Confidence is ebbing away slowly.....

Having been in this exact position 12 months ago, I always wondered what I’d be like if I saw the same things happening again. After last night, I think I’m pretty safe to say that my bottle is starting to go a little bit and the confidence in the systems is sinking fast. Of course, there are people reading this who will be thinking it’s a massive overreaction to a poor run of results and if you analyse things, it could easily have been better than it has turned out recently but if I’m honest, not sure much of this matters to me. At the end of the day, you need to have confidence in what you are doing and at the moment, based on my experiences from last season, my confidence is declining pretty quickly.

It’s the one topic I’ve discussed most on the blog since its inception and I actually covered it in depth at the start of January in this post, so I’m not going to go into depth about last season again. http://the-football-analyst.blogspot.com/2012/01/elephant-in-room.html

The question is, what do I do about it? As mentioned before on the blog, two of the guys following from last season changed tact for the second half of this season. One person stopped betting on the systems completely and is waiting for September before getting involved again and someone else switched to AH betting on all Aways. I dropped the AH switcher a quick email last night to see how he’s doing and he said things are still going pretty smoothly and he’s really happy he made that decision.

Deep down, I really hope these two guys regret their decision big time (I know they won’t mind me saying that!) and I hope they miss out on a lot of profits in the second half of the season. If this happens, I don’t actually think they’ll mind too much as they were able to justify their decision to themselves through the fact they lost a lot of money in the second half of last season.

I suspect out of everyone who followed the systems last season, I lost the most money in the second half of the season though and therefore, I’m possibly scarred the most out of everyone following the systems. Therefore, the question I really need to ask myself is, how would I feel if that happened again to me?

Of course, none of us know what will happen between now and the season end and there is no guarantee that the past represents a good approximation for this season but at the moment, it’s all I have to go on.

I’ll give it some thought and decide what I do from next month. I may well decide to stop following the systems myself which would feel like a bit of a cop out and a waste of doing all the work but having lost nearly 5 figures last season (which was nearly all the profits from the first half of the season!), I don’t fancy taking a similar hit this year!

By stopping, I sort of put myself into a no lose situation. If the systems crash and burn again, I save myself some money. If the systems go on and pick up again and do well, others continue to make money and will be happy to subscribe to get the bets next season. Hence, I can diversify the risk. If I continue betting and lose £5k+ and people lose money and don’t subscribe, then I’ve done a lot of work and lost a lot of money for nothing.

Anyway, that’s for me to ponder between now and next month. I’ll follow the next couple of sets of bets and then decide what to do.

Onto last night. After 10 minutes last night, the 3 biggest price teams were all 1-0 up and I hoped things were about to turn. Unfortunately, all 3 went on to lose 2-1!

I don’t doubt that my ratings are still finding value bets but for whatever reason, at some point in the season, teams who need to win at home manage to pull out the win (even though they are underpriced!) and ultimately, it hurts my systems’ performance. The 3 away sides last night all outperformed their odds I think and gave the favourites a run for their money but at the end of the day, the favourites needed the win to stay in the hunt for promotion whereas the mid table teams didn’t really need the win and more often than not, I think this psychological aspect buggers up my value ratings in the second half of the season!

Algorithm one had 9 bets, 3 winners, 1 draw and 5 losers. A loss of 1.95pts for H/A betting and a loss of 2.95pts for DNB.

Algorithm two had 8 bets, 2 winners, 1 draw and 5 losers. A loss of 4.05pts for H/A betting and a loss of 4.18pts for DNB.

Algorithm three had 9 bets, 3 winners, 1 draw and 5 losers. A profit of 0.21pts for H/A betting and a loss of 1.37pts for DNB.

The established systems lost 15.05pts for H/A betting and lost 11.30pts for DNB.

The newer systems lost 11.64pts for H/A betting and lost 15.30pts for DNB.

Another poor night I’m afraid. Looking quickly, since Jan 1st, there have 12 betting days and only 3 of these have been profitable for the systems. 75% of the betting days have been loss making! That probably explains why I’m starting to worry but hopefully things will turn soon!

I’ll post the weekend bets on the blog on Friday at 6pm.