Importance (or lack of) of recent form

[Smokin Joe]

Thought I would start a thread that hopefully might get a bit of discussion going. I have anlysed the results of over 16,000 football matches. I looked at the previous 6 games of the teams playing and awarded points as per the English league system (ie 3 for a win and 1 for a draw). I then deducted the away team's points from the home team's points to give a "Form Rating". Example; Home team has 10 league points from last 6 games and the Away team has 5. The Form Rating would be 5. The results for all of my data seen Home team lose 7.3% of stakes, and away team lose 8.6% of stakes - so no huge difference there. If I then look at games where the Form Rating > 7 (994 matches) the home teams lost 8.1% of stakes and the away teams only lost 1.4% of stakes. On the other hand, in games where the Form Rating

[lunatism]

Re: Importance (or lack of) of recent form interesting analysis there SJ. Did you look at the home and away teams location form or overall form? Because otherwise it might have a detrimental affect on the results you're getting eg. if the home side played just 1 home game in their last 6 (but they won their last 5 aways), then up against an away side who has won 5/6 of their last away games, you might favour the home side, unless looking at the location...because then you might favour the away side