One of my big pieces of work since the close season has
been to develop a couple of new rating algorithms to allow me to build a set of
Draw systems for the European leagues. I suspect if it wasn’t for the fact my
UK draw systems were my best performing systems last season alongside the fact
my outright European systems ended the season strongly, I’m not sure I would be
bothering looking at another set of systems. Given I already have 50 systems
live for next season, adding another 11 systems might sound a bit crazy but as
always, I’m always looking for another edge at this game to allow me to
diversify within my betting portfolio.
Last season in my own
portfolio, I followed UK outright bets, UK draw bets and Euro outright bets.
The missing piece of the jigsaw for me was Euro draws and as far as I am aware,
there are no standout Euro draw systems available in the market. Being honest,
even if there was a standout tipster or system in the market, it would have to
have a long-term proven track record to get me to pay for it and follow it
myself.
I’ve been here before though
and my solution is always the same….build something to follow myself in future
once it is proven to work. Therefore, it seems a natural progression to move
onto looking at European Draw systems.
I actually planned to do this
later in the Summer but I realised when I was writing the reviews of the
systems from last season that I needed a break from writing and therefore, I
started playing about with the data for the European leagues. As always
happens, once I get started with data and ratings, I struggle to stop and I
managed to build these ratings fairly quickly since I had all the European data
to hand as I was refreshing the Euro ratings for my other systems this Summer
too.
I’ll do as I usually do and
share the backfitted and backtested results but as always, these are not meant
to provide a guide of what we can expect going forward. Depending on how good
my ratings are, the true profitability tends to be around 25%-35% of the
backtested results although it varies by rating algorithm. All I can guarantee
is that the results next season live won’t look anywhere near as impressive as
the results I’m about to show!
I tend to share the historical
results so people can see how the systems look in terms of bet numbers and
average odds. Knowing that the results tend to be lower when live, we can use
the backtested/backfitted results to help us set some targets for the season
forward although for things like betting banks, we need to be really careful as
the drawdowns historically won’t be near as bad as the drawdowns we can expect
in future.
Anyway, caveats aside, let’s
see what I’ve come up with for these systems. I’ve spent a little bit of time
thinking through which seasons to backfit and which seasons to backtest and
I’ve gone down the route this time of the backfitting the last 3 seasons worth
of data and backtesting the previous two seasons. I could have went back further and
included more data but I think I’m of the opinion now that the best data to
backfit on is the most recent data and as long as the results look OK for the
previous seasons, everything should be OK. I used to think that it was better
to build the ratings with historical data and backtest over the recent seasons
but I think the issue with this is that the ratings then get out of date fairly
quickly as I’m using data that is so old. Hence, when I’m refreshing all the
rating algorithms this season on the other systems, I’ll be flushing through
more recent data and tweaking the ratings.
The best place to start is
probably the overall results to get a flavour of what the returns look like for
all systems and to check the filtering works as I intended to. Here’s the
results by system for the 5 seasons combined:
I always love this picture
when I’ve developed a new set of ratings as it is my first check that I’ve
built systems that could be useful. The filtering on the systems works like a
dream (as we would expect based on my other systems I’ve built) and I think the
overall ROI of 24.4% is in line with most of the sets of systems I’ve built. I
think if this was below 15%, I would probably be worried and likewise, if it
was above 35%, I would be worried that I’ve fitted the data too much during the
backfitting.
Of course, the table above
doesn’t help us too much since it has 3 seasons of backfitting and 2 seasons of
backtesting included. Here’s the results by season:
I quite like this picture too.
I think we can see quite clearly which seasons are backfitted (ROI is circa.
10% points higher) but the two seasons which are backtested still show a very
strong return of 18%. Basing it on historical performance, I think the
backtested return can convert to something like a 5% or 6% return as a minimum
live return and this would be acceptable I think over a large number of bets.
Again, we can see that for any
season, the filtering may not work as perfectly as hoped but over a large
sample of bets as we’ve already seen, the filtering can work well.
One place I have struggled a
little with the other Euro ratings has been managing to find something that
works across all 4 Euro leagues. I do tend to find France and Italy quite
difficult leagues when looking at Euro ratings as what works in these leagues
tends to not work so well in the other two leagues. Interestingly though, for
these new Draw systems, I didn’t seem to have too many issues with France as
the draw strike rate tends to be fairly high in France. Here’s the results
split by league:
I find this quite pleasing
that there appears to be an even split of returns across the leagues
historically. The Italian league has a lower ROI but it does have the highest
turnover by a good bit (lower goal expectations in Italy relative to the draw
odds I found) and therefore, the returns and turnover look acceptable.
It’s interesting to look at
the returns by league and season as over smaller samples of bets, we can always
see some crazy returns for some leagues. Here’s the results:
I do find some of these
returns quite amusing! It’s quite interesting how 2 of the last 3 seasons in
France has saw low returns even though this data is part of the backfitting
process but the first two seasons have great returns! Likewise, Spain has
really flat returns over the last 5 seasons which probably points to Spain
being the most consistent league out of the 4 which fits in with my findings
for the other Euro systems. Spain is the only league I seem to have a good
handle on with the other Euro ratings.
I think that’s enough of an
introduction to the European Draw systems for the moment.
As always, the best way to end
these posts is with an overview of the targets for the upcoming season. With it being the first live season, it’s difficult to set accurate
targets but I always try to err on the side of caution. None of us know how
good (or bad!) these systems may perform next season but it’s always worth
setting out targets so we have a benchmark to judge the season against.
Here’s the targets for this
season:
I think the system that stands
out is DE1-DE6 as being the one with the highest potential ROC but this is
usually the case for the combined systems. My only concern with following this
system is the high turnover and the fact that if anything goes wrong with these
systems next season, this system is likely to lose more money than some of the
higher combined systems. However, as we saw with the UK draws last season, if
following the highest combined systems, you run the risk of filtering out too
many winners and making a loss even though the ratings have an OK season! It’s
a tough balance following a set of new systems as you don’t want to push all in
which leads you to filtering the bets someway but if you do this, you run some
other risks,
If I was giving my own honest
advice of how to play these systems, it would be to give them a miss this
season completely or to follow enough bets to ensure any edge shines through
but to play trial stakes. Trial stakes is something I’ve been doing for the
last few seasons now on my unproven systems and it sort of works for me. Yes,
the money won or lost doesn’t actually make that big a difference to my overall
P&L but I get a feel for what the systems are like and how the losing runs
are etc. This means that if the systems perform as I hope, then when I migrate
these systems to my main betting portfolio, I already have a feel for how these
systems perform and what they are like to follow.
Overall then, I think this
concludes the preview of the new European Draw systems. As always with my
systems and ratings, things look very promising but we’ll need to see what
happens when the bets go live. I think for next season, my hope would be to see
the systems make a profit in the first instance. I’m still not as confident
with the Euro leagues as I am with the UK leagues and therefore, I’m not
wanting to set the bar too high in the first instance. If all systems could
make a profit and hopefully have a fairly stable season, then this would be a
good first season I think. I guess I want something to build on in future and
it’s always easier tweaking ratings to improve them rather than build something
new from scratch!
We’ll see what happens…..
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