Gameweek 9 - October 16th

TOT vs LIV - Home @ 2.4

A bet that makes sense on paper. Obviously we lose an indicator as the managerial change function has been zeroed, with this being Klopps first game, but we go for this because of the 12.7% value on a standard depreciation curve.

CRY vs WHU - Double Chance Draw/WHU @ 1.90

Dont like the bet at all, the last bet against palace at home failed miserably but with 18.4% even depreciating the results (20.2% without..) it cannot be ignored

EVE vs MNU - Double Chance EVE/Draw @ 1.66

Interesting bet and one I am inclined to go with given how unconvincing Man Utd look with Rooney having to play every game regardless of form. Strangely only 8%/10% on a standard/depr respectively but remember - United under Van Gaal have a terrible away record. ( 8 wins since the start of last season)

MCI vs BOU - Home @ 1.33

Apparently 12.2% value. I blame that on lack of sample space...

NEW vs NOR - Away @ 2.87

Normally I would give you a double chance but the odds really aren't good enough and the draw drains about 8% of value in a 12% value bet.

You may have noticed I have actually picked 5 results here. I will be excluding the Everton bet from the simulated results because that is the lowest ranked, but i mention it because that is exactly the type of bet I want the model to pick out. At 9% average value, it is still worth doing.

Fixtures in full:

Tottenham 1-0 Liverpool
Chelsea 2-0 Aston Villa
Crystal Palace 1-1 West Ham
Everton 1-1 Man United (or 1-0 depending on which indicator you use)
Man City 4-0 Bournemouth (note Aguero is out...maybe hold back on this)
Southampton 2-1 Leicester
West Brom 1-1 Sunderland
Watford 0-0 Arsenal (apparently a 54% chance on this happening)
Newcastle 1-2 Norwich
Swansea 1-0 Stoke



Happy Hunting,
Aquitis

Gameweek 8 - October 3rd

Now, you may be wondering where are gameweeks 5,6,7? I apologise. I have been away in Turkey and have had a few job interviews etc. personal life took over. It isnt a disaster however - The four most valuable bets as indicated by the model wont change as long as i dont feed the model the extra information. So I plan on retracing my steps and doing those gameweeks - it means there will be no under/over data as I cant find historic Bet365 odds for those fields but it will not hurt our test.

Now, on to more important things. First weekend of October. Looking down the fixtures I would say that all but one or two look very difficult to call. So who does the model think is looking good for a result this weekend?

CRY vs WBA - Double Chance Draw/WBA @ Evens

Crystal Palace have a formidable team. Genuine quality through the midfield, unpredictable wingers etc. What this bet highlights is an overreaction by the market to back Palace. Lets be honest, they are likely to finish in 8th. What this means is there are a lot of banana skins they will slip over - this is one of them, and at a good price too. Value of the home win is around -23.9% just to give you an idea of what a bet this is. Palace are good - dont lose sight of the fact that this is a team with 7 home wins since the start of last season, and 5 in 13 under Pardew.

CHE vs SOT - Under 2.5 @ 1.95

Hmm. Well it seems fairly logical I suppose. Massive value - model indicates 23.3% in this bet so lets hope for a 0-0 draw.

SUN vs WHU - WHU to win @ 2.4

Sunderland are muck at the moment - Even Rooney has scored against them. On the other hand, West Ham only seem to score by counterattacking, and have real trouble when they have the ball and have a second to think. In any case, 15.4% value so lets home the Hammers do the business.

NOR vs LEI - Over 2.5 @ 1.75

Norwich?! What are THEY doing here? No promoted teams!!! This is, of course, the first time I have included a bet on a promoted team - I think it is time to see them appear, we have 3 or 4 games as a sample and I believe the games Norwich have played to be representative of both the league and the calibre of this opposition (previous opponents CRY, STO, BOU). So, 16.1% value in this bet- lets do it. Comiserations to the under 2.5 goals AST vs STO which misses out to this.

Predictions in full:

CRY 0-0 WBA
AST 0-0 STO
BOU 1-0 WAT
MCI 3-0 NEW
NOR 1-1 LEI (Which contradicts my tips...I know....remember they are value tips)
SUN 0-1 WHU
CHE 1-0 SOT
EVE 1-0 LIV
ARS 1-0 MNU
SWA 1-1 TOT


Have a good weekend guys.

Happy Hunting,

Aquitis

Gameweek 4 - Redemption

Well well well. The model finally pays dividends. And then some.

AST vs SUN - Draw/Away - Result 2-2
CHE vs CRY - Draw/Away - Result 1-2
LIV vs WHU - Draw/Away - Result 0-3
SWA vs MNU - Home/Draw - Result 2-1

A perfect weekend. It makes up for all previous losses and then some. The four tips accumulated at a grand total of 40/1 - if the model has just one perfect weekend a season, you'll expect to break even. The fact that this has happened in gameweek 4 fills me with optimism.

