FoG

Looking at the potential play off situation for Euro 2020 qualifying.  Automatic qualification is already slipping by some but who will have a second chance? What will be the fate of the likes of Iceland, Wales, Ireland, N. Ireland, Romania who are now odds against to qualify straight? Who will be the surprise team from Georgia, Kosovo, Macedona and Belarus who will have an easy playoff path already guaranteed to the Finals? The four Group Winners (GW) of each of the four Leagues qualify for a play-off. That makes 16 playoff spots, if they qualify directly their place is passed down. Wikipedia is a good place to start but is in order of current standings, which is unrealistic after so few matches, for example N. Ireland have played 4 matches and won 4 but only home and away against the group minnows. Ireland also are in an artificial position as both Denmark and Switzerland have enough games in hand to catch them. Finally England having only played twice means that their curr...

I have used a chrome extension to calculate the over rounds and the place book over rounds and add to the oddschecker website. For Top 2 places, the overround should sum to 200%.  191% place overround means that the place book is over broke, i.e. if the bookie were to take proportioned money on all outcomes then for every £191 in stakes it took it would pay out £200 forcing it to lose money. That's bad for the bookie, but it is good for you, you can take a plus EV bet on the Top 2 odds. The catch is you have to take a negative EV bet on the win odds which can completely cancel out the value of the Top 2 bet.  Sometimes we can take advantage of an over broke place book. To do so we can calculate the odds the bookies are offering on win and place (easy) and then we need an estimate of the true odds for win and place. Sometimes its relatively easy to get an estimate for win and place when there is a liquid popular market available on betfair exchange. In the case o...

The Question A lot of bookmakers offer what is called BOG or Best Odds Guaranteed. It means if you take an Early Price (EP) on a horse and the Starting Price (SP) is greater than the price you took, then you are payed at the better odds. Grammatically, it should be marketed as "BETTER" Odds Guaranteed and not "BEST" Odds Guaranteed but let's ignore that and investigate if this offer gives value to the punter and how much value. The Data I have been collecting price data on and off for horse races over the past year. The result is that I have a set of data for prices on all horses at different times of the day for a subset of all races ran last year. I have filtered this data to find the price available on Bet365 for each horse where I have recorded a price between the hours of 10am and 11am.  Since this data was collected ad hoc I don't have data for every horse, but the horses where I do have data, the data is accurate. I have collected a second set...