I mentioned in a recent post that I would have more on the English Premier League (EPL) Draw, and as a man of my word, here it is.
Thanks to Joseph Buchdahl’s Football-Data.co.uk website, it is
possible to look at prices for matches going back to the 2000-01 season, i.e.
we have 18 full seasons of price data. Unfortunately back in the olden days, the over-rounds were a lot higher than they are since Pinnacle arrived on the scene, so making comparisons of earlier seasons with more recent ones isn't fair.
Many readers will be familiar with David Sumpter's book “Soccermatics: Mathematical Adventures in the Beautiful Game” and in other articles he has promoted the idea that backing the Draw in Big 6 games is a profitable strategy:
When two big-six teams meet then all the focus is on one of the two teams winning and the draw is forgotten by the punters and the bookies. These circumstances are somewhat unique to the Premier League, because there are so many ‘just for fun’ gamblers involved in the market and six teams with a worldwide following.There hasn't always been a Big 6 of course. The EPL began competition with the 1992-93 season, and is now in its 27th season.
In the early seasons, Manchester United dominated, winning four of the first five Championships, before Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool joined United in forming a ‘Big 4’.
Of the twelve seasons from 1997 to 2009, these four teams filled the top four places six times, with three of the four in the top four the other six seasons.
The nine seasons since have seen the emergence of a Big 6, with Manchester City and Tottenham Hotspur being added. These six have taken the top six spots in four of those seasons, five of the top six four times, and only in 2015-16 were two of the six displaced, famously by Leicester City who won the Championship, and less famously by Southampton who finished sixth.
As I've written before, there are many matches where backing the Draw is akin to throwing your money away.
It turns out that when two well-matched teams meet (i.e. the probability of a home win is only slightly bigger than the probability of away win) then draws are under-priced. When matches are skewed so there is a strong a favourite (i.e. the probability of one team or the other winning is larger than the other) then draws are over-priced.While the definition of well-matched teams is vague, there are a couple of measures I like to use. One is to exclude any matches where a team has a 'true' win probability greater than 0.5, and where the 'true' probability of the Draw is 0.25 or less.
Using these filters, backing the Draw in 'Big' matches from 2000 would have resulted in this:
Expanding this criteria to include all EPL matches, and the profit is 137.67 points from 1,431 matches, an ROI of 9.6%.
ROIs around 10% over 18 years should catch everyone's attention.
2 comments:
Hi Cassini,
Long time reader here, have been away of the markets for a long time but I would now like to get my feet wet again a bit as time permits..
You stopped selling your Back the Draw tips didn't you? Have any other tip system going, or are you even considering it?
Thanks for digging up these data. Are the ROIs calculated vs Pinnacle's closing odds?
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