Ways to play system 7-22

I think one thing that will ultimately separately The Football Analyst service from other more traditional football tipping services in the long-term will be the ability to follow the systems using a range of different ways to suit your own risk aversion.

I know for a fact that system 7/22 is the system that is followed by most subscribers at the moment. It is being followed by many people who are operating a portfolio of systems and for the vast majority of people who are only following a single system, 7/22 is going to be that system.  Of course, I know others are following 6/21 or 7/21 or even just 21 but at the end of the day, everyone can follow the system or systems that suit their own risk aversion but also the number of bets that they feel comfortable with. 

Anyway, for this piece of analysis, let’s just concentrate on system 7/22.

I’ve touched on this before on the blog but next season, I want people to think more about Return on Capital and less about Return on Investment. Of course, the biggest selling point of my systems at the moment is the fact they can produce high ROIs over a large number of bets but as I referred to in this post here, it really is ROI for show and ROC for dough.

So, here’s an example based on system 7/22 only. I looked at comparing the returns of outright betting and DNB in that earlier post but let’s take this on another step now.

Obviously, with 4 ways to play the bets (Outright, AH0, AH0.25,AH0.50) and an infinite way to stake (could be anything from 0 to whatever you like), the intention of this isn’t to show you every possible way to play the bets.  However, I suspect that the more work you do yourself, the more you can maximise the returns.

This is a true story but last Summer, I was contacted by a new subscriber (who I now exchange emails with every couple of days!) who wanted me to test out a staking plan.  After exchanging emails, he settled on a staking plan which I thought was the strangest staking plan I’d ever seen! He’d split the Home and Away bets up on a number of systems and basically, he had a staking plan that went to 2 decimal places for each bet!  For example, system 21, 2.39pts on Homes, 1.13pts on Aways.  I’m not going to post his staking plan or his systems but here’s the whole point of this….

I asked the guy for some feedback for my new website (I’ve asked a small selection of subscribers for feedback which you’ll see when the site opens up for public viewing) but this particular guy has an ROC of nearly 200% this season!  In a way, I find it quite satisfying that someone who spent a lot of his own personal time last summer has ended up with an unbelievable return this season from his own staking plan and his own idea about what systems to follow.

Of course, I’m not saying everyone should do that or be annoyed that they’ve not tripled their bank this season (a 50%+ ROC is good in anyone’s eyes, so if you’ve made in excess of that, you’re doing well) but the point is, they don’t have to do this work themselves unless they really want to!  By reading what I write, exchanging the odd email with me, asking me to look at a sample portfolio and so on, everyone can get a portfolio of systems and a betting method to suit themselves.

Right, back to system 7-22 as I got distracted there!

Here’s a table which shows 9 ways to play system 7/22 based on the results to date. I’ve used the full history of results (backtested and live) but this is one system where the backtested results are much in line with the live results, so there is no bias towards previous seasons like there would be with some other systems that aren’t in line with backtested results.

As you can see, it is fascinating reading.  Simply backing 1pt on Homes and Aways to win outright is by far the highest ROI you can achieve on this system.  An ROI of 33%.  Not bad for a football system!

However, when you actually analyse it, if we use max drawdown * 2.5 as a proxy for the betting bank needed, then the ROC is only a whopping 607.2%. I say only but that basically means you’d have doubled your betting bank every season for the last 6 seasons on average! If you use compound staking of some sort, you’d be retired to the Bahamas now I think and reading this on your IPad!

Anyway, the point of the table is to show that there are other ways to make 7/22 pay.  I know Rowan across at TPI plays 2pts on Homes and 1pt on Aways on 7/22 as his preferred approach after we discussed it last Summer and yeah, this gives a better return on capital than simply backing every team outright.  He made a good decision this season as the ROI on this is better than backing outright this season!

The reason for this post is actually to do with Rowan as we were discussing his plans for next season and I commented that I thought most of the volatility on system 7/22 was being driven by the Aways, so he probably had to look towards using some form of AH betting on the Aways to reduce volatility.  Incidentally, I also commented that I thought 7/22 was no longer a system that could be followed in isolation due to the low number of bets it is producing but that’s not a topic for discussion here at the moment!

I think this table highlights the point I was making in the previous post about how we need to start looking at ROC more and less at ROI.  Yes, having a 33% ROI might be a great return but is it not better to have an ROI of 26% if you can use a much smaller bank and therefore, stake higher and achieve a much higher ROC? 

It’s these sort of questions that I think people need to consider for next season.  Of course, with so many systems to follow and so many ways to play the bets, I don’t expect anyone to achieve the optimal solution but due to the fact we all have different risk aversions and want a different number of bets, what is optimal for one person isn’t going to be optimal for another.

I hope people find some of this interesting.  With 19 out of 20 profitable systems this season for outright betting (20 out of 20 for AH0, AH0.25 and AH0.50), it’s been impossible to lose this season. However, as we look back on the season in a few weeks time, apart from wishing we’d staked more (always going to be the case when you have a good season), we need to think about what we can do to improve on this going forward.  Is it having more bets, less bets, variable stakes, using AH betting more, staking more on Homes, less on Aways and so on.

Although I’ll be doing my own review of the systems and I’ll probably give an update on how I did myself this season, it’s important others take a bit of time to think about their own performance when it comes to following the systems.