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Sports Betting Football / soccer system?

Discussion in 'Sports Betting Forum | Sportsbook Forum' started by cornerking, Feb 5, 2015.

  1. cornerking

    cornerking New Member Founding Member

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    Well the football chat is very quiet in here so in an effort to get it going...

    What selection systems do people use?

    I used to dabble with ELO type systems a bit and am a big fan of them. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system

    Anyone have any experience or selection strategies as opposed to staking strategies?
     
  2. Tyler Hann

    Tyler Hann New Member Lineage to Founders

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    I am relatively new to football betting and have been focusing on EPL almost exclusively. Started with FIFA WC. I'm very interested in the topic but the betting side of the game is new so I don't have groundbreaking strategy to share. Love to keep the conversation going.
     
  3. cornerking

    cornerking New Member Founding Member

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    Good stuff.
    Have you looked at the ELO link?
    What did you think?
     
  4. Tyler Hann

    Tyler Hann New Member Lineage to Founders

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    I like the idea but I would think that you need many games of data or the variance would be too high. At what number of games does the data become meaningful in a season?
     
  5. cornerking

    cornerking New Member Founding Member

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    The Racing Post journalist Kevin Pullein says that you need to look back to the last 16 matches in order to get a good idea about performance. This is a little under half a season in the EPL.
    You can use previous seasons to run into the current one so you hit the ground running with promoted teams taking the values of demoted ones.
    There is a wealth of data already out there on the net to make a system like the one that we are discussing. The main point to consider is which variables are needed. (Goals scored, match result, shots, shots on target, expected goals....)
     
  6. Leandro Faria

    Leandro Faria New Member Founding Member

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    Hey guys, I also like the idea of ELO for soccer betting purposes. But in my opinion, soccer (and specially european soccer) has some peculiarities that need to be accounted for and used to adjust an ELO ranking prior to placing a bet.

    European soccer can have very high volatility in the teams' starting formations. US based bettors aren't used to this since the free agency/salary cap/draft systems implemented in the main US sports restrict (to a certain extent) the transfer and acquisition of players. European soccer leagues are basically a free-market system, where you can pay for whatever you want. Teams with heavier pockets can look completely different after a transfer window because of new acquisitions, and teams with less resources can also look completely different because of losing their players to the richer clubs. This impacts an ELO ranking using 16 matches (as mentioned by member Cornerking) because the team in the beginning of your historical series might be completely different from the one in the end of it.

    Promotion/relegation also adds to this volatility because a promoted club receives a major capital boost from being in a higher league, which leads to new acquisitions. Layer on top of that the fact that teams might be playing multiple tournaments at once (Champs League, National League, National Cup, etc.) and formations are being prioritized accordingly, and you run into an ELO nightmare of having to select WHICH games to include in your historical series. And there is also the fact that new acquisitions might take some time to "gel" together and start performing at a high level, so your ELO system might be underestimating a team's potential strength by putting too much weight on the performance of games that happened months ago.

    I have personally used (with success) a system that looks at only the past 7 games, weighing the strength of opponents, whether the game was played home or away, and giving more weight to the last 4 games (70% of weight assigned to last 4 games). I think the volatile nature of soccer requires a model with a shorter/more recent historical series.

    Let me know if you guys have been betting recently and how it has worked out.
     
  7. cornerking

    cornerking New Member Founding Member

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    Correction. kevin Pullein says 32 games not 16 as I posted above.
     


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