One thing I’ve learnt over the last 9 months or so is that trying to narrow down the basic system bets from the ratings I’ve built to find only the strongest bets is fraught with danger. Yeah, it may be the case that you can pinpoint the very strongest bets but in any season, due to the fact there are less bets, it can cause havoc with your P&L due to the smaller number of games.
For anyone who followed my bets last season, they will have seen this phenomenon occur on system 9 and system 23.
System 9 made a profit of 0.4pts from 48 bets last season and system 23 made a loss of 3.5pts from 74 bets.
Systems 8 and 22 included far more weaker bets than systems 9 or 23 and yet, they still created much higher profits than these more selective systems.
Simply, it is down to short-term variance. I don’t think I have any doubts that system 23 was picking better bets than system 22 but at the end of the day, system 22 had 245 bets and system 23 had the 74 bets last season. Hence, over a sample such as 74 bets, even the best system might hit a bad spell and not make a profit over a small sample of bets. This led me to drop system 9 and 23 going forward as they don’t have enough bets.
Clearly, you don’t want to dilute your sample of bets too much as it can create too much extra volatility.
Why am I mentioning this……
Well, system 33 might possibly fall into that same trap this season if we look at the results for this system.
There are a few issues I have with this system now that I look at the results.
Firstly, I don’t like the fact that there are nearly twice the number of bets in season 06/07 compared to season 10/11. The bets per season seem quite variable. What is causing this change of trend?
Secondly, I don’t like the fact the returns are so variable by season. Season 08/09 has a return for DNB of 7.9% and yet, the previous season it had an ROI of 22.8%!
Thirdly, due to the lower volume of bets, the periods of stability in the P&L seem to go on for months! I can find spells of 4-6 months quite regularly where no profit is made or very little profit is made. This isn’t ideal for me as next season, I could make no money until after Christmas or likewise, I might not make any money from November till the season end!
Lastly, the system only seems to have about 100 bets a season now. As discussed above, this is pretty small for a season worth of bets and it wouldn’t take too much bad luck to turn this system from a winning system to a losing system I suspect.
On the flip side though, the returns from system 33 are better than systems 31 and 32 and therefore, I can’t deny that system 33 does seem to contain the highest value bets these new ratings can find. Any system which produces a return of 25% for traditional H/A betting and 15% for DNB returns has the potential to be a goldmine!
Anyway, I’ll leave that there for now.
Thanks for the comments to my last post. Looking back, it sounded like I was a bit desperate to know someone was reading the blog but when you’re as involved in this as I am at the moment, it’s hard to know if anyone is getting this or not. I’m in danger of getting to the stage like some of the mad scientists I see on Dragon’s Den. They create something that could be the best thing that’s ever been invented but no one else understands it and therefore, it is only meaningful to them! I don’t want to get to this stage with my footie modelling………
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