LSP Bank £104.96
Kellys Adaptation Bank £107.38

Happy Hunting,

Aquitis

Lesson 1 - Overround

In my first lesson in betting using a model, I'm going to explain some of the mechanics of how a bookmaker makes money. I talk about the "overround" quite a lot in my posts so I will explain this in a bit of detail.

What is Overround?
Overround is essentially how a bookmaker makes money. A bigger overround means more money for a bookmaker, and conversely less money for the punters. Overround is represented by a % number.

So how do you calculate your overround?

Liverpool @ 1.36
Draw @ 5.5
West Ham @ 9

First take your odds above, and convert these into percentages. for example, to convert home win, (1/1.36) = 73.5%

Liverpool 73.5%
Draw 18.2%
West Ham 11.1%

Then add these up. These three percentages add to 102.8%. Why is this important? It means your bookmaker is taking a 2.8% margin on whatever bets are placed (in theory). With a perfectly balanced book, he will make a 2.8% profit.

For example, lets assume those odds are a true reflection of the publics perception of the actual odds of the game. The bookmaker receives £7,352.94 in bets on Liverpool, £1,818.18 in bets on the draw, and £1111.11 in bets on West Ham. The bookmaker has then received £10,282.23 in bets, and will pay out £10,000 no matter who wins. Therefore, the bookmaker is completely neutral to the result and will make a profit of £282.23 irrespective of the winner.

Of course, this is in a perfect world and it doesn't always work out like that. People lump a lot of money on the favourite, teams that are well backed, for example Liverpool, will get bets placed on them no matter what the odds are. It is this irrational behaviour which makes it rational for a bookmaker to price up not based on his beliefs, but on his beliefs of the public's beliefs. This weekend it allows the bookmaker to price up Liverpool to win at 73% chance, when a basic model will tell you their chance is closer to 57%.

In any case, overround is quite important. Here is the overround for a couple of bets from the first game of the season, Manchester United vs Tottenham:

Home-Draw-Away: 102.3%
Over-Under: 105.6%

So what does this mean? It means a home/draw/away bet is the best bet to place for someone betting using a football model. It gives the bookmaker the smallest advantage possible (a perfectly fair game would have an overround of exactly 100%) and means that when we are working with small margins, even if the results we are picking are random, our expected profit is only a 2.3% loss.

So what about other markets?

Double Chance: 106.1%
Both Teams to Score: 108.5%
Goals odd/even: 103.9%
Draw No Bet: 106.7%
Result/Both Teams to Score: 114.6%
Score bet (eg 1-1): 122.6%

What this demonstrates is that generally, the more bets you can place, the higher the typical overround. In a way, overround is similar to the bid/ask spread of a typical financial market. You want this number to be as small as possible. If you plan on betting properly, you need to test the markets you are going to bet on to make sure that your overround is as small as possible - bigger overrounds will erode your profits and make gambling unprofitable in the long run.

Gameweek 4 - August 29th

Its been a funny old season. Here we are, 30 games in and results seem to have defied convention. What do i mean by this? Well, across the 30 games so far we have:

Home Win: 6
Draw: 11
Away Win: 13

A draw rate of 37% at season end is unusually high. We normally see a draw rate between 25% and 34% (ill publish this study another day) with an increasing number of draws as the spread of talent in the league becomes more equal. However in reality this is only approximately 3-4 draws more than we would usually see. However 13 away wins and just 6 home wins is very unusual. This weekend we are actually predicting some home favourites are going to continue this pattern and will see a few top teams struggling for a result.


AST vs SUN - Double Chance Sun/Draw @ 2.01

What im about to show you will save you money. It may not make sense and I will do a future blog post on this to explain further, but for now work with me. The bet we want is Aston Villa not to win (it is -18% on the value meter). The bet we want is therefore double chance.

Do not bet on double chance.

Why not? because it is poor value and is for people who don't understand numbers. Double Chance sunderland/draw is priced currently at 1.9. So lets say we bet £100 on this, to return £190 as long as Villa don't win.

Great. Except it isn't. You've just paid the bookmaker because you are lazy. The draw is 3.5 and the away win is 4.75. If you had bet £54.29 on the draw, and £40 on the away win, you would have the following payout table:

Aston Villa win: Return £0
Draw: Return £190
Sunderland win: Return £190

You have therefore reconstructed your desired bet all for an outlay of £94.29. You have saved yourself £5.71 by not being lazy. Ill explain in another post why this happens in further detail. Of course this is completely irrelevant because Aston Villa will win and we will lose money either way.

CHE vs CPL - Double Chance Draw/CPL @ 3.44

A strange bet has caught my eye. Mourinho's home record is famous (9 years unbeaten at home in a row) but with Chelsea out of form and Palace with a great team it is not difficult to imagine Chelsea losing points. At 3.44 and a value of around 22% there are worse bets to take this weekend.


