Two Minute Wrap

A busy weekend with no fewer than three selections this weekend for the EPL Draws. The lunch time game on Saturday was Everton v Aston Villa, a "Toss-Up" selection followed later by Brentford v Wolverhampton Wanderers, which was a "Close" selection. Unfortunately neither was a winner, but Sunday's Leicester City v Brighton and Hove Albion game, a second "Toss-Up" selection, was a winner for us.

Results for the season to date:

I did get an email from James Dean, possibly not THE James Dean, saying:

Hi, Can't seem to find where you define what is "close" or a "toss-up" in terms of the draw system. Do you have a post on this?

I'm sure the parameters have been mentioned more than once, but this post is one from last year that discusses them. Basically you compare the win probabilities of the two clubs after stripping out the overround. I use 25% and 10%, but there's nothing set in concrete about these numbers. There's also no need to have two sets of results, but I have higher stakes on the "Toss-Ups".

The knockout stage of the Africa Cup of Nations also got underway on Sunday with two matches and one winner which was Burkina Faso v Gabon. (Probably unrelated, but  reporting today suggests the military in Burkina Faso has seized power and overthrown President Roch Kaboré in a coup. 

More importantly, the draw price was short at an "official" 2.77 although better odds were available on Betfair, but this isn't unusual in this tournament. Two matches in the 2017 version saw the Draw actually start as the favourite which throws my spreadsheet into convulsions. The one selection today was Guinea v Gambia, but this finished 0:1.  

The NFL playoffs continued with the Division Round, and for anyone playing the Small Road 'Dogs, it couldn't have gone any better. Depending on where you source your selections, you may have had three or even four qualifiers, and possibly three winners.

On Saturday, both top seeded (and rested) teams were beaten. First the visiting Cincinnati Bengals won at the Tennessee Titans, followed by the San Francisco 49ers winning at the Green Bay Packers. 

Sunday saw the Los Angeles Rams win in Tampa Bay and dethrone the reigning Superbowl champions. followed by a rather thrilling Buffalo Bills @ Kansas City Chiefs game which saw an amazing final two minutes - which being the NFL took a lot longer than two minutes!

Using Killer Sports, their system qualifiers were the Bengals, Rams and Bills missing out on the 49ers as they were +6. 

Anyone using GimmeTheDog would have had the 49ers, Bengals and Rams which is what I myself had, since the 49ers on Betfair were +5.5 and the Bills were +2. 

Anyway, at worst you should have had both the Rams and the Bengals to guarantee a winning weekend.

Regarding these selections, Dr Tsouts clarified why he had fewer SU selections than handicap selections:

I started with handicaps and later I added the straight wins, this is the reason there are less selections. Medicine career is working fine at the moment but who says no to an extra income if possible?

Unfortunately this weekend's extra income won't make a dent in the losses in the stock market this year. Still five trading days to go, but right now this month ranks 130th out of 133 in percentage terms, and 133rd in actual money, since I started tracking this in 2011. 

Not the start to the year I was hoping for, but to keep things in perspective, I'm back to where I was in October last year, though of course things can always get worse.

To say the markets were interesting today would be an understatement. The S&P 500 dropped 3.99% and hit a low just after noon (ET), before recovering to end the day slightly in profit +0.28%. That'll do nicely. 

$TSLA was down 9.8% at one time, before recovering to just 1.5% down. (The green was intentional to indicate when a loss can be seen as a win!) 

Tomorrow could be interesting.

Back to sports, and Peter emailed me to say:

On 28/02/20 you posted "NBA where Home Favourites of 13 points or more have a 64.5% record ATS since 2013".

After failing to achieve success here I've just done some backtracking and find that since this post the record for these big favs is 24-27-1

I just checked Killer Sports, and the record they have for these is  31-29-3 which isn't great but at least it's a positive ROI though 0.8% isn't too exciting. As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, where and when you make your selections is always going to influence results, which is why two people are never going to have the same results.

The other thing is that Big Home Favourites at this level are fairly rare, as shown by 63 selections in just under two years, and so variance is likely to be a factor.