2011/2012 Season Review

Similar to last season, the season review isn’t going to go into any great depth but is simply a very high level view of how the season panned out.  The more detailed review will be done at a system by system level although this review should pick up some of the main trends this season.

I want to firstly look at the results by system and split by established systems and new systems.  I’ll then look at the split by league and by Home and Away bets.  Lastly, I want to touch on the trend this season where Away bets were quite erratic on a monthly basis whereas Home bets were the bets steadying the ship for most of the season.

OK, you’re probably getting as fed up as me looking at the results by system but just in case you’ve missed them, here they are again!

I could spend all week discussing these tables and the performances but here’s a few highlights from an analytical point of view that may not as obvious to spot:

·         The new systems clearly suffered from a higher number of draws this season than the established systems. This is apparent in the AH returns where using AH0 actually reduced your profitability by over 50% on the established systems but only 27% on the new systems.  You can see that when you get down to AH0.25, you actually see a bigger profit on the new systems. Not totally surprising since the new systems were meant to were built to maximise AH0 returns but they didn’t hit enough winners this season.

·         Cross referring a rating algorithm built on maximising profits backing outright with a rating algorithm built on maximising AH0 returns doesn’t appear to work.  Whereas system 6-21 improves the returns seen on 6 and 21 greatly, then cross referring it with 31 has made the returns worse! The same is true for system 21-31. System 21 does better without any interference from system 31.  The way around this next season is going to be the introduction of a second AH0 algorithm which will be cross referred with 31-33.  I’ll keep 6-32,21-31 and 6-21-31 next season too although you’d have to question why I would bother with these going forward?  Anyhow, systems 41 and 42 will be alive and kicking next season!

·         The overall results of the established systems v the new systems leads me to believe that the established systems outperformed this season whereas the new systems underperformed. The draw played a part I’m sure but even so, I still think one set did better than expected and one did worse than expected. This may just be a one-off, so I definitely wouldn’t write off the new systems just yet.

·         It really was a difficult first season for TOX, STOY and STOZ and they didn’t get back to break-even until the second half of the season after a terrible start and even then, they ended the season badly.  I’m fed up eating my words with these systems but I honestly believe they are better than they showed this season.  The Aways made a substantial loss this season on these systems but this was definitely due to too many draws. I would hope we see a correction next season. 

Overall, then, a decent season for most of the systems, an OK season for some others and a disappointing season for some of the newer systems. I’ll be amazed if the new systems next season don’t do better than this season!

The next thing to look is the performance of Homes v Aways and the performance by League.  Here’s a table for each set of systems (Established v New) which shows the performance:

You can see that for both sets of systems, Homes have beaten Aways this season. I expect this will surprise many readers as quite wrongly in my opinion, people see some of these systems as specialising in big priced Away bets and although this is true to an extent, the Home bets do well too.  You can see that there are over twice as many Aways bets compared to Home bets on the systems but similar to last season, the Home bets have ended up with a higher ROI.

Considering the shorter losing runs and the much lower average odds, to achieve a 10% ROI on Home bets only is very, very good over a large sample.  The new systems actually came very close to achieving this target also, so the Homes have been pleasing this season.

I guess it’s only fair to say that the Aways have ended up slightly disappointing this season. However, a 9.8% ROI on the established systems isn’t bad I guess over a large number of bets. The biggest disappointment is on the new systems where the Aways ended up with 4.2%. Again though, you could have achieved 4% by simply dutching the selection to win and draw, so you can see the draw has played a massive impact on the Aways on the new systems. You don’t really want to be making as much profit dutching the selection and the draw rather than backing the selection to win!

I’ve already touched on the performance by league but as you can see, Aways in League One and League Two have proven very difficult this season for the systems.  Again, I don’t want to read too much into this as the draw played an impact to some extent and at the high average odds for these teams, all it takes is turning a few draws into wins and suddenly you’re break-even rather than making a loss.

I’ll keep an eye on it next season and I expect some people reading this will either be considering dropping League Two bets or using some form of draw coverage on the Away bets but I honestly feel like you shouldn’t react to short-term trends.  I’ll be looking at League Two’s performance in detail later this Summer.  After that, people will be in a better position to decide what to do next season.

Lastly, here’s the results of Homes and Aways on the established systems split by month this season.

As you can see, both Homes and Aways had a disaster in September as discussed already on the blog a few times but it will go down as an ‘unexplained’ month as regards to what happened. I’ve looked before and quite simply, my ratings were so far off in September, it’s embarrassing. There was no hard luck story, no huge number of draws, nothing out of the ordinary at all apart from the fact that most of the teams selected as value got hammered by the opposition.

Without dwelling on September too much, you can see that the Aways bounced back in devastating fashion and recorded two massive months straight after. December was then break-even and January was another big month for these bets.  Overall, from October to January, the Aways made a profit of 233pts from 889 bets. 26% ROI.  They made a small loss in the last 4 months of the season though and combined with the large loss in September, it turned out to be disappointing.

Interestingly, the Aways suffered from a horrendous loss in September too but didn’t make it back into profit until after January!  They finished the season amazingly well though and finished with 4 very good months in a row.

You can see the impact this would have had on anyone following this season and who varies stakes between Homes and Aways or who only follows Homes or Aways! One reason I don’t split the systems up into Homes and Aways is because I’ve always liked the fact that when the Aways are winning big or losing big, the Homes are doing their best to smooth the returns.  However, I appreciate that you can stake Homes and Aways differently on any system and therefore, the performance of Homes and Aways should be looked at separately when devising an optimal staking plan. 

I hope the above gives a flavour of what the season was like.  As I said to the subscribers, everyone in the service will have made a return of between 5% to 25% depending on whether you had 1,000 bets or 100 bets.  The systems give everyone the opportunity to build a portfolio of bets that suits their needs and hopefully, allows everyone to make a profit the way they want to make a profit.

We’ll see what happens next season……