Backing Favourites

[Joe]

Stuck a little bit of interesting data on my homepage. If you'd backed every major European league team to win at best prices (of up to 8 bookies) where it was shorter than 1.25, you'd be up 5.8% on investment (from 351 games) since the start of the 2000/01 season. Profit was there in each of the 3 seasons. No doubt better prices could have been had but I only have data for 8 bookies. This is all very interesting and further confirms the presence of a favourite-longshot bias in bookies' prices (some of you guys may have seen me talk about this already ;) ). I had already found that backing all average prices at <1.5 returned 96p from every £1 staked during 2000/01 to 2001/02 (compared to 86p if backing everything blind). This takes it a bit further down to the really short prices. What's amazing is that the bookies seem quite happy to expose themselves at this end of the prices market rather than take on greater liabilities on longshots. I suppose being exposed at a price of 1.10 is a lot less dangerous for them than at a price of 10/1. Anyway, I intend to put this info to good use from next season and see how I fair. With 120 bets per year (roughly), with one third Kelly stakes (for added safety) I should expect to almost double my starting bankroll after each season, with about an 8% chance of failing to make a profit. :p

[Guest madmick]

Re: Backing Favourites Joe Da Hanannahs lucky 7-11 system bets on such games. He has good results to show for it too. Sounds interesting. Good luck with it. The nice thing is that even if you make a killing, any change in the bookies pricing policy might well open up other options for long-shot biased systems like DIMB ;) Win-win as they say!