Why Bets Lose...

[AndrewKent]

This is something I have been thinking about over the course of the afternoon. Having the house to myself and little to do (since the wife has trotted off to her friends to watch the Royal Wedding, I swear it is like their World Cup Final!) I decided to have a closer look at some of my losing bets to see if there is some form of communality between them. Apart from the fact that they lost of course! So, a couple of month back I was flooding this section of Punters Lounge with questions about how to go about building a betting system. I am glad to say that I have managed to come up with something that after back testing (and live testing as well!) has been offering small but consistent profits (we're talking about a 7%-8% Yield here). So, for games that meet my criteria, I have a 66% Strike Rate when I back the home team. Great, lets look at the games that lost...okay, I see that from my losing bets, 61% ended in draws. Great, rather than Backing the home team, lets Lay the Away. This leaves me with games where I am certain that there is going to be a home win but they've ended up being an away win. Question is, why does this happen? Now I know football is "a funny 'ol game" (you have my blessings to flame me for the use of a very old cleche) but there has to be some reason why winning streaks and form comes to an end. As with most systems, I apply a series of calculations to previous matches to determine a "rating" for a future match. This is fine but I am trying to think of how to limit flaws with this process. If I am looking at the previous X games, is there a 6-0 drubbing in there that's squewing the figures? Do teams that win 4/5 games on the bounce get complacent and lose? If a teams recent form show them to be strong but they have drawn their last 2 matches, could this be an early indication that "form" is dipping? These are some of the things that I am thinking about. Now, this isn't a plea for someone to give me a wonder calculation, to be honest, I've done pretty well finding profit in a difficult market in such a short period of time. No, the point of this thread is to discuss potential indicators for dips in form that could be incorporated into an already profitable system. I've found some of the best ideas I have worked on have come from like-minded people bouncing ideas back and forth. Might stimulate me (or others reading this) to go out and try something new. Discuss...

[ONEDUNME]

Re: Why Bets Lose... The answer is simple enough. Because there are a minimum of twenty five human individuals who all have an input into the outcome. Any one of them could be suffering from injuries, illnesses, fall outs with the lady (or gents) of their lives....any number of things. To think that you can determine an outcome of such an event with calculations is stupidity almost beyond belief.