Friday 12 April 2013

Football Model: Quick update and predictions for 13-17 April

The sun's shining (yes, even oop North) and the pub beckons, but first a quick update and predictions for this weekend.

We did pretty well last week, calling the usual average of 50% of results correctly and winning £23.35 at the bookies, on £10 stakes for each game.

That puts the running total at + £66.68 in the five weeks since I've been calling bets in public.

I'm probably heading for a fall, but no turning back now...

Here are this week's percentages, out to next Wednesday's games (might rerun these if the starting line-ups change). Watch that I've now swapped the order to list Home / Draw / Away like everybody else does.



Picks for betting...

Arsenal v Norwich - Home win (it seems very sure about this one!)
Villa v Fulham - Draw
Everton v QPR - Home Win
Reading v Liverpool - Away Win
Southampton v West Ham - Home Win
Newcastle v Sunderland - Home Win
Stoke v Man U - Away Win
Arsenal v Everton - Home Win
Man City v Wigan - Home Win
West Ham v Man U - Away Win
Fulham v Chelsea - Away Win

I'm off to the pub to spend last week's winnings. Enjoy the weekend!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

hello sir,

interesting approach; as you probably know the basic way to compile odds for a given match requires a quantitative input (calculation based on the goal supremacy of each team, total goal expectancy...etc) and secondly a qualitative input (team news, reputation...etc)...BUT one of the most important inputs that will definitely determine how the odds will close, once official team news inform of the absence or presence of key players that will impact the supremacy of a given team (most simple example; when Messi does not start for Barcelona, odds will be adjusted considerably, because his absence will impact the goal supremacy of Barcelona and therefore reassessing the outcome probabilities, goal supremacy and total goal expectancy is a most). Now, in order to properly compare the accuracy of the predicted outcome probabilities that your model is generating you must compare against the major/thin margin firms (asian bookies), where the largest liquidity is at....

example: your madel predicts the home win probability for man. city @ 63%, while the leading market firms are quoting man city win @ 76% (taking the over-round away)

given these circumstances and assuming your model is accurate enough and that there will be no surprises on the starting line-ups; rather than backing the home win i would opt for laying it since the market is off by 13% in comparison to your expected probability or even better back Wigan +1.75 @ 1.87.

best regards.

Neil C said...

Thanks for the comment, yes this is something I've been looking at closely.

At the moment, the model's not quite accurate enough to make it work. What seems to happen is that betting on differences between bookies and my model, leads to betting on outliers where the model is wrong, rather than situations where the model's calling results better than the bookies are.

It's nearly there - just a fraction behind market odds accuracy - but at the moment, would slowly lose money if you use likelihood differences.