Explanation of the system numbers....

Before I reply to Toby, I've just had a comment from Ryan asking how much I charge for this! It's the second such comment in 24 hours. Simply, all of this is done free of charge by me this season as it is a trial season and I want to build up some exposure. Even if I charge next season (depends how well this season goes I guess), it would be a minimal fee to help me justify my time posting on here if nothing else! I follow the bets myself and whether I do the work for myself or 50 people, I still need to do the same work. Hence, I haven't given charging people much thought really as I can do without the hassle although my fiance may not agree with this statement!

I know 'free' blogs like this can be abused though by some people and therefore, I would probably cap numbers on my email distribution list to ensure we all got prices and I would possibly move to posting the bets after I release them to others. Whatever happens, my intention is for me to make a profit first and foremost. Anyone else who wants to follow can do so if they wish but I really don't care!

Just so you know, I will be posting up an analysis looking at Draw No Bet betting and Double Chance betting this weekend on here. It's probably worth a read for those that enjoy this type of betting rather than traditional H/A betting.

Onto the reason why I started writing this post. Toby asked a very valid question about the numbering of my systems. Well, he asked 2 questions really but in essence, he asked what has happened to systems 1-5 and systems 11-15. He also asked why I don't have systems like 6-23,7-23,8-23,9-21,9-22 and 9-23. Interestingly, he didn't ask what happened to system 10 and he won't know this but he should have asked what happened to any other systems as I had as I also have systems 24 and 25 too!

I touched on this back on the first day I posted bets as I had a few friends asking me about the numbering of the systems when I sent the email out with the first bets this season. Looking back now, my answer to the question was fairly ambiguous at the time but I can expand on it further now. For info, here's what I wrote back then... http://the-football-analyst.blogspot.com/2010/09/first-system-bets-this-weekend.html

A few people have asked about why the systems are called 6,7,8,9 and not 1,2,3,4. Quite simply, there are other systems on the go and I'm always looking at data for other systems. These systems 6-9 are the ones that performed the best last season and therefore, I have kept the names the same for those following in the TFA forum. Next season, I will probably change the system names but at the moment, I'm sticking with these names.

Clearly, when I started out this season, although I went live with systems 6-10 on day one which covered the top 5 English Leagues and the SPL, I had other systems on the go in the background. The guys in the TFA forum know about these systems but when I started out on this project in January 2010, my intention was to have systems for the top 5 English leagues, all the non-leagues in England, all 4 leagues in Scotland and the top league in Italy, Germany, French and Spain. I would also move into the Scandinavian leagues when I had time to look at that too. :)

Looking back now, I'm sure they will laugh as much as me at the size of the project I was trying to undertake and after a few weeks this season, all the systems tracking these other leagues were consigned to the bin. I might resurrect that project one day and I still think I can do something in the European Leagues especially as my systems had a big edge when I started looking at this in the second half of the 2010 season.

Ultimately, that consigned systems 1-5 to the scrapheap from about the 3rd week of the season even though no bets had taken place. I kept systems 11-15 live for 2 months and tracked the results and although they did manage to break-even, the upkeep of these systems again ensured that they had to be consigned to the bin.

Therefore, I was left with systems 6-10 which concentrated on the top 5 leagues in England and the SPL. At the same time, I also had a different rating algorithm built which was for the same leagues as systems 6-10 but due to the need to build a way to track these bets like I was doing system 6-10, I didn't want to be posting up bets without being able to track the results closely. Hence, for the first few months this season, these systems produced bets in the background and I checked the results each month but I didn't want anyone following these bets (including me!) until I could get the formatting of the results in the same way as I track systems 6-10.

That explains systems 1-5 (dead from very early on), systems 11-15 (dead after a few months) and systems 20-25 (alive in the background and alive on here and fully proofed from the start of November).

So, what happened to systems 10,24 and 25? Well, amazingly, they had no bets! As you will have seen, the higher up the system you go, the less bets you have on the system as it is filtering the bets by the amount of value each bet is perceived to be. This season, no bets had met the criteria for systems 10,24 and 25 and therefore, after a few months, I knocked them on the head and don't even check to see if any bets appear on these systems now. The systems were so selective and would only be throwing up 1 or 2 bets a season I suspect these days, so they weren't practical to follow. In addition, having a system like this is meaningless as you can never tell if it has an edge or not due to the lack of bets.

Well, that only leaves systems 16-20. Where did they appear from? Well, I always had the idea of doing multiple bets based on the single bet selections thrown up. Some of the guys across at the forum weren't too keen on doing lots of single bets each week this season and they were more interested in playing small multiple bets. They asked me to take a look at how this would do and system 16 was born. System 16 is basically a combination of bets appearing on system 8 and system 13 (which is now dead but is used by system 16 when it throws up bets!). After a bit of work, I managed to build systems 17-20 and I had 5 multiple bets based on the single bet systems.

Overall then, I'm left with systems 6-9, systems 16-20 (multiple bet systems) and systems 21-23.

Early on this season, I highlighted the fact that teams that were appearing on the different algorithms (6-9 and 21-23) were having a very high strike rate when they appeared together. Due to the fact I had no time to look at this and hadn't even thought of looking at it before now, I mentioned it in my weekly email and I even mentioned it on here once or twice. Due to the work involved in looking at this and the past performance, I said that if people wanted to follow this, they could do but I would not be able to track the results until after Christmas. http://the-football-analyst.blogspot.com/2010/11/change-of-direction-needed.html

So that was the birth of systems 6-21 et. al.

Why no systems 6-23,7-23,8-23,9-21,9-22 and 9-23 ? Simple, there aren't enough bets. System 23 only has 80 bets a season and if we only start backing teams that appear on system 6 etc. we would be bringing that down to less than 50 bets I suspect. Likewise, system 9 only has 40 bets a season, so combining that with anything else is useless.

Being honest, system 9 on its own is fairly useless I suspect as with so few bets, you can't get an idea of how good the system is and all it takes is a few games to go against you and it could be loss making.

Will I change the names of the systems? I'm not sure. I've grown fond of the systems and I see them as my little pets. I adore system 8, detest system 23, love system 16, hate systems 17-20, love system 8-22 etc. In addition, anyone following this season knows which system they follow and why and therefore, changing the names of the systems would lead to ultimate chaos I suspect. In addition, all my results are based on these system numbers, so I don't fancy changing them all either!

For those that prefer pictures, this diagram is something I have been working to for a long time now but I know it helped many of the guys in the forum following the bets, so I'll post it again on here. It is somewhere on the blog also a wee while back I think.

Any questions, please leave a comment.