Goalscorer Bets Thoughts and Strategy

[harry_rag]

As Kevin Rowland might say, please allow me to express myself!

I appreciate this thread may not be of as much general interest as it's Bet Builder equivalent but occasionally I'm inclined to set my thoughts down in writing and (once in a blue moon) they may be of interest to someone else. Also (and this would be extremely welcome) someone else might want to offer an opinion and give me some feedback on where I might be able to improve things.

Currently I'm mulling this over. Let's say you frame your own prices, as I do for the anytime bets. You think something is, say, a true 5/2 shot (3.5 in new money) so you add on your required margin and you bet if you're able to get better than 14/5 or 3.8. All players fall into 3 broad categories:

A : "BET" because you can get your target price of fair plus margin.

B : Better than fair but less than your target price

C : Worse than fair

This is how those categories have faired in my current data sample.

	Bets	£	ROI
A	1237	64.84	5.24%
B	1434	30.59	2.13%
C	4462	-385.47	-8.64%
	7133	-290.03	-4.07%

So far, so reassuring. a modest profit from the A bets, a smaller one from the B bets and a loss from the C bets.

Now, pause for refreshments or a yawn before we move onto the next stage; what if you had someone else's take on what the fair price is to compare to your own? Are 2 heads likely to be better than one?

[harry_rag]

So, if you have someone else's take on the fair odds to track returns against you end up with 9 categories ranging from the best (AA where you both think a price is good enough to back) to CC (where you both concur the price is worse than fair). This is what those returns look like for the period where I've been recording both prices.

AA	249	17.35	6.97%
AB	157	12.48	7.95%
AC	226	-22.62	-10.01%
BA	165	21.59	13.09%
BB	179	-19.88	-11.11%
BC	356	13.01	3.65%
CA	310	-18.85	-6.08%
CB	466	-29.87	-6.41%
CC	1146	-114.59	-10.00%
Total	3254	-141.38	-4.34%

Taking the bottom 3 first (those beginning with a C) it's reassuring that my "worse than fair" selections are loss making regardless of what the other price suggests, so no need to pay them any further attention.

Turning to the top 3 (those beginning with an A) these are currently what I would back as system selections. There's a clear suggestion in the data so far that I should stop betting on the AC selections, those where my pricing says it's a bet but the other says the odds are worse than fair. There's also a clear suggestion that I should be backing the BA selections (where I think the price is better than fair and the other pricing flags it as a bet). Both of those outcomes are logical enough though I'm wary of the data sample not being big enough yet.

Following my current approach (backing all of my A selections) there have been 632 bets during this period with an ROI of 1.14%. (The start of this period coincided with the worst couple of months experienced so far hence the much lower ROI than for the overall sample in the opening post).

If I adopted those 2 implied changes it would be 571 bets with an ROI of 9%.

My inclination is to see how the data develops over at least the first quarter of this year but it does seem like there might be some merit in a dual input approach to the pricing.