Laying the underdog, all games, all season, all leagues

[rabbito]

Hi, I've been messing around like eveyone here for a decent system for a while, I stumbled on a xls sheet with a macro that someone made to get the football-data.co.uk data. I used this one and altered it to suite a system where you can lay the underdog in every match in a season (or just only the away underdog) and it seems that a couple of leagues show nice profits each year, mainly the top leagues E0,E1,E2,I1,N1,SP1 .. Has anyone backtested this before, I've taken the last 3 seasons and even when you play EVERY league you could make a nice profit.. If someone could take the time to look at it/spot a mistake/critisize/call me great, I'd be very obliged :) http://www.megaupload.com/?d=5BZPJ40D Feel free to use the excelsheet to your own wishes and mayby we can all benefit.. Thnks !

[rabbito]

[Jenno99]

Re: Laying the underdog, all games, all season, all leagues It's an interesting spreadsheet and slightly surprising that the idea of laying every underdog works as it means that the odds are consistently wrong. In practice though it seems a difficult system to implement, as you mention you need a large starting bank and it would be very time consuming to lay every underdog in every league (unless you programmed a bot to do it or something). In some leagues is this more profitable? Could you concentrate on these?

[trevman]

Re: Laying the underdog, all games, all season, all leagues have you tried laying the home fav?, i suspect part of your profit is that the odds on football-data are based on backing (thus have bookies overround incorporated) hence the long term profit. try adding 10% to the price and lay at that, and account for commission on wins.

[PAW]

Re: Laying the underdog, all games, all season, all leagues What trevman said. Convert the odds to a 100% book then test the theory again. Nice graphs though!

[rabbito]

Re: Laying the underdog, all games, all season, all leagues Great feedback ! I'm comparing the current prices from football-data.co.uk for the weekend matches and indeed the average odds are lower than the betfair odds. For example

Div	Date	HomeTeam	AwayTeam		BbMxH	BbAvH	BbMxD	BbAvD	BbMxA	BbAvA
D1	4/3/2010	Dortmund	Werder Bremen		2.55	2.42	3.59	3.29	3	2.81

The betfair odds are 2.5 (instead of 2.42), 3.65 (instead of 3.29) and 3.05 (instead of 2.81) To compensate I will add 10% to the historical odds (quick look still manages are nice profit, the leagues who were winning before are still winning, less profit but still..). I'll also take a look at laying the fav, but my gut feeling tells me it's not going to be as good.. Alternatively I could also lay the underdog in play, when mayby the odds will drop a bit :) Interesting stuff ! :)

[trevman]

Re: Laying the underdog, all games, all season, all leagues something you might find interesting; http://web.archive.org/web/20080213231111/http://www.soccervista.com/England_1_Predictions.php other pages can be found; http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.soccervista.com/England_1_Predictions.php