One For The Money

Thanks to those of you who took the time to comment on my last post. It's nice to know someone is taking a look at my ratings and all feedback is appreciated. It even got a mention on Cassini's excellent blog 'Green All Over' which is high praise indeed, although I'm a little stumped as to how our ratings differ so much. If we were picking names out of a hat we'd have ended up with a closer match!

So, onto this weekend....

and here are the current Betfair prices...

What are my thoughts? Well, there's a few matches that raise my interest but this one especially:

Bolton v Blackpool - One thing that I didn't mention previously was my liking for consistency. If a team has one 'green' performance' but then backs it up with a 'yellow' and then a couple of 'reds' it shows signs that they are unreliable. These 2 teams are the exact opposite. Over the last 4 matches both have strung together greens and yellows which leads me to think this could be a close game especially when I look at the respective home and away averages which are 19.29 and 19.39. Bolton do have a good 4 game supremacy difference though (24.00 to 19.50) and Blackpool's scores do seem to be on a dipping trend so it will be the prices that decide what to do from here. Bolton to win at 1.61 (62%) seems too short but on the other hand I don't fancy Blackpool to win. That leaves the draw at 4.30 which represents just over a 23% chance. For me, I think there maybe some value here. With the par price for the draw in Premier League matches normally around 3.40 is the market missing a trick?

That's my insight into the reading of one match but I'm interested to hear your thoughts on any of the other games. Do my ratings highlight any other possibilities?

Ghost Town

Well, what did I expect? Not one reply to my last post! Not surprising really as I know I don't blog very often these days, but I'll try once more.

For the record, my thoughts for the last round of games only threw up one solid opportunity and that was for Blackpool to beat Wolves. Why? Well, the first thing I try to identify is for one team to have a strong supremacy over the last 4 games and Blackpool fitted the bill with 3 strong performances and an average rating of 21.00. Wolves on the other hand had 3 poor performances on the bounce and only one strong performance which was 4 matches ago. Their average was only 16.75.

Secondly, I look at the average home and away ratings for the relevant teams for the season to date. I'm looking for the supremacy to continue here and in this example it did. Blackpool had an average home rating of 19.80 compared to Wolves' away rating of 13.00 - that's quite a difference!

Finally, after spotting a mismatch it's all down to the prices on offer. If I get to this stage then I'm confident that I've been able to narrow the result down to a 50/50 shot so if I can get better than odds of 2.00 then I've a short-listed selection. The odds on a Blackpool win was 2.48 and that was good enough for me so I made the bet.

Now I'm not preaching that this is a fool-proof system as there are other factors to consider (like the loss of a key player etc.) but as a rule the idea is to spot value over the long term through a few simple steps. It's not rocket science but there's quite a bit of method behind the ratings so I'm hopeful the run can continue.

For those of you who might still be interested here's my latest form table taking us up to the 22/11/2010. Some unexpected teams are towards the top:

Something To Chew On

Since the beginning of the football season I've been busy working on a rating system for the Premier League. It's now reached a stage where I feel it offers a level of reliability and has to date enabled my to generate an ROI of 28%. Not bad considering this is all new to me!

So this is how it works. Below is a snippet showing this weekends Premier League games (clicking on it should make it bigger).

The most recent games are nearest to the team name and have been assigned a score from 4 to 34. Naturally the higher the better, but to help there's a traffic light system. A green background indicates a strong performance whilst a yellow one is average and a red poor. Simple eh?

The table also then shows the average score for that team over the last 4 games (Ave) and the average score for the home team playing at home this season (Ho.Ave) and vice versa for the away team (Aw.Ave).

By representing performances in this fashion it should be easier for me to highlight a team on form and when compared to prices it should identify value bets.

Here's the most current pre-match prices for these matches on Betfair:

So how do you interpret these performances against the prices - do you see any value based on my ratings?

Geek's Toy - Children In Need

After announcing that the Geeks Toy Trading Software will continue to remain completely free for 49 weeks of 2011, the Geek is also going to extreme lengths to raise money for 'Children In Need'.
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As part of the fundraising there are some excellent prizes up for grabs, including £250 cash and a Betfair API subscription worth £2000.
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In addition, The Geek is running a charity plugathon, so if you're a sports / Betfair blogger / site owner and want to help raise money for good causes then check this out.
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On top of all this version 1.1 of the 'The Toy' was released recently and now includes advanced charting and market overview features. This combined with it's reliability and speed make it the essential partner for any trading session and I'm happy to endorse it.
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Let's raise as much money as possible and thanks to you all in advance.
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All the best,
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Mark
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