Monday, 29 June 2015

Euro Draw Systems Season Review 2014/15

If I was most looking forward to reviewing the Euro systems on the last post, it’s safe to say reviewing the Euro Draw systems is the thing I’m least looking forward to this Summer.

If I wind the clock back 12 months, I had just had a pretty decent first season with UK Draws and therefore, it seemed a natural progression to take a look at Euro Draws in the Euro leagues. I had plenty of reservations though and given my first set of Euro systems flopped in their first season, I think I had my doubts whether or not the same could happen here. My other issue is well documented but basically, backing Draws in the Euro leagues isn’t exactly an easy place to make money. Historically, the underlying losses for backing Draws was on average of 7.5% going back to 2006/07 season and therefore, I had my doubts about finding an edge. I think the combination of both the doubt about the Euro leagues and the doubt about Draws in the Euro leagues should hopefully have helped people didn’t get carried away with these systems last season. 

It is somewhat ironic that based on the underlying results, season 2014/15 was the second easiest season for Draws in the Euro leagues in the last 9 seasons! There was an overall loss of 2.7% and a strike rate of 25.8% over the season and therefore, it wasn’t impossible to make a profit last season if you had an edge in these leagues. Clearly, as we’ll see, I had no edge and wasn’t even close to finding an edge.

I better just get on with sharing the results for last season:


Considering the Euro systems a few years ago had a nightmare season and lost 127pts, this takes losing to a complete new level. A loss of 297.8pts at an ROI of -11.9%. All 11 systems made a loss and the average loss was 27.1pts on each system.

It’s hard to know where to start here.

The ratings themselves were very poor, with both rating algorithms losing 9.8% and 13.6% respectively. This accounts for a loss of 41pts and 61pts loss on each algorithm. If your base is this bad, it’s impossible to imagine any system could make a profit and even cross referring systems isn’t going to help too much as the losses are so extreme.

The filtering between DE1 to DE2 to DE3 didn’t work at all and as you reduced the bet number, the ROI simple deteriorated which is the opposite of what is supposed to happen! The filtering from DE6 to DE7 did work better though and a loss of 13.6% on DE6 was reduced to a loss of 2.7% on DE7. There were 230 bets that appeared on DE6 but not DE7. These 230 bets lost a total of 55.2pts which is an ROI of -24%. Considering the underlying loss was only 2.7%, this is an unbelievably bad result.

Looking at the combined systems, I’m not sure the picture improves. If anything, it’s just as bad, if not worse. DE1-DE6 lost 12.8% which was closer to the losses on DE6 than DE1 unfortunately.

DE1-DE7 did OK as DE7 did OK but again, there was no real improvement from cross referring the systems. DE2-DE6 did worse than DE2 or DE6 and the same is true for DE2-DE7 when compared to the single systems.

DE3-DE6 and DE3-DE7 both had nightmares and lost over 20% each which takes some going over a season backing draws!

Overall, a total and utter disaster and based on these results, all you can say is that you’d need to rip up the systems and ratings and start again if you wanted another attempt at doing something with Draws in these leagues.

To try to give a little insight into the issues these ratings and systems faced, here’s the breakdown by league for last season:


As you can see, France was a major issue. My ratings obviously favoured this league for Draws due to the low goal expectancy historically but last season, the strike rate dipped massively in this league. The underlying ROI for backing draws in France was -18.4% which meant you were always going to take a bath backing draws in this league.

If you simply ignore the French league (I know you can’t do this but just pretend!), then the overall results were not anywhere near as bad and although it would have still been an 83pt loss, nothing like the 297.8pts loss the systems suffered.

I’m sure if I drilled into the results deeper, I can find lots of examples of last season’s results being nothing like the historical results for subsets of bets but this is the same in every league. It’s how your ratings cope with this that determines their profitability long-term I think and last season, my Euro Draw ratings couldn’t cope at all.

Summer Action – I need to decide whether or not I want to continue with looking for an edge at Euro Draws next season. At the moment, I would say it’s probably the end for these systems but I’ll spend some time this Summer seeing if I can develop another set of ratings quickly. I’m not investing too much time though! Even if I do have Euro Draw systems next season, they would be trial systems at best and I wouldn’t touch them with a bargepole after this season! 

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