Monday 11 April 2011

Replies to a couple of comments

I had two interesting comments over the weekend regarding the results on here. As I said in my earlier post today, I've deleted the comments by accident as they were in amongst some moronic anonymous comments but I did read both comments!

The first comment asked me what the returns would have been this season had I just suggested backing every team that is value. I've graphed the P&L over the season for the traditional H/A betting, DNB bets and DC bets.



There have been 672 games that had a team that is described as value. By value, I mean where the odds at the time of betting are greater than the % chance that they will win the game according to my ratings.

The profit for traditional H/A betting is 15pts. This gives a return on investment of 2.2%.

The profit for DNB betting is 33pts. This gives a return on investment of 4.9%.

DC betting is break-even.

Clearly, these results are slightly disappointing at face value but please remember that this includes all value bets. Hence, the purpose is to simply create a profit or at least, break-even. As soon as I start to filter these bets, I can increase the profits substantially by only playing the higher value bets.

If I was being judged on this measure this season, I would have had a filter in place to only pick out value bets once a set criteria has been met. Hence, I would drop all low value bets (system 6 and system 21) and only play higher value bets as it would reduce the number of bets and increase the returns. I'm not being judged on my ratings though, I'm being judged on my systems and therefore, I don't need to worry too much about this aspect.

All the above shows is that you can't just back every team that appears as value, regardless of how much value you think is achieved by backing the team. If you have a team with 50% value appearing on system 8 and you have a team with 10% value appearing on system 6, then clearly, you would want system 8 bets to be better than system 6! Hence, that's what the systems do.

The other thing worth considering is the shape of the graph. H/A betting was above DNB until Christmas (roughly 400 bets) but since then, DNB has kept going up and H/A betting has been in freefall. This is driven by the number of draws that have been appearing in the value bets since Christmas.

In the first half of the season, there were 85 draws in 339 bets. A draw % of 25% which just so happens to be the long-term % for draws in the ratings.

From Christmas, 333 bets and 107 draws. A draw % of 32%. The extra 22 draws or so that you wouldn't expect have eaten away our margin with the ratings after Christmas when backing H/A. If you are covering the draw, as the graph shows, you are still able to make money after Christmas.

Anyway, I hope that answers the question that was posed.

The second comment asked for a breakdown of pts won on each system this season by month. I'll keep it nice and simple and not worry about ROI etc. as it wasn't asked for. The table below has all the info you require by month. I've also shown the cumulative view of the season as it tells the story pretty well I think of how the systems have done this season!

2 comments:

  1. I asked the question to do with the profits per month.have you looked at the profits if you backed the draw instead of what your system say?

    Greg

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  2. Hi Greg.

    That's another intriguing question. I'd be lying if I said I knew the answer but I expect that backing the draw must result in a loss when there is a normal draw % at play. The normal draw % for my systems is 25%, so when this happens, backing the draw must be loss making (3/1 to break-even and the average draw odds aren't as high as this).

    Over the last few months though, I would be willing to bet a fair bit that backing the draw would be good profits. February had the highest % of draws in over 4 seasons, so I'd be interested to know how much profit backing the draw created......

    I'll get back to you in a bit.

    Graeme

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