Example of Bets for Next Season

One thing I have been doing over the past few weeks or so is getting myself prepared for next season. You won't believe the number of spreadsheets I have on the go and I reckon that if I was any good at databases, all of my stuff should be kept in databases as they cope much better with large quantities of data. Unfortunately, my Access skills are nowhere near as good as my Excel skills, so I'm sort of stuck with Excel I'm afraid.

My main issue now is simply the size of the sheets as doing analysis involving pivot tables (which is how all my analysis is done) causes the spreadsheets to be quite large. It's so bad now, when I'm transferring spreadsheets between work and home, I have to send a spreadsheet at a time (even though it is zipped!) which is a farce really.

There was a comment on the blog last night from Chris asking how the bets would look like for next season. Reading between the lines, I'm assuming he means what the betting sheet will look like I post up here with the bets. He mentions if I'll be quoting AH odds along with the odds for the team to win also.

I've discussed this before but I am sticking with two ways to follow these system bets next season. I will monitor the profitability of the bets to backing the selections outright and also backing the selections DNB (covering the draw). I won't look at any other Asian handicaps although I appreciate these type of bets appeal to some people more than others.

Just on the Asian Handicap bets point, one of my other readers Mark sent me some data for AH betting for the leagues where I'm playing in. It was the AH odds for all the games for the last 3 seasons. He asked me to do a little bit of work to look at this and I spent over 4 hours on Saturday night coming up with an analysis of the performance of all my systems using these odds. I've already said to Mark I wouldn't post it on the blog but I did send Mark the analysis. I feel like this blog has enough going on without me introducing AH analysis as trying to intrepret the results is difficult.

A high level summary would be that AH betting is still very profitable with these systems but OVERALL, the returns are lower than just backing the selections to win. There were a lot of different types of AH bets and clearly, some were more profitable than outright betting for some systems but that's more to do with small samples of bets, more than anything else.

I've already looked at double chance betting and shown that it is less profitable than backing the team outright or covering the draw. Hence, there are lots of different ways of following these bets and hopefully we'll make a profit no matter what we choose to follow but all my analysis points to backing the teams to win the game is the most profitable method.

Anyway, back to the comment from Chris.

I've given a bit of thought to how my bets will look next season. It's important that I show the odds on the team to win, the odds if you were covering the draw also and of course, the bookmaker that provided these odds. The below is a template of what I will use next season. (ignore the fact I've only used one game!)

It's all fairly self explanatory I think but I'm sure it won't please everyone. As I've stated before on the blog, all of my analysis on DNB is done using the draw odds and calculating the stakes you'd place on the team to win and draw to calculate the DNB odds. I'm aware that this is likely to be lower than the DNB odds offered by bookmakers but to maximise profits, I don't see an issue with placing 2 bets instead of 1.

Of course, odds move at times and this could cause you to not be perfect and I know people don't like betting £32.38 on games with bookies as it looks like you're trying to do some sort of arbing but if you rounded every bet to the nearest £ and even ignored the odds movements, I doubt it would affect your P&L too much.

Anyway, I think this answers your question Chris. If not, let me know exactly what you were after mate.