The Final Systems

Ok, this could be a long post but it’s been a busy week again for me and I’ll try to squeeze everything into this post.

One thing with working full-time whilst playing this game is that every now and again, with the job that I have, things can get very busy and the 9-5 job suddenly becomes an 8-6 job and sometimes I’m lucky if I can get away for 6pm. Not only that, by the time I leave the office, I’m mentally and physically drained.  I’m fortunate enough in the sense I do have a job I really enjoy and therefore, I don’t really mind the fact that every now and again, it does take over my life for a little time but then it tends to settle down again.

The last couple of weeks have been like this and therefore, I’ve really struggled to do as much with the football systems as I’d have hoped or more correctly, I’ve struggled to do what I needed to do as quickly as I wanted to.  When you get home and settled down at 8pm, it’s difficult to then pull the laptop out and get stuck into this stuff, especially when my wife hasn’t seen me all day and I can barely keep my eyes open past 10pm as a result of the day at work!

Anyway, I managed to get some time last night as my other half was out and I’ve finished pulling together the results for all the new systems. I’ve also been tidying up the results across at the website etc. and the only results left to add are these for the new systems I discuss below. Hopefully I can get this done on Monday and that’s the end of the system building and results updating and I can start working towards next season.

One thing that I hope has come across this Summer is the amount of work that has gone into reviewing last season and setting up new systems for next season.  It’s hard to explain the amount of work that goes into building systems and doing what I do but let’s just say it’s a lot of work. As well as building the systems, I also need to put a process in place to enable me to update the ratings after every game next season and given the fact I’ve increased the number of leagues and systems by a fair bit (twice as many systems next season), it’s a logistical nightmare. 

I know I’ve taken on a lot for next season but I’m hoping the time and effort invested this Summer will shine through next season and I’m trying to put something in place that can make myself and everyone following a decent return for the next few seasons.  Hence, if I was in this for the short-term, I’m not sure it would be worth my time to do what I’ve done this Summer and building more systems for more leagues but as I’ve said previously, the intention was always to work to a 3 year plan and then take stock of where I’m at. This is the 3^rd season and after this season, I’ll stand back and assess where I’m at and decide whether the project has been worthwhile and what the future holds.  A lot depends on how this season goes I think but we’ll see what happens.

OK, so I’ve finally completed the final systems.  It has taken me slightly longer than I hoped but I hadn’t anticipated so many bets would be thrown up from the new set of ratings and more importantly, I didn’t expect the results to look as they have done!  Hence, I had to go back to the beginning, check the system building process and ensure I’d not done anything stupid at any point. Thankfully, I didn’t find anything wrong but as you’ll see below, the results are a little bewildering to say the least!

Before I share the results, it isn’t my intention to review all the systems individually on the blog. I’ve already reviewed systems 31-33 as they were live last season and all I’ve done now is create systems 41 & 42 using the same methodology as I used on systems 31-33.  The results for systems 41 and 42 aren’t great if I’m honest and they don’t look as good as systems 31-33 looked before they went live. 

Of course, the purpose of having these two other systems was to create a set of combined systems using the DNB rating methodology applied to these systems.  I guess deep down, I hoped that the returns from the combined systems could rival the results we’ve seen on the UK combined systems 6-21 to 8-22 and also the backtested results I’ve seen on the new European systems.  Unfortunately, this hasn't happened and the results are difficult to interpret if I’m perfectly honest.

Without further ado, here’s the results of all systems using the DNB (AH0) methodology:

It’s hard to get overexcited by the results of these systems. I should really place more emphasis on the AH0 returns since the point of the systems is to maximise these returns but as soon as you look at last season’s results, you can see the results are disappointing. 

The first observation is clearly the number of bets on systems 41 and 42. There are a helluva lot of bets! It wasn’t really my intention to build these systems with such a higher number of bets but I was struggling to reduce the bet number without having to interfere with the ratings and I never do this as it would lead to backfitting to some extent and I avoid this at all costs.

Interestingly, even though there are a lot of bets on 41 and 42, when you cross refer them with 31-33, the bet number drops significantly. Hence, 41 and 42 look totally different to systems 31-33 in terms of the type of bets thrown up.  One significant difference I can point out is that I’ve allowed more shorter priced Aways to creep onto systems 41 and 42.  I’d picked up on this last season but when I was building the UK systems previously, I’d struggled to find an edge on shorter priced aways. I think there seems to be an edge at AH0 with these bets in the sense that not many lose even though too many draw. Hence, I think if covering the draw, you can actually do OK with shorter priced aways. 

This of course means you can never have these on the combined systems as systems 31-33 won’t have these shorter priced aways, so there’s a key difference between both sets of systems. 

One thing that stands out from the combined systems last season is just the fact that many of the big priced away bets finished in a draw. You can see this clearly if you look at the returns of backing the combined systems outright as against using AH0.5.  Hence, although 4 of the 6 combined systems lost last season, all 6 did OK if using AH0.5.

Basically, my advice to everyone for next season who is following the service is to ignore these new DNB systems until we see some live results. Although I’ve gone through every system and given them a target ROI and ROC, I’m not sure I’d really buy into them.  In addition, I’m giving targets for backing outright when these systems were only ever meant to be used for AH0 purposes, so I’d suggest we all keep this in mind when considering the results in future.

Similar to what I’ve done with all the other systems this Summer, I’ve gone through and picked out the number of bets, what sort of betting bank we’d need, what the target return is and so on for these new systems.   Here are the results summarised:

As you can see, I’ve sort of settled on a maximum ROI of 10% for these systems and if I’m honest, the target ROC figures don’t excite me too much, so it’s hard to think these systems are worth following next season.  They seem like a lot of work for not a lot of return!

Right, I’ll leave this post there. That’s me done with the system building and reviewing all the new systems for next season.  I’ll show the performance summary table on the next post which will include all systems for the first time.