Stoking The Fire

First item on the agenda is an apology to Peter Nordsted, and his Drawmaster followers, for my publication of this weekend's selections on Saturday morning. I was under the wrong impression that these were published on goal.com and were freely available, but Peter has advised that they are in fact paid for by subscription, so I apologise for this error. As it happened, it wasn't the best of weekends for last week's FTL leaders, with one winner from seven selections.

As Peter, and no doubt others, noticed from my Portfolio Strategy post, a couple of entrants were on Stoke City to win at Manchester City which has seen them soar up the FTL table. The lucky (or shrewd) entries were Fulltimebettingblog and BettingTools.co.uk - basically if your entry was a website name, you had a winner! As Geoff said in his email with the selection:

Stoke to beat Man City (and if that one comes in I’m sure the odds will be long enough to put me top of the table!)

That would certainly have been the case if Geoff hadn't selected Newcastle United to beat Crystal Palace in what many pundits were describing as the battle to join the Super Seven and form an Elite Eight. Zaha's late (first of many in the EPL) goal bought joy to most of us, but despair to not only Geoff, but also a few others as well and none more so than Marc Owen Banks who saw his four team Home win accumulator come unstuck because of this result (although Villa didn't win until Sunday). He had NEWCASTLE, ASTON VILLA, MILLWALL, MK DONS, an acca that "would" have paid 12.54 had it come in.

Marc had a comment on the accumulator versus singles debate:

I will jump in on the accumulator debate here - As the representative of @ValueBankFooty

It is not easy, nor fair on you Cassini, for me to throw over the full Valuebank ratings, which do actually rate every single game in the four English divisions - The time for you to go through them would be ridiculous - This may even work against me as the full ratings are proving profitable - For instance, this weekend, with four games to go, there is a 5pt profit to single point level stakes in backing every prediction!

Valuebank is about every game, but my entry is my interference of those ratings in trying to pick out the wheat from the chaff; so far not so good.

But also, the quench the thirst of a big win for my followers on Twitter I try to pull, Home and away accas, a weekly Jackpot and some other bits and pieces.

Back to the acca, I am indeed one entrant who is making acca predictions, albeit not ridiculous ones - and can guarantee that should one land, I will not shut up acca shop and concentrate on defending a lead (should it gain one) as that is not what I am about,(as anonymous would attest to I am sure!) albeit not against the rules. Really my aim is to prove that you CAN play accas and make use of the value in the prices within to BEAT the increased over-round by actually taking advantage of the value in a price, not once but twice,three or more times by having that value in an acca. Indeed, in my first week, prior to joining FTL, I landed a 30/1 away win treble, which is almost sufficient to keep that particular angle going for most of the season. I was unaware of FTL at that time which might be just as well,as to land one that early could have caused some ruptions!

In fact, anonymous introduced me to the FTL and may even have been thinking that my tactic was good enough to ensure another £50 dropped in the pot to his advantage at the end of the competition (Cheeky anonymous!)

So that's my take on the accas, never ridiculously speculative 3 figure to one odds or anything and something I will employ season long, whilst trying to slowly build from selected valuebank ratings predictions.

It's been fun thus far,and whilst I may have missed the away treble that I will get for the season, watch out, I've still to hit the home win acca yet!

All the best

I must say I am happy that I'm not being asked to sum up profits and losses from 46 games each week, and as mentioned earlier, Marc came within a whisker of hitting the home win acca this weekend. At 12.54, it would still have been a little short of the 17.95 that Stoke City were to win as a single. As one might expect, that result shook things up at the top of the table, and the current FTL looks like this:

Ten entrants have still to make a selection, although I imagine most will be in action after this upcoming international weekend. As always, if you see anything wrong with your numbers, let me know. I found a couple of errors including with my own XX Draws / Unders but I believe everything is now correct.

Although Drawmaster had a disappointing weekend, they are still in profit , as are Draw Picks who opened with two losing weeks, but have found 9 draws from the last 19 for a 13.02 point profit over the last two weeks. Draws are certainly back in the top leagues so far this season - 38 in 118 matches (32.2%) while Home wins are down - a trend I mentioned that I expected to continue in my Betting Expert article here.

Also in that article, and if you haven't read it, there's some interesting things in there, is this table on the rise of away wins in the English top division over the years:

Home wins across the top five leagues are currently below 40% this season. It won't last, and neither will the 50% draw strike rate in Germany! A number of matches that would have previously been official XX Draw Selections have been dropped this season - matches involving newly promoted teams are unofficial mentions until 2015 while selections in France at sub 3.15 are also no longer official selections. Backing the draw at such short prices is not profitable as I may have mentioned before. 

Backing selections at 3.15 and over would have made +8.80 points using Pinnacle Sports' prices, while backing draws priced under 3.15 lost us 13.78 points.

I will also not be including newly promoted teams as official draw selections until the second half of the season, i.e. January 2015. Last season these selections were profitable from January (a whopping 0.82 points) but they lost 26.16 points prior to that. I will still track them and include them each week, but they will not be Official.

Early days still, but omitting newly promoted teams has actually cost 2.71 points this season. 0.91 points on the Draws and 1.80 on the Unders, while omitting Ligue 1 draws priced by Pinnacle at sub 3.15 has saved 5.26 points (5 on the Draws, 0.26 on the Unders).