Today is Monte Carlo Day!
My new book Monte Carlo or Bust: Simple Simulations for Aspiring Sports Bettors goes on general release. Amazon have a 'Look Inside' with the first chapter. Available at many other outlets.
Trading Football? Not sure which Football database you should buy, well perhaps begin with this fantastic FREE resource.
Download
@BetGPS
Betting-Data workbook.
Download stats from
@12Xpert
.
Thank you to the both of you 😁
Leagues covered and steps below:
#FootballTrading
Your moment of comedy for 30th June.
If anyone would seriously like to consider a doctoral thesis in the evidence for and psychological explanation for England favouritism bias, I would love to be your supervisor.
Monte Carlo or Bust: Simple Simulations for Aspiring Sports Bettors. Early print edition available direct from publisher now for those who can't wait any longer. Amazon, Google etc will have it next month.
To receive such a complimentary review for Monte Carlo or Bust from such a highly respected individual in the world of betting as Matthew Trenhaile is truly rewarding. It's as if he's read my mind with respect to what I wanted to achieve from the book. I cannot thank him enough
It's a brilliant calculator for serious bettors who want to quantify their drawdown risks. Many +EV bettors will fail because of the psychology of losses. The more you understand them, the greater your chances of handling them. My book has devoted 10,915 words & 34 charts to them
There are several betting strategies that can be applied to Roulette and claim to be capable of ‘beating’ the game and guaranteeing that players can make money from it.
What are these strategies, how do they work and are they actually reliable?
Preliminary investigations into performance of
@NateSilver538
soccer ratings against closing
@PinnacleSports
1X2 betting market. Sample 18,105 league matches from 12/08/16 to 10/04/19. 538's model finds 21,915 'value' bets. Yield is -5.95%, (blind betting -4.38%).
If you like this article, hopefully you’ll love my new book even more. I like to believe it’s the most serious treatment of staking that’s still broadly understandable you’ll find. No stupid staking plans, but a rigorous analysis of the risks and rewards. Out in December.
In addition to finding an edge, staking is also an incredibly important part of
#betting
. How much should you stake if you don’t know your edge?
✍️
@12Xpert
You should be ashamed of yourselves. There is NO way to improve chances of success in roulette. I thought you were a reputable group. You used to be when I verified your tips 15 years ago. What’s happened?
🤓 Learn new strategies and take your roulette game to the next level.
Read our seven top tips on how to improve your chances of success playing roulette.
#roulette
#casino
How to test your betting model, and other thoughts about randomness and psychology. Thanks to
@BettingIsCool
for inspiring me to think up this approach. Hope you find it useful in some way.
77 teams have played at the
#WorldCup
Here's how they rank if 3 points are awarded for a win (1 for a draw, which includes games settled by extra time and penalties). Data fro
Absolute rubbish. The vast majority of people who gamble gain immense pleasure from it. Same with drinking, same with eating. Same with shopping. All industries have side effects. (Incidentally, the same with vaccines and chemo.). Does not imply they are founded on misery.
Someone has suggested to me that the best way to remove the bookmaker's margin in 1X2 football is the equal margin method. This would imply no favourite-longshot bias and discredit 40 years of research. Looking at all my data back to 2007, I've tested this hypothesis... (1/n)
Golden rule of gambling: NEVER RISK WHAT YOU CAN’T AFFORD TO LOSE. That means if you lose everything you’ve put at risk gambling, it won’t effect your life and lives of those around you.
Silver rule: things that go up CAN come back down.
Bronze: Never chase losses.
#footballindex
Imagine the outcry if this was ‘bet and shop’. Why? Because gambling has been institutionalised as a cultural bad, whilst drinking has not, despite the latter accounting for 25 times the cost to public health and a net drain to the economy.
Paperback edition for Squares & Sharps released last week. Nothing new, but for those who haven't read it and might like to, it's a little cheaper. Available via major outlets. My new one "Monte Carlo or Bust: Simple Simulations for Aspiring Sport Bettors" due 2nd December.
