One of the issues I was always going to have with this weekend’s trial of the FA Cup games was determining whether my ratings had worked over such a small sample of games. It’s easy to look at 15,000 games and say that my ratings have an edge but when they find 16 value bets and you’re trying to judge the success, it’s always going to be difficult.
Before this weekend and before I had calculated the ratings, I knew all of this though and it didn’t faze me too much. I wanted to test two things this weekend really.
Firstly, were my ratings throwing up prices massively out of line with the bookmaker prices in all the games? Secondly, were the ratings throwing up the sort of value bets that are thrown up, week in, week out in league games?
Looking at the results and looking at the ratings again, I think I’m safe to say that the ratings worked as I thought they would. I’ve shown the results below for H/A betting, DNB betting and also Double Chance (DC) betting for each of the games where a team was defined as value.
The ratings found most value with the biggest priced teams (consistent with what happens every week) and there was a general bias towards away sides due to this (same as happens most weeks). There were 4 games thrown up where the selection was priced 7+. 2 losses and 2 draws is a pretty good result overall and a profit would have been made by backing DC on these games.
Overall, from the 16 games, there were only 4 winners but there were also 5 draws. At the odds of the selections, it was always likely to be a really good weekend or a poor one I thought but it wasn’t too bad in the end.
As I said above, it wasn’t about whether the ratings made a profit or loss this weekend. The test was whether they could be used in the FA Cup in future and if I’m honest, I would have to say yes, I don’t see an issue with using my ratings for cup games based on this weekend’s bets. Whether I want to use them is another story though and it is something I need to give more thought to.
The other thing that I wanted to test this weekend was whether there was any point in considering looking at the Under/Over market based on my ratings. Again, based on a sample of 11 bets, it’s impossible to draw any conclusions.
However, there was definitely some promise here I think with a profit made of 3.46pts and a record of 7 wins, 4 losses. This included a last minute goal going against the system.
I think this does give me some food for thought in terms of possibly looking at this in future. It would be a fairly big job to go back and build a selection of systems based on under/over 2.5 goals but the data is all there if I want to do it. I’d need to bring in the odds data for O/U 2.5 goals which is a mammoth task but not impossible. Given where I am in my system building experience, I reckon that from having a quick look, it is maybe a 3-4 week job to do this.
Whether I can justify the time and effort to do this is the question and given where I am with the footie at the moment, the answer to this would be no. However, if this season goes well and I decide to launch some sort of service next season and take this blog to a more professional footing, then I could maybe justify the time and effort to do this. This is a long way off though considering I only really have 11 months worth of actual bets behind me.
Anyway, I hope readers enjoyed the dip into the FA Cup this season. As I say, it does give me food for thought and along with the record from early season games, it does give me some decisions to make for next season I suspect.
I’ll be back later this week with the weekend bets.
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