Tonight's Matches

Brazil looked reasonably comfortable last night in the opening match. Great strike from Neymar in the first couple of minutes, and the last goal was very slick also.

By the way, don't worry about getting an early night tonight in preparation for work in the morning, and forget all about that boring golf competition that's going on somewhere in America. Instead, settle down to BBC2 and BBC1 at 8:00 and 11:00 this evening and watch Mexico v Italy and Spain v Uruguay.

Everyone's is predicting a low-scoring affair in the first match, and that may well be the case. Personally I'll be scalping this match only, which will allow me to dip in and out of the match as the action rises and falls (hopefully it does rise occasionally). The advantage of scalping the whole match, of course, is that I'm not taking a position throughout the entire course of the match. I'll just be making hay during the appropriate trends of the game.

With regards to the second match, I said yesterday that I'm interested in Uruguay, and indeed I am. Up front they have Diego Forlan and Luis (Red Rum) Suarez, and they are both prolific for their national side, even though as a team they are struggling to make it to next year's World Cup.

Spain are obviously favourites for this match but, all things being equal, you would expect both teams to get out of the group, with Nigeria and Tahiti failing to progress if the form book is right. A draw wouldn't be a particularly bad result for either team, but with this competition not having the same kudos as the major ones, I'm hoping that all the teams will play with a little more bravado and openness than normal.

So, with the array of attacking talent on both sides (Suarez especially will want to impress the likes of Real and Barcelona), alongside some signs of occasional defensive frailties, I'm guessing there might be one or two goals in tonight's match.

Dave from Betfair Football Trading - the highs and lows is a great advocate of, what he has termed, the Scatter Gun, whereby you back pre-match 1-1, 2-1 and 1-2, and then perhaps 20 minutes in when the odds are good enough, a little back of 2-2 also. This is his mainstay strategy and it's held him in good stead. If you're not familiar with it, then I suggest you pop over to his blog and devour everything on there. Do note, however, that this is a trading strategy and not a set-and-leave approach. You need to manage these scores in-play.

I'm not sure the starting odds are quite right as far as Dave might be concerned (perhaps Spain would be a little short for his liking), but personally I think this is a reasonable fit for this match and that's what I'll be going for. I'll obviously also do a bit of scalping on this one also, as it can help iron-out the kinks in pretty much any chosen strategy.

Good luck tonight if you trade.

The Confederations Cup

It was only a couple of posts ago that I found myself whining about the lack of decent football activity during the summer, and that this was the perfect time to take a break and recharge the batteries.

Well don't you listen to a single word. Pah! All utter nonsense because today sees the start of the Confederations Cup and there is definitely some interest to be had here. Sixteen matches over 15 days, involving some of the world's top countries (with a few minnows thrown-in for good measure) and, listening to the players and managers being interviewed, it's easy to see how seriously everyone is taking this. This is the major practice competition before the World Cup next year, and all the teams involved want to win.

For Brazil, of course, it's also a double practice run for them. They can test out their grounds and their infrastructure ahead of the real thing. Interestingly, goal-line technology is also being used in this competition, so it will be intriguing to see how that fares.

So, what do we have? Well, these are the teams involved and, for good measure, I've also plonked their World Elo Ranking alongside too:

• Spain (1)
• Brazil (3)
• Italy (8)
• Mexico (11)
• Uruguay (17)
• Japan (25)
• Nigeria (34)
• Tahiti (141)

As you can see, there is really only one whipping-boy in the whole competition, with a decent spread of opposition amongst the rest. Brazil, as the hosts, and Spain (who have chosen a very strong squad) are the obvious candidates to win the whole thing - but Uruguay, the South American Champions look interesting to me.

Of course Uruguay have Mr I'm-very-hungry-so-do-you-mind-if-I-take-a-chunk-out-of-your-arm Suarez in the team, and they also have Edinson Cavani, who apparently every team in the world is going to sign this summer. Anyway, they look like dangerous opponents. They play their first match on Sunday against Spain, and I'm expecting that to be well worth watching. Spain beat them in February 3-1 but their recent form has been good.

Next, you could also consider Japan, who can boast some really decent attacking talent and Nigeria (the African Cup of Nations Champions) to upset the apple cart in a couple of matches. Japan play today against the hosts Brazil, whilst Nigeria will be hoping to get a decent start when the play Tahiti on Monday.

The winners odds are shown below for your interest. But my advice is to get involved. Don't be a wanker and take time off during the summer. Whoever came up with that stupid idea should be shot at dawn!

Incidentally, 188 have a small promotion on the Confederations Cup, which should help:

Cry Baby

This is Jesus Navas, Manchester City’s £15 million signing from Seville. The picture was taken as he arrived at Manchester International Airport, in preparation for life in England. Doesn’t look very happy, does he?

This is an extract from the BBC website:

Navas has suffered from chronic home-sickness in the past, and spent his entire career at Sevilla, which is 20 miles north of his hometown of Log Palacios y Villafranca. He turned down a move to Chelsea after helping Sevilla beat Middlesbrough in the 2006 UEFA Cup final, citing a fear of living abroad. Navas has suffered from anxiety attacks when away from home for extended periods and has been forced to leave training camps on several occasions.

Well done Citeh. Top signing that. The first sign of trouble and he'll be on a plane faster than you can spunk another title chance against the wall. 

With Navas and Carlos AWOL Teves now both in the team, Citeh have also announced the signings of Banacek and Magnum PI, so they at least stand a chance of tracking down their players once they have fled the country.

According to reports from reliable sources, Navas arrived at the airport and immediately tried to purchase a ticket back to Spain. Well, after seeing Manchester, who can blame him?

Betting Momentum

After my long break, I wandered into the trading chatroom the other day, absent-mindedly placed some bets on a couple of U21 Euro Championship matches, which both lost me a bit of money - but I actually found myself watching a rather nondescript movie called The Double, starring Richard Gere halfway through the matches, and I ended-up just switching my laptop off without even trying to manage my postions.

So what was that all about then?

After thinking about it for a couple of days, I realise now what's going on. In the first instance, I'm one of those people where it takes a while to get back into the swing of things. I need a while before I'm mentally back in gear, and I have built-up enough momentum to start betting/trading seriously. I find it also takes a little while to become attuned to the prices of things again after a long lay-off.

Unfortunately that's not all. I am a football fan and with one or two exceptions, I trade football and not much else - but I realise that I'm not the type of fan that can just sit and absorb any match that's on. I have to be "interested" in the match or I can happily just switch it off.

I am interested in all the major European leagues, especially and obviously the English leagues, but I have found that interest wane considerably come mid-may when they are all done and dusted. Many of you make good money during this "off" season, when some of the lesser leagues start, and all power to you for that, but for me making money from the match is not enough to sustain me. I also need to be entertained or at least interested in the teams involved. Now that might sound all very precious on my part but that's the reality.

For myself, also, this time of year is a natural break that I look forward to. Football trading is nothing more than a hobby for me, and I don't want to risk getting bored with that hobby or to feel that it's become a duty. Also, with the increasingly good weather, I also have no real inclination to be stuck inside staring at my computer screen when I could be out with friends or baking up a storm on my barbeque in the garden. Next month, the children will be on their summer break and I want to enjoy that time with them also.

It is, afterall, all about balance. When I'm not enjoying the sun or out with friends, then I want to take the opportunity to prepare for next season. That means updating my spreadsheets, gathering more data, working on my database, etc.

So, I may dip my trading toes back into the water over the summer on a few occasions, but I will recognise the facts and largely give it a rest. That's not to say that I will completely neglect this little blog of mine. I'll try and come up with one or two posts of interest to you all, and I'll try and post semi-regular over the summer.

Good luck to all you who will continue to trade during this time.

What a relief

I turn my back for a few moments, and all kinds of whacky happenings have been going on in my absence. Yes, I'm back home and, although I had an absolutely fabulous time abroad, I'm relieved and happy to be home.

However, all the footy shenanigans have been going on whilst I've been away. Very interesting indeed.

All change in Manchester I see, with Mancini out, Fergie and his purple nose safely wheeled off to the retirement home, only to be replaced by yet another jocular, bubbly and excitable Scot. The Special (Needs) One back at Stinkford Bridge. Mark Hughes, who's managerial skills seem almost inversely proportional to his skill as a player, miraculously finds himself back in gainful employment after Stoke advertised at JobSeekers Plus, so on and so forth. All very exciting.

I was more than a little gutted to see my lovely Spurs yet again fail to reach the last four. The usual blip that we always suffer at the same time of year did for us yet again. Consequently, we'll be lucky to keep hold of our little monkey-faced genius Gareth Bale, but if someone is foolish enough to offer £85 million for him, I'd be happy to see him go for that. We could replace him with Ronaldo I suppose :-)

In other areas, I've noticed that those decent people at tradingfootball.eu have also been busy while I've been away, and seem to have been doing okay. They've added some interesting new strategies up which I will be analysing in due course.

Of course, I'm not about to detail what those strategies are here as that would be grossly unfair, but their strategies did make me knock-up yet another little spreadsheet that some of you may find useful. 

When looking to create a new strategy for yourselves, you obviously want to cover as many of the possible scorelines as possible, even if some of those scorelines will end-up as a scratch or smallish loss. You may decide to cover a selection of scorelines at the outset of a chosen match, and then work towards covering off any remaining danger scorelines as the game progresses. Or you may just be the type of person who likes maximum coverage right from the word go.

Either way, to help you all work-out what a possible strategy could be, I have created a little hedging spready.

Download Hedger Here

This is a rather simple spreadsheet, and the only changes you need to make are in row 4, where you can choose to Back or Lay any selection (or selections) in the match odds, both teams to score, Under/Overs and Correct Scores market. Click on each item in row 4 and a dropdown will appear allowing you to choose either Back or Lay. 

Playing around with the spreadsheet will allow you to see which Backs and which Lays cover-off which scorelines, allowing you to develop a strategy. 

It's mildly lame, I suppose, but some of you may find it helpful.

________________________________

On a different note, I have to report that I've been (correctly) taken to task regarding my last "testing your strategies post. I had a couple of basic mistakes in the spready and some anonymous chap was kind enough to spot them and point them out to me:

Anonymous1 June 2013 15:36

I am afraid the spreadsheet is not correct.

1. The column K : Result column needs to look at the Full Time Result (and not part Time result). Your need to look at column G instead of column J.

2. The calculation of the return in incorrect. For example your first return for the match Blackburn3 Everton2. You lay Everton , and Everton wins 1-0; you should therefore lose your stake and not win.

3. The result and return columns were incorrect.

Unfortunately once all corrections are done, the return is

- £ 61.

Happy to send the amended spreadsheet to anyone. Just send me an email to jmf@btinternet.com

Anon is of course spot-on about my silly mistakes, but largely I suppose it doesn't matter in this instance. The main point about the post was to get you all to start testing your own strategies. The spready that I knocked-up took about half-an-hour and was specifically for the post in question.

I will, however, endeavour to do better in future. Do bear in mind though, that the spreadsheet I've just posted above also only took 30 minutes and so there is a decent chance that has errors also!

End of the season (for me)

For personal reasons, this year has been quite different to those previously. So, like many football teams, my season is effectively going to end early this year.

On Friday, I'm flying off with my family for a nice six week break. We'll be visiting Malaysia and the Philippines, soaking up the sun and generally relaxing. I've been to South-east Asia several times before and it's a fabulous part of the world.

For me personally it will be a chance for rest and recuperation, and I will recharge my batteries ready for the rest of the year. Hopefully it will also herald a good trading season come August.

So, apologies for a rather erratic set of posts this year, but I do foresee a return to a more steady, continuous  set of posts in the new season.

I hope you all have a good end-of-season trading/betting, and I might touch base with you all again come mid-June when I get back.

Testing your strategies - part II

In my last post, I showed you how to collect the raw data from www.football-data.co.uk and to use that data to apply a basic strategy against every single match (all 380) in one fell swoop to see if that strategy was a winning idea. Sadly, it wasn't, but this was a reasonable first stab at some back-testing, and hopefully even that simple example will have triggered some ideas in you that you want to test.

As you get more into this, however, you will quickly start to see some problems with the approach I have outlined. Many strategies rely on looking at previous results to assess current form or to help with the selection process of a particular strategy. The back-test that I showed in my last post provides no method to select a team’s previous match or indeed their previous n matches.

There are a few considerations when looking to solve this problem: 

1. We don’t know the number of games a team has played so far.
2. We don’t know if a team’s last match was played at home or played away (different column in the raw data).
3. We don’t know how far back a team’s last match was (i.e, the last one could have been postponed). 

Strategy Idea:

Let’s take a concrete example that we want to test. I have an amazing idea (yes, another one) to lay any team below odds of 3.00 who’s last match was at home and where they lost that match without scoring a goal. So, if a team lost their last match at home to nil, then they will become a lay target. Okay, so how do I achieve this? I need to: 

1. Check the odds in their current match (are they equal or less than 3.00?)
2. Check if they were at home in their last match.
3. Check if they lost their last match.
4. Check if they scored a goal in their last match.

If all these qualifying criteria equate to true, then I must assess whether I would have won/lost money laying such a team. In other words, what would my P/L have been?

Previous matches: 

So, how do we solve these problems? Well, as in most things in life, there is more than one way to skin a cat. I have a method that I have come up with to allow me to overcome these issues. Doubtless, my solution is not the most elegant or effective around as I’m certainly no Excel guru – but it seems to work okay and should allow you to satisfactorily test a wide variety of strategies that require the resolution of these issues.

Below you can download the latest version of my E0.xls spreadsheet. The original test is still in the workbook, but now I’ve added another sheet and called it “Test 2”.

Download test 2 Here

In this “Test 2” sheet, you will see a whole new set of columns. For the columns G up to K, I have simply reproduced the data within the raw data sheet E0. This is merely a convenience and allows me to manipulate the data free of the actual raw data. As mentioned in the previous post, this is always good practice.

If I wanted to make this sheet into some kind of template, I would also be tempted to turn these various columns into “names”, but I won’t go into that right now as I'm already worried that I'm going to confuse the hell out of you all.

I do realise that, for those of you who are not Excel-orientated, what I'm going to describe below might be a bit too much, in which case you may want to pass on the whole thing – but for those of you who even have some small knowledge of Excel, this is probably all understandable. I hope so anyway.

Meat and Potatoes:

Right let's crack on. Columns L and M are also copies of columns in the data sheet, and are the home and away match odds. Using these helper columns, I can now start to build-up my lookups properly.

In Columns C and D, I have added a game count for each team (just a simple COUNTIF). Then using that game count and the team name, in columns A and B, I have simply concatenated (joined) these two values together to create a string that I can subsequently use to lookup previous matches. The concatenation is very simple:

            cell_ref & cell_ref

For example: =IF(G13="", "", G13&C13)

We are now pretty well setup to perform our previous match lookups. To assess each team’s previous match, we need to do this: 

1. Generate a lookup string “on-the-fly”.
2. Try and find a match for that string in the previous match data.

We have the current game number for both teams, so we need to do something like this:

            String = team_name + (current game number – 1)

This is cool, because we can now go back any number of games to pick up the result from previous games. If I want to find out the result of a team’s match 6 games ago, it’s simply (current game number – 6). Columns E and F use this lookup technique to find-out if the previous game was a home game or an away game.