Most depressing aspect of Brexit is the confirmation that absolutely everyone suffers from the overconfidence bias of believing that they're right & clever about stuff and those who don't agree with you are wrong & stupid. It's intellectual and moral otherization and it's obscene
If you truly want ‘the will of the British people’ to be implemented, you’ll be happy to have a second referendum to confirm what their will is. If you’re afraid your lies won’t fly twice and that breaking electoral law might be much harder a 2nd time, not so much.
#PeoplesVote
Problem gambling costs UK society £1.27b. Problem eating costs UK society 77 times, yes 77 TIMES, more. Medical checks at supermarkets for whether you can purchase that pack of Pringles, anyone?
Efficiency of Betfair closing odds in UK racing (flat and jumps). Sample size is 912,145 (2009 to 2018). Data subgrouped by 1% implied win probability differences.
A lesson to all would-be pro-bettors: when your peaks and troughs operate over sunspot cycle timescales, you can see quite clearly that anyone who tells you that making a living from gambling is easy is either stupid, a liar or a fraudster.
Imagining daring to take on the alcohol industry in the same way, which detrimentally impacts 10 to 100 times more lives depending on definitions. Or is it because society's movers and shaker are morally comfortable with having their own drinking problems?
UK Govt is due to set out reforms to gambling laws. They must use this opportunity to put the right protections in place to prevent harm and deliver bold reform, rather than cave in to powerful industry lobbyists.
Read the full piece by
@MPIainDS
and I👇
Super important to understand this. The favourite-longshot bias in many sports is the first thing any novice bettor should become aware of. If nothing else, it will help you lose less.
This is how much you would have lost if you had bet $1 on all the Favourites or on all the Underdogs, in all the ATP main draw matches, since 2010, at Pinnacle closing odds.
• Yield Favourites: -1.9%
• Yield Underdogs: -6.0%
Obviously, it doesn't make any sense to do this.
VAR is pointless if referees won’t look at the video evidence and junior officials won’t overturn decisions. Premier League has got it all wrong. A foul is a foul. The end.
@tiptapdancer
My rule of thumb is not to mine data looking for edges, but instead to develop a hypothesis first about why an edge might exist and then try to verify it. If you switch causality on its head via data mining, you are much more likely to end up out of pocket.
Some modelling/forecasting software has come to my attention so I thought I'd let you all know.
There is a module that allows you to directly download Football-Data files into the GUI. Uses several probability distributions based on academic literature.
(1/n) Was this
#WorldCup
a 'shocking' one? That is to say, should we feel surprised by what unfolded? Yes, Japan beat Spain and Germany, and Saudi Arabia beat Argentina, but collectively as a set of 64 games, how likely or unlikely was it?
Three books (one of which I've read, the others which I intend to), that should be on the reading list of anyone who either find it hard to control potentially addictive behaviours or who find it hard to not to judge society negatively for 'allowing' them to happen.
Your brain is hardwired to anticipate the future. The expanding black hole is illusory but created by your brain that's trying to show you the future it expects. Knowing what the future might bring creates a sense of control in domains of uncertainty. That's why we like gambling.
After 13,484 bets, the expected yield from the Wisdom of the Crowd system is 4.084%. The actual yield is 4.082%. Of course, this is theoretical since you'd have long since been restricted by all the bookmakers had you not taken other measures to disguise your activity.
Here's some data based on traded Betfair volumes. AO = actual odds, IO = odds implied based on volume traded as a fraction of market total. Spot the outlier (discounting Belgium who have jumped from 20 to 40 in the actual market). Is this evidence of the England-favouritism bias?