SWA vs MNU - Double Chance SWA/Draw @ 1.75

Interesting that the model thinks that Chelsea, Man United and Liverpool are massively overvalued this weekend. In any case, this bet doesnt pay anywhere near as well as going against Chelsea and Liverpool (both priced up at 1.36 this weekend) but still indicated as a value bet of around 7%.

LIV vs WHU - Double Chance Draw/WHU @ 3.41

Liverpool are at Home to West Ham and its telling me to do the same bet at 16% (model 57% vs bookmaker 73%). On the face of it this looks a terrible bet. West Ham have been awful, their victory over Arsenal aside, and so i am not going to do this bet. Then I am reminded that I am but a mere monkey standing in the way of this supreme machine's power until it learns how to blog by itself. So we have our bets for this weekend.


Thats it for this week guys. Other value bets include an Everton win against Spurs (7.5%), Over 2.5 goals for the same game (5%), Newcastle Arsenal over 2.5 (8%), Liverpool West Ham under 2.5 for (6.7%), under 2.5 for the Chelsea game (8%), and Under 2.5 for the Villa game (5%).

List in full:

NEW 1-2 ARS
AST 1-1 SUN
BOU 0-1 LEI*
CHE 1-0 CPL
LIV 1-0 WHU (see!!)
MCI 3-1 WAT*
STO 1-0 WBA
TOT 1-1 EVE
SOU 1-2 NOR*
SWA 1-1 MNU


*still not including any promoted teams in anything i publish, or when I tally my perfect scores at various points in the season.

Gameweek 3 - Another Failure

Pretty disappointed yet again and i think we can safely conclude that the model isnt working with 0 profitable weeks out of 3.

MNU vs NEW - Home - result 0-0
While Newcastle were never going to win this these are exactly the sort of games I try to avoid - massive odds on home favourite. In truth United should have won as a goal was wrongly disallowed for offside but this was never worth betting on given Uniteds fixtures this season in the league.

Lei vs TOT - Home - result  1-1
As mentioned, Aquitis was actually spot on, predicting a perfect score of 1-1. The model essentially said Spurs wouldn't win, and i made the same mistake that I made in GW1 with Liverpool/Stoke - only this time it was costly.

WBA vs CHE - Over 2.5 result 2-3
The only winner of the weekend.

ARS vs LIV - Home - result 0-0
How this game ended 0-0 I will never know. Arsenal scored a legitimate goal that was incorrectly given offside (I'm seeing a pattern...)

A quick scan of the predictions in full and I see most games I was a goal off. I'll keep this going but its clear I need more data. The only reason I think these bets are value bets is because bookmakers have more sophisticated models than me.

Happy Hunting

Aquitis

Gameweek 3- August 22nd

After last week's 3 correct scores, I have decided to post score predictions after my four key value bets. I've been doing a lot of thinking about value bets - basically a discrepancy between my model and the bookmakers price - and while value bets may be identified in equilibrium, its quite likely that during parts of the season when there is a lot of ongoing chance (August, January) this may simply be bookmakers having a better model with more information.

Still, my bets for Gameweek 3:

MNU vs NEW - Home @ 1.36
I really do not like this bet. Apparently Man Utd have an 85% chance of success in this game, meaning this bet has a value of roughly 10%. I prefer backing the outsider but there really isnt that much on this week. Interesting this was picked - ill have to keep an eye on how bookmakers look at teams who have had a midweek game in the european cups going forward.

LEI vs TOT - Home @ 2.6
Now HERE is a good bet! Leicester at a massive 2.6 when Aquitis predicts a 50% chance of winning gives a juicy value of 12%. Oddly the most likely score is 1-1 @ 10.2%, though its clear to see the model really doesn't fancy Spurs' chances away. I would normally take a Draw No Bet on this but the value for the draw is pretty poor on this game so we will stick to the home win.

WBA vs CHE - Over 2.5 @ 2.07
I really dont like this bet. I wont elaborate - just think about the respective managers.
I really really dont like this one.


ARS vs LIV - Home @ 1.64
This week has thrown up some very strange suggestions, none of which I particularly like. But as I said, its slim pickings this week- which is why we have this at a pretty mediocre value of 5.4%. Arsenal should have enough about them to see off Liverpool, but then I'd have said the same about West Ham...

Guys, predictions in full

MNU vs NEW 2-0
CPL vs AVL 1-1
LEI vs TOT 1-1 (But if you rebase it from Ranieri's arrival then a 4-2 victory..haha..)
NOR vs STO n/a (with hardly any data the model suggests 0-2)
SUN vs SWA 0-1
WHU vs BOU n/a (apparently a 40% chance of a 0-0...lets give the promoted teams time)
WBA vs CHE 1-2
EVE vs MCI 1-1 (!!!)
WAT vs SOT n/a (0-0 is 100% chance....)
ARS vs LIV 1-0 though 2-0 is preferred in the non time adjusted model.

Happy Hunting!

Aquitis