The Draw As Third Favourite

One, of many, curiosities about this Premier League season is that since 2000, every Home odds-on favourite in a match where the Draw was priced as either the third favourite or joint second favourite, had won. 

This isn't a scenario that shows up too often, so it wasn't anything to get too excited about, but it was interesting nonetheless.

Then along comes 2020-21 and the first two qualifiers of the season fail to win, the second being Manchester City v Liverpool this past Sunday. 

The Draw can of course be either the second or third favourite or it can be joint second favourite and I've written before about how backing the Draw when the Away team is the favourite is more profitable than when the Home team is favourite, but this was in the context of "Close" matches.

Blindly backing the Draw when the Away team is sole favourite will not be profitable, but if you stick to the "Close" matches, backing the Draw is far more profitable in these games than when the Home team is the sole favourite.

Of the seven types of match-odds, assuming nothing untoward is at work as sometimes seen in Italy, the lucrative match types for Draw backers are clear from the chart below. When there are fewer than 50 matches a neutral yellow is used:  

For the A-H-D category, some of you may be interested to know that for the "Toss Up" category, the ROI climbs to 26.65%.

On a day when my wit won me, and WON ME BY A LOT! in the words of Trump, the Internet, a betting related topic came up on my timeline with @MathewForth questioning how a tipster could guarantee three bets a day.

The answer is that he can't.  

It's a clear signal that the tipster has no clue about how betting profitably works because you can't set an arbitrary number of selections within any timeframe. 

You might have several value selections on any given day, or you might have none for several weeks. The result of forcing selections, or stopping on a day after a random number has been reached, is that you either bet at poor (negative value) or you miss out on positive expectancy bets. The three a day idea is nonsense. You bet when you have value, and you don't bet when you don't. The option of not betting should never be underestimated or looked down upon because it falls under the "discipline" heading. 

Meanwhile the Next President market on Betfair has still to be settled, with Biden out to 1.1 now. Presumably this is because Trump is refusing to concede but so far his lawyers have held a press conference outside the Four Seasons Total Landscaping business with the star witness a convicted sex offender who isn't even from Pennsylvania and otherwise have presented no credible evidence at all.

Claims that vans have been seen pulling up outside with people seen filling in ballots for Biden are all ridiculous but it's amazing what some people will believe. When you ask them why this fix didn't also get the Democrats a couple more Senate seats, and why they lost House seats, well - no explanation. The one person so far committing fraud was a Trump supporter who attempted to get a ballot for his dead mother, but was caught by the system and even if, and it will never happen, he gets the result in that state overturned, he still wouldn't have enough Electoral College votes to change the result. 

I've topped up at 1.11 as this is too good to be true. Pretty sure that with half a billion traded, Betfair will not be voiding this market!