Long term betting colleague Mike Lindley of Winabobatoo has written a nice little Excel worksheet for analysing bankroll evolution with varying parameters (odds and EV). You can find it (and other freebies) here:
So the 2023/24 Wisdom of Crowd season has ended. It's been another frustrating one on the back of an equally frustrating 2022/23. Together, the 2-season yield from 3,061 selections was just 0.692. The profit chart is shown alongside the methodology's expectation. (1/n)
(1/2) I've had the pleasure of reading and reviewing Predictive Methods for Football & Betting Markets, by Enrique Dóal Perez Frias, originally in Spanish and now translated into English. So much better than most stuff that's out there on this topic.
What a fabulous question, never to be uttered by people who say gambling offers nothing positive.
Understanding of variance, signal versus noise, process not outcomes, humility, modesty, endless cognitive biases. All in all, great lessons for life in general. Now that’s utility!
Such is the nature of variance and uncertainty, that if you could 'know' the winners in advance, the profit from over 13,000 Wisdom of Crowd value bets could be compressed into just the 36 longest-priced winners.
For last 5 seasons ATP & WTA tennis, betting
@Pinnacle
when top market closing price (9,490 bets, 22% of all odds) would have returned a loss of -11.8% (flat stakes). Betting all odds would have returned a loss of -3.6%. Difference has a t-test p-value of about 1 in 10 billion.
@ConceptWin
Perhaps, Alex, if you were taught about finance, risk taking, uncertainty, chance and randomness when at school, you and many others might end up making better financial decisions. This doesn't just apply to gambling but to people's relationship with money in general.
Most of you know this, but for those tempted to buy tips, do your due diligence when considering a purchase. With that in mind, I wanted to draw attention to a network of 4 tipsters who are clearly fake &need sounding out. Over the past few weeks they have spammed me repeatedly.
Give up your salary as a football pundit and take a much smaller one as a politician if you believe you can do better. Football punditry, like politics, is largely a zero-validity environment where nearly everyone thinks they know everything but really they know little at all.
Odds just after verdict and then 12 hours later after news has been digested. In one tweet, change my mind that the US is culturally broken, unfixable and this marks the beginning of the end of its leadership of the free world.
"Documents published by
#footballindex
... confirm that for months before its collapse the company had been reliant on new deposits to cover liabilities on existing bets "
That's a Ponzi. The only question still remaining is whether the owners were negligent or fraudulent.
The plan they’ve proposed would effectively force
#FootballIndex
users to pay for the privilege of taking over a worthless company
It’s insulting to the thousands of people who have lost life-altering sums of money. Thankfully we’re geared up for a fight!
Some red flags 🚩
Anyone who claims to have:
- inside information
- stable tips
- connections
- a “banker” or “max bet”
- “a sure thing”
- “have lumped on this lads”
Anyone who can’t tell you their average odds, ROI/yield, or has no record of their bets/profit & loss.
AVOID.
So lots of talk about the loss of home advantage in the Bundesliga. Here's the 36-game rolling average home win percentage (36 because that's how many games have been played behind closed doors, including 1 before lockdown). Vertical grey line delineates the change.
If you don't understand variance, life is so much more of a challenge. Control the things you can (skill), accept the things you can't (variance) and have the wisdom to understand the difference. Monte Carlo or Bust covers the maths of losing (and winning).
If someone says "don't believe in variance" then I say rubbish. Had a torrid time last 6 weeks - I don't hide anything - 27 losers on the bounce bar a few e/w place returns. Believe me it happens, today stopped the rot with 2 winners, it really isn't a world for the feint hearted
Outcome bias. One of the worst after overconfidence. This is why most people, and particularly football pundits and journalists will never really understand the point of expected goals. History, once lived, is seen as inevitable Forget the penalties, England lost the game.
@OnlineTrader1
@Mark74Robinson
But if the players had tucked away the penalties or Italy had missed more, we would have won and the guy is a hero. Fine margins.
Wisdom of Pinnacle Crowd has seen 12,007 live selections since August 2015. The expected yield is 4.12%. The actual yield is 4.13%. Sorry for all the accounts that got shut.
My attempt at guessing how bookmakers evolve their odds, and what it has to say about the number of bettors who are sharp. Feel free to say it's a load of rubbish.
