Summary

This post summarizes the models predictive performance vs the bookmakers predictive performance to date.

It additionally summarizes the staking performance to date.

This post will remain sticky and replaces the round by round results post.

Detailed bet history

For those who have contributed to the initial bank, the break down of your contribution and what you are currently entitled to is below. It’s pretty self explanatory with the main column being ‘entitlement’. This is how much you are entitled given your initial contribution. The gain (in dollars) is the amount of profit/loss you have currently made on your investment

Summary

Hi guys, I’ve been a bit slack on posting results each week, but unfortunately we havn’t had much action regarding betting due to origin matches and low probability picks.

In any-case below are the R14-17 results and overall predictive results to date.

Teh model performed poorly across the two bye weeks leading into origin (as expected) and has been primary reason for betting abstinence.

The model improved moving into round 16 and overall is sitting at ~60% since across all rounds.

Going forward I am probably going to just keep a sticky post updated with results to date as posting results by week is quite a bit to keep up with.

Conclude

OK, lets hope for a good round 14!

Summary

Since there were only 4 games in round 12, I thought I would post the results of round 12 & 13 together to save myself some time.

Round 12 was a very poor predictive round (1 out of 4 correct) owing to the models inability to properly account for team changes due to representative matches (State of Origin). However; we did better than the bookmaker (5 out of 7) in round 13 after I put a bit more weight on the team dynamic factor/s to account for player absences due to Origin.

Although retrospectively we know the model did well in round 13, at the time I chose to abstain from betting because some (key) team players were being rested up after Origin.

OK so lets take a detailed look at results for round 12-13 and the results to date:

Conclude

OK, lets hope for a good round 14!

Summary

This round we didn’t lay any stakes due to poor expected return and low probability scores.

Despite this, the model performed slightly better than the bookmakers and predicted 6 of 8 games (75%). The bookmakers (at time of previous post) actually had the Eels as favorites over the Storm, although leading up to and just before this match the the Storm became market favorites

As a point of interest, assuming I had staked $100 on each game at the odds I posted in the round 11 staking and predictions guide, we would have won a total of $140. We would have had $800 in bet risk and therefore would have made a 17% return on this risk. But as stated previously we currently have a very conservative bet strategy and therefore chose not to bet this round.

Conclude

OK, lets hope for a good round 12!

Summary

This round was a better staking round with 4 of 5 bets paying off. The at risk amount for the round (amount of money staked) was $500, however due to the relatively short odds on the majority of games, the profit for the round was a modest $72. The model predicted 5 of 8 games (62.5%) doing better than the bookmaker/market who predicted on 4 of 8 games (50%).

Total profit to date rose to $135.00 which currently represents a 6% return on our initial bank

Conclude

OK, lets hope for a good round 11!

Summary

This round was pretty interesting!!. The predictive accuracy was well below average with only 3 of 8 predictions being correct! There were some pretty big odds swings after my initial post (~3 days before start of the round) so I am comparing the closing odds (to demonstrate how poorly the ‘market’/bookmaker did on this round as well). Four strong favorites for the round ended up losing (50% bookmaker accuracy) which included 3 games we staked on. In particular:

• St George lost to Warriors after becoming strong (1.65) favorites when it was announced Warriors dropped six players from the team. When we staked on this game we locked in odds on St George at 2.45 so it actually became a game which we had a high probability of a decent return, but alas St George couldn’t do it!!
  • As a side note, the opening and closing odds of St George represented one of the best hedging opportunities of the year which I will discuss in an upcoming post on arbitrage/hedging

• Rabbits (strong 1.35 favorites) lost to West Tigers

• Bulldogs (reasonably strong 1.65 favorites) lost to Parramatta

• Brisbane lost to Sharks (28-30) after a strong (but not strong enough) come back in the second half

Aside from this we did have a win on Melbourne at odds of 1.50 ($50 profit).

Needless to say that the three staking losses made a reasonable impact on the overall bank taking a $250 chunk off our $2,513. This took our bank back down to $2,263, however this is still $63 above our initial bank so we are still in the black. Its just unfortunate that we “lost” an opportunity to increase our profit margins to sustain potential future losses.

Conclude

OK, lets hope for a good round 10!

