Posts Tagged prediction

Before I start, my ratings on the champions league this week were almost spot on. Thanks to the standard deviation of these things, its quite rare to hit the nail on the head. But the large number of matches did help quite a bit in hitting the bullseye this week. So it’s been an excellent week on the footy, I’ve got some money to give back now!

I was interested to see some discussion on predicting a draw bumping around a few blogs.  This is poinant for me, as the draw was the first ever thing I tried to predict when I first started my quest to make money from gambling many many years ago.

The interesting thing I discovered was that predicting the price  of a draw wasn’t actually too hard and you can be very accurate with a bit of effort. When I look at the market though, it is clear that I’m not the only person to know how to do this, which is no surprise. Sometimes distortions do exist and these have pushed the draw price around to levels that could be seen as value. But that’s quite rare. Certainly, on the high profile matches, the market is very accurate.

One issue you will have is that when you are placing an outright bet, you pay an arm and a leg in commission. Trade your position though and your effective commission is reduced. That is why I always have a preference to ‘trade’ where possible. For the draw I simply place orders at levels I know are value, if they get matched, great. If not then I have lost nothing. One thing you should always be aware of is that data mining is statistical deja vu. When you predict you are not concerned with the past, but the future. Its possible to find no end of things that work backwards, but unfortunately the future is not in the past! Always look for why things could happen, don’t rely exclusively on what has happened.

Here is something from the past however, I am glad I didn’t lay odds on this draw or else I would have surely been bankrupted!

http://www.betangel.com/blog_wp/2010/05/06/the-battle-for-forth-place/