It's not much, but I've uploaded a small data file of 220 for matches from the last round of major international competitions (no qualifiers): WC, ACON, CA, Euro, Confed Cup, Gold Cup. Closing odds from 40 or so bookies and goals.
Hope it's of some help.
I guess this is kind of obvious, but in a sample of 162,654 football matches, the ratio of the opening to closing 1X2 odds (
@Pinnacle
) was bigger for the 162,654 winners (1.0059) than the 325,308 losers (0.9945). The difference is significant. t = 38, p-value = 3e-316. 🙃
So I actually bothered to do the analysis. As you suggested, took out the big 3. Just looked at data from 2020. Sorry, don't have qualifiers. Maybe you do, in which case, show us your analysis (unless you still can't be bothered). Here is the chart. Favs lose 2.9%, Unders 4.4%
@12Xpert
Why don't you do the work? I have the data to support my conclusions. It's not worth the time to post them and explain it to you. You made the initial false conclusion and can't support it. Take Djok/Nadal/Federer out. How about include qualifiers? And why 10 years?
Something I always felt was true intuitively but hadn't bothered to test. The longer the football odds, the more likely they'll shorten by closing. Implying that despite bookies' efforts to incorporate favourite-longshot bias, bettors still prefer the underdog. Sample = 474,277
I estimate that Djokovic has bounced a tennis ball before serving in a professional tennis match 1 million times and has wasted nearly a week of viewers lives doing so.
Backing teams on bad losing streaks relative to their opposition appears to be profitable on Asian handicap market too. Last 5 seasons' of English league football +3.8% to 'fair' prices. Punters are ignoring regression to the mean and seeing meaning in hot streaks that isn't real
I can’t post this image enough times. It could be the most important one from my Monte Carlo or Bust book. Once a bettor aspiring to be more than recreational digests it, handling the psychology of losing will get a little easier. (Sharp = ev +2.5%, Square = ev -2.5%)
Every successful punter has stories on losing runs and giving the volume of betting most do, this can ensure some pretty long sequences indeed.
Losing no matter who you are is therefore to be expected. It's how you deal with it when it comes which matters most.
At
@GambleAware
's Annual Conference,
@andrewjonrhodes
of
@GamRegGB
criticised
#FootballIndex
for encouraging users to believe they were investing, not gambling. But Wayback machine shows this was not corrected until May 2020, 4 months after its pyramid nature was revealed to them
Amazon up to it's old tricks again. Just can't have any privacy these days. 😄
Hope you like the cover. Bet you can't guess what's in the book. 😉 Note that it's not due for release until December 2nd.
An entire chapter devoted to the subject of losing. You'd be amazed just little the difference is between sharps and "mugs" with respect to the expected length of losing runs and the size of drawdowns, and just how little time you'll spend at bankroll highs. My best chapter.
Essential reading for those weighing up which judges are worth following. Joseph's 'Monte Carlo Or Bust' also spends a lot of time explaining why groups of tipsters who are in essence 'throwing darts' can produce what appears to be sharp advice - great read!
Excellent commentary on the accuracy of xG models.
I should have an article with
@Pinnacle
on the usefulness of xG for match betting purposes, but been waiting months and still no sign of it. I’ll publish it myself next week if they can’t remember to do it.
Not all xG models are the same. Slight differences in per shot xG are to be expected.
But how does something like this happen? Same number of shots, but Flashscore is 50% higher than Fotmob (Opta).
There's a likely cause, and it's a good reminder to vet your xG data.
Tony Blair once said "Education, education, education." I say "Variance, variance, variance." If your oblivious to it, you WILL (financially) fail at betting, even if you're one of the few clever enough to have an edge.
We woke up talking about Variance today! 🤔
For those who are not familiar with such an important concept in the world of Sports Betting make sure to check our article about it! 👇
Do people understand that
#GameStop
is just another in a long line of pyramid schemes driven by greed and hubris, where only those who thought of it first get rewarded by everyone else chasing the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow?
