Cassini TFA System

I mentioned this on the last post in passing but one of the things I did this Summer was decide to enter the tipster league that Cassini runs. Although it was meant to be a bit of fun, I sort of expected that whatever system I built for the league, I would walk the league over the season fairly easily. This was based on the fact that any high turnover system I’d built from my ratings over the last 3 seasons would have at least beaten the winner of the league last season pretty easily. Hence, all I had to do was repeat the performance of the last 3 seasons (see last post!).

Of course, I knew Cassini was going to use Pinnacle’s closing line for the odds recording and given the TFA following and the number of subscribers using Pinnacle to place bets on match days, I knew any TFA system in the league would not be as potent as my other higher turnover systems but even so, I still didn’t think I could create a system that produced an ROI of lower than 3% at Pinnacle’s odds.  I imagined 600 bets this season, a minimum return of 18pts and an average return of 30pts a season.

Of course, none of this meant I would win the league but I was thinking that if any person beat 18pts over the season, they probably deserved to win the league as very few would have as much turnover as me and therefore, they had to outdo my 3% ROI over the season which as Cassini’s league showed last season, wasn’t easy to do.

The graph below shows the P&L so far for the Cassini TFA system (I do come up with the most original system names at times!).

I should state that the results in the graph are based on my advised odds which are taken on a Thursday evening which is a general price in the market. Beatable by anyone with a number of bookmaker accounts, less beatable for anyone who only has a Pinnacle or Betfair account. So far this season, I am running at 101% of my own quoted odds, so if I can beat my odds with limited accounts these days (bets placed either on a Thursday evening within an hour of the email going out or on a Saturday morning), then people should be able to get very close to my odds.

The results currently show a loss of 6.6pts this season from 120 bets. So, we are exactly 20% of the way through the season for this system. As a minimum, I would have expected a return of 3.6pts and the target return would have been 6pts. Hence, I’m 12.6pts behind where I hoped to be.

The official returns in Cassini’s league are a loss of 8.17pts. Interestingly, the gap only appeared at the weekend past as until then, we’d been very close but I hit a number of big priced winners at the weekend that had shortened significantly with Pinnacle in the lead up to kick-off which caused a big discrepancy between Pinnacle and the other bookmakers at kick-off.

Taking Cassini’s total then, I’m 14pts behind where I hoped to be after 120 bets. Sounds a lot but when you look at the number of draws this system has hit this season (32 draws in 120 bets – 26.6%) with an average win price of 3.20 for my selections, then you can see that all I’m missing is a few draws turning into wins (4 games?) and I’d be bang on target for where I hoped to be at this stage of the season.

1 team lost a 3 goal lead, 3 teams lost 2 goal leads and a small number lost 1 goal leads. Hence, I can’t see my bets doing this again in the next 480 games too often and therefore, still hopeful I’ll get close to where I want to be this season with this system.  Looking at the entries in the league this season, I expect the quality is the best it’s ever been and therefore, I’m maybe going to need to achieve a profit of 30pts I suspect to win the league.  Not impossible but I can do with a good run for the next 120 bets! 

I'll try to provide updates of this system as the season progresses although if you want to see how it's doing in the league, Cassini's blog is the place to look.