Summary

We had a great round with 7/8 predictions correct. In addition to this, of the 5 bets placed, we profited from 4 and broke even on the 5th (due to cash back offer). Our initial bank for the round was $2,107.54 and after all concluded bets the bank sits at $2513.03 This represents a $313 profit to date (14% ROI)

We had a big win from a 5 game ‘multibet’, and profited from the 3 head to head bets recommended by the model.

Before I go on, in my last post I indicated I was staking on 3 head to head games (all of which profited), however after my post I actually placed two additional bet. One was a ‘multibet’ and the other was a head to head bet of which a there was a bookmakers promotion offering cash-back under certain conditions (margin <8 points).

I haven’t explained the math behind why I did this however I will outline in a future post explaining how Sportsbet’s head-to-head multibet odds are calculated. I also realize that I said in my original staking strategy that I wouldn’t place any ‘exotic’ bet types, however I hadn’t factored in the potential advantages which can be gained from various bookmaker promotions (which make some of these bet type more attractive). Again I will explain in a future post. Ok, now lets review how we did in detail:

Conclude

Ok, lets hope we can can build on our great start to investing in following rounds!

Summary

Unfortunately this round we had a poor performing staking round with a staking accuracy of 33% (wining 1 of 3 bets). Overall we had a predictive accuracy of 62.5% (5 of 8), however unfortunately 2 of the three games we mis-predicted were games we staked on!! This might seem ‘unlucky’, however it is more appropriate to call this result statistically unlikely given the historic performance of high probability predictions. That aside, ‘statistically unlikely’ events can and do happen!

The two staking losses brought our overall bank to $2,107.54 (-92.46 from an initial bank of $2,200) for a return (to date) of -4.2%. Don’t get dis-heartened though; remember this is a season long strategy and we are bound to get a little volatility.

Conclude

Ok, lets hope we can can build on our great start to investing in following rounds!

Betting Strategies

Onto the betting strategies… To keep it simple, we have looked at 7 betting strategies…

• Bet on the Home team
• Bet on the Away team
• Bet with the Bookmaker
• Bet against the Bookmaker
• Bet against the Bookmaker for the Home team
• Bet against the Bookmaker for the Away team
• Bet for a specific team (Melbourne Storm in this example)

We can have a look at how many bets this results in:

The Simulations

Lets run these simulated simple betting strategies, and see what it does to our initial bank of $1000.

Plotted results over time, the dashed line represents the initial bank amount of $1000.

Of particular interest is the outcome of betting on the bookmaker favourite, or against the bookmaker ending up within a few dollars of one another.

To put these results in context, I’ve run a coin-toss simulation, where a fair coin was used to determine who to bet on, with a 100 simulations performed over time. The aim is to present a range of possibilities where random chance is driving the betting decisions. This can provide some context for the performance of the other betting models.

This shows that at the end of 2015, had we followed either betting strategy, we would have been not much worse/better off than just letting a coin toss determine who to bet on.

Compare this to the most robust betting strategy of betting on the home team who isn’t backed as the favourite to win by the bookmakers.

It appears that very rarely would our coin-toss strategy result in the same performance. I believe this betting strategy could warrant further investigation, given the simplistic nature of its application, it could be improved with different stakes based on the odds, or other parameters to help prune out unfavourable bets. Stay tuned?

Summary

We had a great round 6; with seven out of eight predictions correct (87.5% precision). We missed out a clean sweep (8/8) only on the last game where Bulldogs defeated Melbourne. The bookmakers didn’t have as good a round, predicting only 4 of 8 games correctly!

I stated in my last post , I was going to stake $50 (5% of $1,000) on the Cowboys to win against Penrith at odds of 1.61. Not long after my post I had a flood of contributors which increased the starting bank roll to $2,200 and hence the final stake to $110. By the time I placed the bet the odds actually lengthened (which is favorable) to 1.69 and we ended up with a profit of $75.90 ($110*1.69 - $110).

Those that took my advice and had a ‘punt’ on Roosters to beat the Rabbits and Manly to beat the Warriors would have come away with tidy profits as the final odds offered on these games were very decent!

Finally, this was another round where away teams won just as many games as home teams (4 each), further validating my decision to de-weight the importance of this feature in my re-model.

Conclude

Ok, lets hope we can can build on our great start to investing in following rounds!