And a lesson probably not a lot of bettors are aware of, even sharps: the difference in losing streak probability between squares (EV = -2.5%) and sharps (EV = +2.5%) is surprisingly small.
I enjoy a night at the casino, a bet on the football and perhaps politics. Please, explain to me on what grounds you feel eligible to tell me I can’t continue to enjoy these things along with millions of others?
Gambling should be entirely banned in the UK.
The value created is supposed to be entertainment - right?
OK - pop into your nearest bookie and tell me how many people you see who look amused and entertained.
Current 'luck scores' for
#PremierLeague
, the excess by which actual points exceeds expected points, assuming the latter is a better measure of longer term form. Those nearer the top should expect to mean regress south in the actual points table. Tottenham have already started.
From time to time I'm asked whether I'd provide xG data. To offer something more powerful than bookmakers' odds, this would require data & modelling beyond my means. However, from
@football_xg
might be of interest wanting to use xG for betting predictions.
Let’s be clear. Unless it’s offering thousands of tips every month with significant EV, this is not going to offer you an income every month. Betting has too much variance. If you want a living from betting, understand variance otherwise its psychological effects will kill you.
@ImNotATipster1
@12Xpert
follow us for the best Draw and under 1.5 tips.
Check out to see our ultimate soccer betting strategy. sure way to make an income every month. Use our tips with our ultimate soccer betting system.
Children aren’t allowed to gamble. On the other hand, they are allowed to buy shit food and eat themselves to death. Over 1 in 4 10-11 year olds are obese in England. You’re fighting the wrong battle.
I'm thinking of reducing the main leagues football data bookmakers for 1X2 odds to just two: bet365 and Pinnacle. Is there any reason why I shouldn't do this? In return, I am thinking of adding bet365 and Pinnacle O/U and Asian odds (in addition to max/avg). Would this be useful?
UK Gambling Commission releases new methodology for counting problem gamblers. It conceded that surveys focused on online self-completion produce consistently higher estimates of gambling harm. Despite that, let's compare the new rates to other moral hazards blighting UK adults.
A few idiots tweeting here. I trust you all know better. The problem is that when a bet wins or loses, outcome & hindsight biases go into overdrive to tell the punter that the prior probability of the win was 1 or 0 all along, and the phase "alternative histories" has no meaning.
Over the weekend there were several tweets pushing the idea that a bet is only value if it wins. Clearly nonsense and be careful who you listen to - some people might be well meaning but such uninformed views help no-one.
Why is the expected profit calculated from Pinnacle's closing odds not as accurate as when calculated from their odds at the time the Wisdom of Crowd value is found? I've said a few things about it. Interested to know your thoughts.
Skeeve is one of the most personally respected tipsters I had the pleasure to verify back in the days of Sports-Tipsters verification. He did things the right way (for example Pinny odds only and prices quoted 15 mins after first announcement etc). A proper niche market tipster.
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The 2018/19
#PremierLeague
is almost upon us. I've written a short article looking at the relative of value of Betfair Exchange Premiership match odds after commission is applied.
Public Health England (PHE) estimates cost of gambling harm in England (2021) to be £1.27bn.
Cabinet Office (2001) estimated the cost of alcohol harm in England & Wales to be £21bn, whilst PHE (2009) estimated it at between £27bn and £52bn.
(1/3)
If you like using percentage staking (e.g. Kelly) then my latest
@PinnacleSports
article explains how your range of performances is log-normally distributed. I've built another little calculator for this too.
Are
@Pinnacle
's Asian handicap odds efficient? (Well, what do you reckon I'm going to say? 😄)
Also a method for how to calculate expected goal superiority from them as an alternative to using spread betting totals.
"
@FiveThirtyEight
have an xG database containing over 15,000 matches. The expected goal difference in this match was just over 4 in Liverpool’s favour, making this the joint-eighth best away performance by this measure... and the finest from the 1,328 Premier League matches."