Football Betting - A Philosophical Approach

[Aristillus]

Hi There, I'm new to the forum, and although I've already made some posts, I thought I'd introduce myself with one more conversational and philosophical in tone. I think I am right when I say we are all here to win bets in order to win money? That as far as I can perceive is what it is all about, but we all have different perceptions and views on how to go about achieving our goal. However, let's state the most obvious premise regarding your act of betting on a football match. Winning money on your bet is an incidental outcome. It is simply the end result of a set of 'perceivings' you hold between the meeting of two football teams who are to play each other. You don't have to be a professional punter to win or lose money, you just simply need to participate. However you decide to place a bet, it is an act culled from either a hunch or gut-feeling, or one that is derived from study of historical data. I have made bets using both methods, and although I have yet to win a single bet, the system I use has given me a consistent level of around 72% accuracy. The reason why I have not won a bet yet (coming very close on many occasions) is due to my betting on accumulators only, and have found myself losing the bet on the outcome of one match, of one team letting me down. Three time this season one team out of the selection of eight or nine teams has stopped me from collecting a pot consisting of thousands of pounds. Of course, accumulators are where the big money wins are, but the likelihood of winning them is extremely small. Before the start of the current season I had a good think of how I could change my betting style, and what aids I could use to help guide me towards bets more-weighted in my favour, but obviously, not guaranteeing the win. Having knowledge of Microsoft Excel I created a database for both the Premier League and the Championship. It was a laborious and monotonous task I can tell you, but once I made it all automated, all I have to do each week is enter the scores and the database updates itself across the whole spread. Only recently have I come across the Poisson system of probability, and have incorporated it into my database as it gives me a more detailed resolution on probabilities. Databases generate massive amounts of data over time, but what is more important is how one uses that data. At the start of the season, my database was empty, but like a painting becoming more resolved and clear with each brush stroke, the database began to generate data I could use with every game played. I know from experience that database systems do provide weighted probabilities favourable to prediction, I've seen it with my own database, if it didn't, I wouldn't be here now writing about it. For instance, Watford v Middlesbrough have just played their game, and Poisson suggested that Watford would win as follows... Home Win------Draw-----Away Win ----47%---------27%--------26% Another way of using Poisson gave the following highest probabilities for... Watford: 1-0 win @ 12.9%; 2-0 win @ 9.2%; and 1-1 draw @12.1% Middlesbrough: 0-1 win @ 8.9%; 0-2 win @ 4.4% and 1-1 draw @ 12.1 % Other form factors I use were as follows.... Watford----44% Middlesbrough----50% Watford won 2-0 Other predictions for today's games can be found here... http://forum.punterslounge.com/threads/159113-Sky-Bet-Championship-gt-6-7-Apr Despite what some other posters say about it being simply a system that picks the favourite team, the system always weights itself to the team with the better season performance, and when making bets, you want to weight the outcome in your favour. In other words, you want to pick the team that wins, and not simply play a particular bet because it gives you better odds. There are always two systems competing for the result, the punter's and the bookies', and the bookies more often than not, weight the odds in their favour, the trick is not to compete against the bookies, even though that is where the big wins are, the trick is to go with your own system, trust it, and hopefully it will pay you the dividends in the long run. Bet small and discerning and try to stay in profit. If the winning team or result and the bet don't correspond, you will always lose the bet and money, and that is guaranteed! What I am saying here is that you should weight priority on picking either the winning team or the draw, until you get either of those two options right, you win nothing, no matter what bet you place. Regards all.

[froment]

