Thursday 7 November 2013

2013/14 Results v Live Results

I think one thing I’ve struggled with a little this season is the publicity the systems have generated in the social media space. It’s always been great to read about how others are doing following the systems and many high profile bloggers follow TFA in their portfolio of systems and for the last few seasons, it’s been great reading about how much money they’ve been winning and how great TFA has been performing.

During the last few seasons, there have been short-term spells where the results have been awful and reading about some of the losses others have suffered haven’t been great at times but in the main, all of  the publicity around the systems has been very positive. The Secret Betting Club do a great job in ranking reputable tipster services and TFA has sat in their Hall of Fame for a while and regularly tops the tipster leagues they produce and before this season, I don’t think there was a better performing football tipster over the last 3 seasons.

Of course, two months in, the systems are battered and bruised, some people have lost small fortunes and TFA’s reputation built up over the past 3 seasons is in tatters. Before this season, I’ve proofed 21,252 system bets and produced a profit of 1,547pts at an ROI of 7.3%. This includes euro bets which were loss making last season when the systems were trialled but I think it’s best if we just look at all bets for this post. For the record, the UK bets before this season produced a 9.1% return from 18,372 bets.

Over the first two months this season, the systems have lost 230pts from 2,615 bets. Some of the criticism in emails in particular (less so on blogs) has been around whether or not the edge is gone and whether or not the systems have fallen off a cliff and will they ever recover. I touched on this before on a blog post but it’s difficult to define what the short-term is in this game. In many ways, a season worth of bets can be short-term and it’s not been unknown for a tipster to have a losing season and bounce back. I know a few very high profile SBC monitored footie tipsters have had a losing season or a break-even season and bounced back and therefore, I’m not sure some of the criticism hurled my way has been fair.

I exchange lots of emails with subscribers when time allows and I think the conclusion I’ve come to is that my issue this season is all down to one fact….my success in the last 3 seasons. If I hadn’t been as successful in the last 3 seasons, people’s expectations wouldn’t have been quite so high, betting banks wouldn’t have been quite so tight and overall, I expect we’d be taking this season’s results in our stride.

Of course, as I’m happy to admit, part of this is my fault. I’m not shy in lacking confidence when it comes to the systems and therefore, I haven’t been playing down the returns over the first 3 seasons too much. I’ve written about this on the blog before but I’m like marmite. Some people love my confidence when it comes to football betting whereas many others hate it. I’d go as far to say that many people have been waiting for TFA to fail and have probably been quite enjoying the troubles this season from afar.

As some blog readers will know, I took the plunge to enter Cassini’s tipster league for a bit of fun this season (I don’t need to advertise these systems given the membership was closed and I’ve no shortage of people wanting to follow the systems!) and as you will know, it caused a little bit of a stir which was a good bit of banter and a bit of fun. I’m sure people who aren’t familiar with TFA look at the returns of the system in Cassini’s league at the moment and must be thinking to themselves, if he’s the best football tipster over the last 3 seasons, I think I’ll become his bookie! :)

Anyway, the point of this post was that I think we need to keep the results in some sort of context of the last 29 months of live results. Yes, it’s been a rubbish start to the season but it’s still early days. I’m maybe not as confident as I was two months ago but every time I look at the updated live system results, I can’t help but feel things will turn around sooner rather than later.


Here’s the results of all systems this season and all live results since inception. They look nothing alike! 



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