Welcome to my new blog.
Now that the domestic football season has finished I thought
I would start blogging again and share my thoughts and opinion on all things
betting / trading related.
A lot of water has gone under the bridge since I last posted
here back in September 2009 and it was around this time that I read a post from
the excellent blog Green all
over and the post can be found here
This post in itself completely changed my approach to
betting and what really piqued my
interest here was the fact that in baseball the very best teams rarely win more than 60%
of the time so in effect any team can win any game.
If you are thinking of getting involved in the US Sports
such as baseball always remember the following from Cassinis blog
In sports such as baseball,
historical data shows that picking underdogs is the best way to "keep the
wind" at your sports investing back. This may result in winning only
40%-45% of your selections, but the long odds means you'll have a positive
return.
So let’s look at a realistic example. If you back a favourite in the
baseball and want to show a reasonable return on investment of say 8% and you
are backing favourites priced at 1.72 you are going to have to show a very
unlikely 63% consistent strike rate and as we have seen the very best teams don’t
produce this return consistently.
Now I know very little about baseball however, I do know
about betting and this very information was enough to set me devising a relatively
simple ratings system. During my initial experimentation the results were good
and I found that opposing the home favourite that offered no value looked the
best way to go forward. I also looked at opposing the away team that was
favourite that showed no value but the results here were pretty neutral.
I then fully trailed these ratings last season and they
produced a reasonable 22.50
Point profit but tailed off towards the end of the season shortly after the
All – Star game.
Since then I have made improvements to the ratings system and
I encouraged by the results looked at introducing the same principals to the
NHL Ice Hockey and here again opposing the favourite has shown to be successful.
I have found that if the ratings show there is value then opposing the
favourite home or away has shown a nice profit of the results of which can be
seen here . Interestingly
if you would have backed the favourite that showed value you would only be up
by 0.35 points.
I have also used this in the basketball and although this
has shown a reasonable 14 point profit
the only problem with this is that you still have the bookmakers overound to
overcome as generally both sides of the spread are priced fewer than 2.00.
However with the basketball I always ensure that I am receiving points and that
my ratings are always highlighting at least 3 points value.
This season on the MLB the ratings are now up over 12 points after
92 bets and it is now my intention to do something with the Tennis. I do have
someone who supplies me with some ratings for the ATP but I have yet to find
the best way of utilising these so it is a work in progress.
Ultimately with the US sports and the tennis I hope to
create a fund that will consistently return over 100 points profit a year. So
far my return on investment is pretty good with the following.
NHL 163 Bets +33.13 Points ROI 20.32%
NBA 165 Bets +14.38 Points ROI 8.71%
MLB 92 Bets +12.76 Points ROI 13.86%
Combined 420 Bets +60.27 ROI 14.35%
Personally I prefer a style that is fairly selective that
produces a reasonable number of bets and a reasonable return on investment as
you do hear about certain Las Vegas gamblers who bet on anything that shows
value. Their points return maybe larger
but they will be having significantly more bets and a losing run betting in
this volume can seriously dent the confidence.
Finally I really like these ratings based systems because it
takes out all of the emotion, energy and background noise involved in making a
selection. Management changes and team line ups do not come into it. It is just
a case of going with the numbers and at the moment it looks to be paying off.
If you would like to receive these ratings then details can
be found here