Re: Football Betting - A Philosophical Approach Hello, Aristillus, :welcome to the forum! Nice to see your posts and some fresh ideas, thanks for sharing it! :ok I saw your posts in the Championship thread, nice reading there, but I have the same objection as MPLouis: without odds, your selections lack real sense - the goal is to get money from bookmaker; and you can get it only if they pay at sufficiently high rate. I mean, if I see Man Utd or Chelsea priced at 3.00 (which will probably not happen this season), I will rush to bet; if I see them at about evens, I will gladly take it after having a look at their oponent; if I see them at odds of 1.70, I will think twice and have a deep breath before placing a bet, at very moderate stake; but no way I would bet on them at odds are 1.30. Hence, without odds, your selections are simply incomplete. In your example above, probabilities of 47% / 27% / 26% imply the odds 2.12 / 3.70 / 3.85, or roughly 1.99 / 3.46 / 3.59 after 7% overround; Watford was generally available at 2.50 - 2.60, so it was indeed a good pick; however, it was hardly worth backing at odds lower than 2.20, and absolutely a no-no at evens. The reason is, I highly doubt you can sustain your strike rate of 72% at these odds, let alone to increase it to 80% as you hope; so you cannot afford yourself to back teams at odds lower than they should be according to your calculation.

Despite what some other posters say about it being simply a system that picks the favourite team' date=' the system always weights itself to the team with the better season performance, and when making bets, you want to weight the outcome in your favour. In other words, you want to pick the team that wins, and not simply play a particular bet because it gives you better odds.[/quote'] Well, that's the consequence of using Poisson - 1X2 probabilities reflect probability of expected goals of each team, which reflects their position on league table, which is, in turn, reflected in the odds offered by bookmakers; hence, you like it or not, your system is indeed inclined towards picking favourites.

[Aristillus]

Re: Football Betting - A Philosophical Approach

Hello, Aristillus, :welcome to the forum! Nice to see your posts and some fresh ideas, thanks for sharing it! :ok I saw your posts in the Championship thread, nice reading there, but I have the same objection as MPLouis: without odds, your selections lack real sense - the goal is to get money from bookmaker; and you can get it only if they pay at sufficiently high rate. Well, that's the consequence of using Poisson - 1X2 probabilities reflect probability of expected goals of each team, which reflects their position on league table, which is, in turn, reflected in the odds offered by bookmakers; hence, you like it or not, your system is indeed inclined towards picking favourites.

Hi Froment, Many thanks for your reply. :ok I agree with the premise that the reason for betting is to win the bet and collect the profit as well as the stake back. Today, sees the first time I make a profit. It is small, but has returned an amount 6 times that which I bet, so it is a start.:nana Basically, I am using the little shrewdness that I possess. I do not doubt that there are many people here whom have been betting for quite a while, and understand the betting systems to such an extent that they win as often as they lose. Good on them. :ok I only use Poisson as a visual guide, whereby I can see in an instance the better probability. Today, I gave probable predictions and gained 6 out of 9 correct results, so an accuracy of 66%. Fortunately, instead of betting on an accumulator, which I normally do, I bet on individual games, and made a small profit, which to me is encouraging. I am not blessed with an understanding for the many betting systems I have seen on this forum, nor do I have the money to play big, but as long as I can continue to collect more than what I lose, I will count myself a winner. Of course, it will look as if Poisson picks the favourite, but in the true sense of things, Poisson isn't picking anything, it is just presenting factual data on teams and their past performance. It is just a means to organise the data into some sort of useability. Poisson doesn't predict anything, no system does, it is we humans that make the predictions because of our faculty of anticipation. I suppose there are mathematical avenues one can use to spread one's bets out in order to bring about a profitable margin, but I don't currently understand them, yet I know they cannot be 'predictive'...only probable. When we bet, it isn't the bet itself that is important, it is the result of the game that's important, because the result of the game on which we bet is what determines the profitability of the bet. The bet itself is incidental, having no effect upon the game whatsoever, just like our expectation of the result has no effect on the game. Until our expectation matches the result of the game, the bet is worthless to the concept of profiteering from it. Agreeing to the odds a bookie places are a much better profit-orientated premise, than one in which probability shows a result unlikely to happen. Yes, the profit will be small, but it will grow with consistency. Once the season is over, I will analyse the data, as I am interested to see if probability is more likely to predict a correct result than say one's gut feeling? I expect it to be so. If it is, we should not dismiss Poisson off-hand as it will provide a hit more than a miss, and we can use that to our advantage as punters. Regards to you

[christos83]

Re: Football Betting - A Philosophical Approach Aristillus i am very curius..what data do you use on the poisson? I mean how do you calculate the expected goals for each team. I have been using poisson for a while but never managed to get a good result and i can tell you i have tried every possible way