Help with Poisson calculation, please

[Guest Dosheroonie]

I am intrigued by this poisson thingy, but totally unable to work it out. Please can someone explain so an idiot like me can understand, how to make a poisson calculation in excel to get 1x2 percentage chances, using as an example the following estimates: home team predicted goals 1.8 away team predicted goals 1.1 Thanks in advance for any help.

[Guest madmick]

Re: Help with Poisson calculation, please Poisson is a numerical distribution function, like the normal (or Gaussian) function The 'easiest' way to do what you are asking is to calculate the chance of the home team scoring any number of goals up to some maximum (e.g. 10 or 20). Use the Poisson function in Excel. It takes the form Poisson(X,lambda,false) where X is the number of goals you are interested in (e.g. 0 to 20) and lambda is the predicted goal average (1.8 and 1.1 in your example). Now do the same for each away score. You will have two lists of 10 or 20 probabilities of the given team scoring that many goals. Now you have to combine them by multiplication for each possible scoreline. If you do from 0-10 (11 scores) then you will have an 11 x 11 matrix. This is the probability of each of these scorelines. The 1X2 can be derived for this by adding together all those scorelines that result in a home win, draw or away win respectively. good luck with it - the key of course will be in how you derive your average goal figures