TFA Value Ratings

What I intend on doing this Summer is that when people write to me and our discussions sparks off a piece of analysis or an interesting angle to look at, I’ll try to do a blog post on the subject. These posts aren’t going to be too long and ultimately, what I want people to take from these posts is to consider whether or not it’s another angle they may want to look at this Summer.

David wrote to me on Friday with some analysis he’d been looking at on the TFA value ratings. Interestingly, rather than looking at the ratings in terms of value bands as I’d been doing, David was looking at 1% increments and had noticed that there was a clear trend that bets under 1% were terrible value and badly loss making and should be removed from the systems immediately.

I mentioned in the previous post that at times, I can’t see the wood for the trees as there are so many ways to analyse TFA, it’s easy to overlook something fairly obvious.  I think this is another example of me potentially overlooking something that was fairly obvious.

As always, when looking at the data from the algorithms and systems, we need to decide which data to look at. When we are looking at the value ratings, we have a number of options to look at.

All single systems (6,7,8,21,22,31,32,33,41 & 42) from 2010/11 to 2013/14

All live bets from 2010/11 to 2013/14 (6,7,8,21,22 for 4 seasons, 31,32,33 for 3 seasons and 41,42 for 2 seasons)

All bets for rating algorithms only (6,21,31 & 41) from 2010/11 to 2013/14

All live bets for rating algorithms only from 2010/11 to 2013/14 (6,21 for 4 seasons, 31 for 3 seasons and 41 for 2 seasons)

Clearly, we would also like to look at 2013/14 season in isolation and therefore, we have the following two options:

All live bets from 2013/14 season (6,7,8,21,22,31,32,33,41 & 42)

All live bets for rating algorithm only from 2013/14 season (6,21,31 & 41)

I think we have 6 different splits we can look at. Obviously, the bets from the 2013/14 season are the most indicative but as we know, last season was anything but a normal season and therefore, I wouldn’t like to draw too many conclusions from last season’s data in isolation although it will be interesting to see how the results looks.

Rather than analysing tables of data, I am going to use graphs. The vertical graph will be cumulative ROI and the horizontal graph will be the TFA value rating. Clearly, we would expect to see ROI increase as we move along the TFA value axis.

All single systems (6,7,8,21,22,31,32,33,41 & 42) from 2010/11 to 2013/14

As we can see, backing bets with between 0% and 1% value has created a near 17% loss over the 4 seasons of results. Backing all bets up to 5% value is basically break-even which is where my thinking was about missing out these bets this season.

All live bets from 2010/11 to 2013/14 (6,7,8,21,22 for 4 seasons, 31,32,33 for 3 seasons and 41,42 for 2 seasons)

Again, backing bets with between 0% and 1% value has created a near 20% loss for the live systems over the last 4 seasons. Backing all bets up to 9% value is basically break-even.

All bets for rating algorithms only (6,21,31 & 41) from 2010/11 to 2013/14

Again, backing bets with between 0% and 1% value has created a near 175% loss for the live systems over the last 4 seasons. Backing all bets up to 5% value is basically break-even.

All live bets for rating algorithms only from 2010/11 to 2013/14 (6,21 for 4 seasons, 31 for 3 seasons and 41 for 2 seasons)

Again, backing bets with between 0% and 1% value has created a near 16% loss for the live systems over the last 4 seasons. Backing all bets up to 5% value is basically break-even.

All live bets from 2013/14 season (6,7,8,21,22,31,32,33,41 & 42)

Backing bets with between 0% and 1% created a near 16% loss for the systems in the 2013/14 season. Backing all bets up to 16% value is basically break-even.

All live bets for rating algorithm only from 2013/14 season (6,21,31 & 41)

 Backing bets with between 0% and 1% created a near 9% loss for the systems in the 2013/14 season. Backing all bets up to 13% value is basically break-even.

Ok, there is probably a lot to take in here, so let’s try to break it down a little.  In summary:

•        There is clear correlation between the level of profitability achieved and the TFA value ratings.
•        The higher the TFA value, the higher the ROI achieved.
•        It seems a no-brainer to drop all bets of less than 1% value on all algorithms given that for every season, these bets have been badly loss making.
•       The 2013/14 season was clearly a tougher season than the previous seasons for the ratings and this has been replicated in the value ratings. However, if you had been filtering out the lower value bets, you could have eliminated some of the areas where losses were made.
•       I would suspect that there is clear correlation between the underlying results for a season and where the value ratings break-even. During a very tough season like last season, if backing all bets, you needed to set the value % fairly high. During easier seasons, your value % could be lower before profits will be made. We won’t know this in advance, so people need to set their value cut-off where it suits them I think.
•       Clearly, the value ratings provide a filter that appears to be fairly powerful

The ratings were under utilised last season by myself and many other subscribers. Given the issues the systems faced and the fact there was a very easy way to filter out some poor value bets, I’m frustrated by this and from exchanging emails with some subscribers who used the ratings, I’m even more frustrated that these people did much better than everyone else! Basically, during a really difficult season last season, all the info was available to all of us to do much better than we ultimately did and we need to learn from this going forward.