August Wrap, Draws All Over

Another month in the books, with August seeing the return of football in Europe after an off-season break that seems to get shorter each year. 

In the US, the MLB season starts getting to the interesting stage, with the regular season concluding before the end of September, and the playoffs starting on October 1st. 

As readers will be aware, I've been keeping my powder dry in this league while the markets adjust to the significant rules changes in recent seasons, but I did dip my toes into the water in the Sacred Manuscript with a couple of systems. 

Or I tried to, but the river ran dry for one of them! 

In August, the first system generated the grand total of zero selections which was a little disappointing but the ROIs for the season remain at 27.6% when betting Straight Up, and 9.4% when betting on the Run Line. 

The Totals System didn't exactly generate a huge number of bets either, but 7 of the 11 were winners with one push, and for the season overall the record of 53-34-2 means a 61% strike rate.

The College Football season also got underway, and while this is probably not one of the most followed systems by subscribers, the basic systems combined for an 8-6 winning record, with the more selective ahead 6-2 after Week One.

The NFL season starts this week with a couple of Thursday Night games to kick things off. Autumn is almost here.

In the CFL (Canadian Football League) the newly added system went 3-3 for a small loss after we lost the Under/Over on one game by 1/2 point. It happens. 

Back to round-ball football and for the second consecutive year, we were off to a winning start with the Community Shield ending as a Draw at an 'official' 3.90. 

I was matched at 4.8 earlier in the day, and whether the steaming was due to Sacred Manuscript subscribers investing their life savings (sincerely hope this was not the case) or a reaction to the line-ups, I'm not quite sure, but at 4.8 it seemed there was only one direction the odds would move.

The updated numbers for the Community Shield matches and the totals including FA Cup and League Cup Finals are now:

As for the domestic leagues, I've received some ideas from a couple of subscribers, specifically around the EPL Draw System.

One subscriber wrote:

...but I find it hard to see the logic of backing draws in say the Premier League but not also the Championship, or La Liga 2 but not La Liga 1.

I fully agree. In a perfect world, the rationale for a Draw System in a top league should apply across other similar tier leagues as well as further down the league even if results weaken, as suggested in the examples above, but this wasn't the case when I last looked at other leagues in some detail maybe five or more years ago. 

Back then, I put it down to each league and division having it's own characteristics, and with other priorities in life, left it at that. In hindsight, this might have been a mistake. 

The first versions of the Sacred Manuscript contained the EPL Draw System, but then it was mentioned to me about this time two years ago that Spain's Segunda División showed similar results, and with a slightly different set of parameters, I verified this and added it to the Sacred Manuscript. It has been up by 26.46 units since then.

More recently, our old friend Dr Tsouts mentioned similar findings in the Greek Super League while very recently, in the past few days to be precise, another subscriber told me that he used the idea, again with the parameters modified, with success in La Liga and the Chinese Super League. 

My knowledge of Chinese football was non-existent, that of Greek football not much more, but data is data so I took a look and as a result the Greek and Chinese Leagues with the appropriate selection criteria are now added to the Sacred Manuscript - and before anyone complains about not receiving their update with the latter, the league is on a break for a couple of weeks so I'll be combining it with a few other updates - and am now turning my attention to La Liga.

I'm not giving too much away here, since it's been discussed on the blog previously, but in the EPL, in games between two closely matched teams, e.g. within 10% of each other, the Draw represents value. 

Since 2001, right up to this past weekend, there have been 640 such matches, 199 winners and a profit of 38.87 units or an ROI of 6.1%. 

The term "within 10%" actually means any match within a range of +10% (a positive number for matches where the Home team is the favourite) to -10% (a negative number for matches where the Away team is favourite). 

The mid-point here happens to be zero, and in a perfect market this is perhaps where you would expect it to be, but all markets are different. 

I think I've mentioned here before that results did vary depending on whether we were on the plus or minus side, but I clearly drifted off to another idea and never followed up. 

It summary, it appears that the basic rationale for the "close" idea carries over from the EPL to at least some of these other leagues, but there is a difference in both what "close" actually means, and in where the mid-point for the range should be. 

Of course if zero doesn't fall within the optimal range, I'd need an alternative term.  

With my new employment status, or lack thereof, and thus a little more free time, I plan to revisit these other big leagues and see if the Championship and La Liga are viable leagues too. 

La Liga certainly seems to be. Here are the preliminary results:

Obviously the 2024-25 numbers aren't anything to get excited about yet, and the 5 years and 10 years totals exclude them, but these are solid results. 

On a monthly basis, the profits do dry up a little in the first quarter of the calendar year, but overall they look pretty consistent. 

I'm pretty sure that subscribers can expect another update with this league included, and possibly others,  

The Draw isn't everyone's cup of tea, which is why there is value to be found. 

The Sacred Manuscript is now up to 100 pages, and with new systems added at the suggestion of subscribers now making it more than 50 long-term profitable systems, is now ridiculously underpriced. 

We now have systems for the College Basketball end of season Tournaments, an NFL System based on Bye weeks, NBA Systems based on travel and Time Zones, as well as the previously mentioned Greek Super League and Chinese Super League Draw systems. And soon, La Liga and who knows what other leagues from around the globe.