Laying Short Priced Favourites (Football)

[Ratmouth]

Hi All, Apologies if someone else has already had a thread regarding this subject but I have started some backtesting/chronicling of the following: All soccer matches in which the favourite team is priced 1.5 or below (either opening price or closing price have to meet this criteria) I have used prices from two well known bookmakers who have a small overround so the prices should be close to the exchanges. I have only populated my spreadsheet with 104 matches at the moment so way too small a survey but my initial findings are: If you were to lay EVERY favourite (e.g. £10 per lay) at their closing price (an average of the 2 bookmakers' prices) you would yield a profit of 21.80% If you were to lay all favourites (at their closing price) who had drifted from their average opening price (roughly half matches) you would yield a profit of 32.84% If you were to lay all favourites (at their closing price) who had shortened from their average opening price you would yield a profit of 5.16% These profits all take the 5% commission exchange charge into account. Early days but exciting start!!

[froment]

Re: Laying Short Priced Favourites (Football)

I have only populated my spreadsheet with 104 matches at the moment so way too small a survey

Well, that's indeed a tiny sample. Luckily, your system is easy to backtest; your idea is really simple, and I would be surprised if it worked, so I decided to check it. I know it's not nice to bring bad news, but my survey shows disastrous results if laying home favourites, and questionable results if laying away favourites... :$ I did backtest on 6 leagues for previous season, using data available at football-data.co.uk, for two staking plans, fixed stake and fixed liability.

at their closing price (an average of the 2 bookmakers' prices)

When I started working on the spreadsheet, I forgot about this statement, and did it the other way, as I usually do, but I think the results would not be too different. What I did: instead of using average of two bookmakers, I used only Pinny's odds, as they usually have the lowest overround, and then assumed that lay odds would be some 5% higher; i.e., if odds at Pinny were 1.40, I guess I could lay the selection at 1.47 (1.40*1.05). I don't hard code that increase of 5%, but leave it in the cell, "Increase of lay odds", so you can vary it - if you put 1 there, you assume that lay odds are equal to Pinny's odds. The flaw might be that I chose to test 5 top tiers and Championship; football-data provides 21 league, and I deleted other ones, as I thought 6 leagues would be sufficient; but maybe your system would work in lower leagues... I can't go back now and try again for those leagues, but you may use this spreadsheet to check if you want, just copy formulas, or replace the data (teams, results and odds). In addition, more than one season should be tested; this test shows really good results when laying away favourites in Spain, so one needs to know if that happens regularly each season, or it was just an exception last year. As for laying home favourites, I think you can forget it. File is here: https://mega.co.nz/#!u1I3mA5C!GBS1PrdIdy17joOP07akflUB9S6fDSFoIu3-5PJdQKI And these are results: