FoG

Paddy Power Accumulator  Promotion Advert Paddy Power are running a promotion on all top UK Football matches (see right).  They are offering 20% bonus on all 5 Fold+ Accumulators.  At first sight it sounds like a good deal.  But will the bookies "edge" swallow up the potential 20% bonus? The first problem is to find an accumulator that has any chance of paying out.  Even if you can find 5 overwhelming favourites at 90% certainty, the chance of all 5 of them coming in is 0.90 x 0.90 x 0.90 x 0.90 x 0.90 = 0.59.  And so although you may feel that you picked absolute bankers you are at only about a 60% chance that you will get a payout. Not even mentioning that dead certs like that are very few and very far between.   Calculating Adjusted Probability The next problem is the bookie's edge.  When a bookie quotes odds for example 5/1 for an event they mean 5 unfavourable outcomes to each 1 favourable which works out as a 1 in 6 chance or a 16.67% chance.  We can

Have you ever wondered what shapes the bookmakers odds?  The traditional wisdom would have you believe that the odds are based on where the money is.  Obviously if the majority of the money is on one particular outcome then the bookie will not want to be offering long odds on that outcome.   Is this true? Paddy Power recently published some information on where the bettors are putting their money on the Premier League outright market this year (see right).  Based on these stakes, you would think that Paddy Power would  ideally  want to offer Man Utd at 2/1, Liverpool, Arsenal and Chelsea at about 4/1 and Man City at about 9/1.  These payouts would guarantee  a profit for the bookmaker no matter who wins.  However the reality is far removed from that.   Take Liverpool for example.  Paddypower opened the market in June offering 13/2 on the Anfield Reds.  Liverpool clearly received strong backing from the punters.  The obvious reaction from the bookmaker would be to shorten their od

The  Colossus  website lets you choose your pick of results from a list of 7 games that they select.  It is similar to picking lotto numbers.  Then based on the actual results of the matches one lucky person may win the jackpot (or share in the jackpot if there is more than one correct pick).  The jackpot is a whopping  £ 10,000,000. Now unlike the lotto each pick is not equally likely to come up.  You should use this to your advantage and only pick the most likely scores.  Below chart shows the results for the English Premier League since August 1993.  We use the AOD (any other draw), AOA (any other away win) and AOH (any other home win) to classify the results in the same way that Colossus does.  This chart gives an indication of exactly how likely different scores are. Result of all premiership matches since Aug 1993 classified by scoreline. As you can see 1-1 draw is the most frequently occuring result, followed by 1-0 home win and a 2-1 home win.  These 3 scorelines make

I think Chelsea will win the Premier league. There, I've said it! — Gary Lineker (@GaryLineker) August 15, 2014 The Premier League is about to finally kick off.  Still time for that last minute punt on the outright winner.  Y ou will hear a lot of people make predictions on winners from Gary Lineker to Eamonn Dunphy to your mate down the pub. So why is the smart money on Man City? Well the information that the pundits usually leave out is how sure they are.  Are they 50% sure?  100% sure?  Before making an informed betting decision  you need to know the  probability  that they will win.  The Football pundits may be experts on football and can easily pick out the strongest team but would struggle to give the probabilities.  They generally are not experts on probability theory.  To get our probabilities we can turn to data analysis projects like bloomberg.  See here  for their current league predictions. The concept of Expected Value  can then guide us as to whether

It has happened again only about a month after my article about  Provisional Fifa Rankings   inspired the  likes of the Mirror  and ESPN  who also picked up the story of England's record drop.   Back then I had tweeted this days before the Mirror and ESPN articles on the same subject. @BBCSport @FIFAcom #WorldCup2014 Are England set for their lowest ranking since May 1996 (18 years!)? http://t.co/IRLO2MiPOc — david heaney (@davidheaney1978) July 3, 2014 And now Pinnacle Sports published a very similar article just a few days after my blog post on Poisson Predictions  where I calculated a 57% chance of win for Man Utd.  Their article can be found at  http://www.pinnaclesports.com/online-betting-articles/strategy/soccer/poisson.aspx .   The Poisson Distribution is not ground breaking news, Simeon Denis Poisson first described it back in 1837 and even then it was based on previous work by de Moivre in 1711.  I am also aware that it surely has been applied to sports betting

"There is no such thing as a sure thing." Opportunities come up from time to time where y ou can proportion your wagers on each outcome for a  guaranteed pay out .  Some examples can be found here -  http://www.betbrain.com/surebets/ .  What is the drawback to this apparent  free money ? The drawback  is that often times you have to sign up to several different bookmaker websites to get the advantage.  The hassle to sign up may not be worth the small margins in your opinion.  There may also be minimum deposits and different limitations and hassles in depositing and withdrawing your cash on each bookmaker website that may   also  turn you off. By the time you have set up the accounts on the appropriate bookie websites the odds may also have changed.  Thus resulting in a missed opportunity .  Even worse, you may lose money if the odds change after you already have placed the bet on one of the websites. So keep all that in mind as you read the rest below.

Meet Paolo Paroli.  Signor Paroli is an easy going type of guy.  He works as a waiter in a small pizza place in Milan.  He enjoys his job but at the end of the week there is not much left out of his pay cheque. Paroli is soccer mad like most italians.  He likes to have a regular punt on the weekend matches.  He doesn't mind small losses every now and again and chases the adrenaline rush of a big win.  He can only make small bets, its all he can afford, but he has created his own system.   He saves just €10 from his tips per week to play his system.  If the bet wins he adds it to his stake for the next week.  This way he can push his winnings and eventually win big.  When his winnings exceed € 1000 he pockets the total and starts again from  € 10.  To even further limit the risk Paroli decides to bet on the strongest favourites each week. Paroli began his system in 2002.  His first season was not the most successful.  His weekly spend is limitted, so he cannot lose more than