=IF(C22<2, "", IF(ISNA(VLOOKUP(G22&(C22-1), $A$12:B607, 1, FALSE)), "A", "H"))

Hmm, what’s all this then. Looks a bit complicated. For columns E and F I’m saying:

If the number of matches is less than two, then put an empty string there, otherwise perform a vertical lookup (VLOOKUP) of the team_name+(game number -1) on the column containing the home name lookup tags (column A). The "ISNA" bit is saying, if there is an error (in other words, it cannot be found), then that must mean there previous game was an away match, so I can put an “A” in the cell, otherwise I did find it and I can plonk a “H” there.

So, columns E and F are themselves helper columns, but I’ve already used the lookup values in columns A and B to good effect. This is essentially the same kind of lookup I will be doing to test the actual strategy.

  

The real good news is that all of these columns A to M that I'm talking you through can be largely ignored and you don’t really need to know how they’re constructed. I just thought it would be helpful if you did know. The actual testing of our strategy can be found in columns O to T – but you can use this sheet to test other strategies and helper columns A to M should prove useful for numerous strategy tests.

Testing our strategy:

If you look at row 33 in the spreadsheet (where I have highlighted it in yellow), I have identified Everton as a team that last played at home and lost to nil (row 25).  How did I do this?

=IF(OR(H33="",F33="A", C33<2, D33<2, M33>$B$4),"", IF(AND(VLOOKUP(H33&(D33-1),$A$12:K32,9,FALSE)=0,VLOOKUP(H33&(D33-1),$A$12:K32,10,FALSE)>0),1,""))

Again, this looks much scarier than it actually is. Let’s break it down. The first part

IF(OR(H33="",F33="A", C33<2, D33<2, M33>$B$4),""

Is a set of disqualifying criteria. It’s saying: “if H33 (away team name) is empty” OR “if their last match was an away game” OR “they have played less than two matches” OR “their match odds are greater than 3.00”, then leave the cell blank. If all those criteria are met, then I can continue. The next bit:

IF(AND(VLOOKUP(H33&(D33-1),$A$12:K32,9,FALSE)=0,VLOOKUP(H33&(D33-1),$A$12:K32,10,FALSE)>0),1,"")

Is saying: “if the team’s last match resulted in a home scoreline of 0” AND “the team’s last match resulted in an away scoreline greater than 0”, then plonk a value of “1” in the cell. This then acts as a flag that we have a qualifying match. Columns Q to T then work from the fact that this is a qualifying match, and they see if laying the team in question would result in a win or not – which is essentially the same as the simple checks from my first post.

Looking at the results, we appear to have found 16 qualifying matches throughout the season, and have made £63 profit, which is an ROI of 39%. Cool.

Before we get too excited, however, there are a couple of things to note. The data from football-data.co.uk provides average odds but presumably these are Back odds, where as my strategy involves laying teams. The odds would therefore not be as favourable as I am using. Also, the number of qualifying matches is extremely low. I would need to either play with my maximum odds (if you change the figure in cell B4 you can do this yourself) to help me pull in more games, or I would need to run this strategy against an awful lot more matches. With such a small sample of qualifying matches, I am at the mercy of variance. In other words, it could just be a small hill just before the unending gradient downwards.

But once again, I haven’t spent any of my children’s hard earned inheritance (as they guy off Dragon’s Den would say) and, based on the results, I would say I need to investigate and experiment further. Or you can :-)

Hopefully, however, all this meddling has shown those of you who presently don't get involved in testing that it's really not that difficult. Once you get your hands dirty with it and build a couple of tests of your own, you will start to to get an idea of how intriguing it all is.

Even if that amazing Holy Grail of betting is not really out there and waiting to be discovered, you can nevertheless come-up with a half-decent idea and give it a thorough test against a vast amount of historic data in about twenty minutes. This will give you a reasonably definitive answer one way or the other.

Just remember, dont' go trialling it the using the fun method first!