FoG

With Johan winning the Lincoln on Saturday, 21 tipsters in the Handinap competition will be very happy.  But we all know that a good bet can lose and a bad bet can win.  It is about the process rather than the outcome.  So what were the good bets? The Experts StarSports had released a market on who would win the Handinaps competition.  It quickly reflected the money as a couple of users clearly wanted the honour of going off as favourite.  Some unknown names moved to the top of the betting and the compiler has mentioned some losers in the book. However before the market was turned upside down I took a screenshot.  It would be handy to have a list of twitter profiles which were rated highly for their tipping ability, coming from another expert on racing and trading.  So this is the list that I will use as the experts.  The list is solid, I've enjoyed any content, interviews and guests on podcasts this list have put out. Below are their reported picks.  And broken down by frequency:

This article relates to the horse tipping competition organised on twitter by Handinaps . I have run a few basic simulations to give an idea of distribution of scores for different player types (sharps/guessers) and different strategies (low risk/high risk). Fav Sharp : This is a low risk strategy for a sharp punter that is adept at finding value on the shorter priced odds.  The parameters I have used here is that he has a 10% edge and he can find two horses about 5.0 decimal odds in each of the 40 races.  He tips both. Fav Guesser : This again is low risk, the favourites are short enough prices that you would expect the final position to converge to close to the expected value over 40 races (80 picks).  This type of player however is not sharp, so his EV will average out at some negative number to account for the margin the bookie applies to favourites.  Again the parameters I use here is 5.0 decimal odds and giving the relatively uninformed punter a -15% edge. Mid Range Sharp : As th

I can't really call myself a gambling blog if I dont put some content out there for Cheltenham.  The major offer that most bookies put out these days on the horse racing is the extra place offers.  There is much speculation on twitter on which bookies will offer the most places on the major races.  There is definitely tons of EV being given away by the bookies here as they compete for customers looking for the best offer.   But what is the best way to play it? Some people ( recs ) will just back the horse they fancy.  This is fine, its a bit of fun, you cheer your horse on and the extra place offer is just a bit of a bonus for you. Others ( arbers/matched bettors ) will back and lay to lock in a profit no matter the result.  They have two options - lay on the standard place market or lay on the extra place market.  The difference is they either lock in guaranteed profit or take a small qualifying loss gambling on winning both the place part of the back and  the place lay when the

Input odds below (in decimal): Home Odds: Draw Odds: Away odds: Over 2.5 Odds: Calculate Params See also Elo Reverse Calculator . Dixon Coles Dixon Coles is a method of generating probabilities on football matches.  It is related to Poisson but adds a correlation for low scores.  It seems to be one of the most accurate public methods.  It requires three parameters lambda, mu and rho.  rho describes how related low scores are.  lambda and mu represent the average goals the home and away team are expected to score. In this calculator I have fixed rho = -0.13 (more info here  and here ) and I simply do a brute force search varying lambda and mu to find the values that has the lowest error from the Win Draw Lose and Over 2.5 odds entered.  I use the WDL odds and Over/Under odds as they are the most liquid betting markets and you can usually read a very accurate estimate for these off oddschecker or the exchange.   The solutions (from this brute force search described