have walked away, but he stayed in there and kept me busy with 770 entries over the season and deserves some credit for staying the course, as do other Amateurs who found themselves off the pace with no real chance of cashing in. Three entries fell by the wayside in January (Graham C, Scatter Gun and Murphy's Law) but everyone else hung in to the end.

Had there been one, Rubicon would have won the prize for biggest weekly profit making 30.95 points in one week in May. Unfortunately he followed it with 19 losses and a short winner the following week, such is life.

Just for interest, if we strip out those entries (lower selection totals) who left early to avoid the traffic, and sort by ROI, Neil actually fares a lot better moving up to twelfth. Only Rubicon and Peter Nordsted's Premier Betting have a double digit losing ROI, and my hilarious joke that next season, Peter's service should be renamed Championship Betting, can be repeated. At least Matchbook readers are in the money, being tipped the other side of these bets!

It's been fun. We must do it again some time. I have some ideas to hopefully improve the whole thing, but using one set of prices (Pinnacle Sports) for everyone seems to work quite well so long as everyone understands that these prices, and thus totals, can often be beaten and that the table is for comparative and entertainment purposes only.

One idea is to award prize money to every entry in profit and make it proportional to the size of the profit, so for this year, and assuming all entries qualified for prize money, the returns (last column) would have been:

I'll also only include paid entries next season, and no longer include the 'official' selections from the professionals in the table.

No harm in looking for sponsors for next season now, so if Graeme, Ian Erskine, Skeeve, Football Elite, Premier Betting, SoTDoc or anyone else would like to bid for sponsorship / naming rights, don't be shy.

And if any readers are interested in entering for 2014-15, or have any comments or suggestions, shoot me an email.   calciocassini @ aol.com   or leave a comment.