Starting a system?

[Dale Cooper]

Obviously I don't expect people to give away their secrets and all that but I'm just interested as to how you actually begin your system. First, do you just get an idea (say, teams that haven't conceded a goal in the last 3 games and you want a system to back them to keep a clean sheet in the next game) and just work from there? And secondly, how do you go about backtesting something like that - is there an enormous amount of data inputting to be done? I'm just curious as to how you all go about it as I want to create one for myself sometime soon (can't be relying on those 'hunches' anymore!). Cheers :)

[Bedlam]

Re: Starting a system? I get a lot of inspiration from these threads, there are some very clever people posting systems on here, & it seems that many punters take elements from various different systems to cobble together a whole new one for themselves. For any system it pays to have some good foundations, like a ratings system. I have found Paul Ross's ratings very helpful along with the RFO ratings. Then experiment, do a dry run (paper test) until you fine tune things & find out what works for you, if you have the patience & discipline (which I don't!).