La Liga Review
La Liga Review
With the English Premier League in the midst of a half winter break/half schedule, I focused one of my previous articles on La Liga and this meant that my pursuit of data driven betting excellence had taken something of a continental lean.
While with it being the first attempt at Spanish dominance it meant it was time to christen a new model one that came in the form of ‘LigaBot’ and it was one that saw a number of fundamental changes regarding how the predictions were made.
With Barcelona being away from home but having a poor run of results away from home it meant that previously, even though they had a fair superior league position than their opponents Real Betis, the away form was too far weighted in terms of prediction.
Which meant some fundamental changes were to be made in order to get a better success rate in terms of my data driven football predictions, change that is further referenced in the link at the top of the page.
However, now is not the time for stalling any further, lets now take a look at how ‘LigabBot’ fared in his first wave of Spanish picks. Although, before we do so lets recap what those picks actually were:
A TASTY RIOJA
So with the outcomes above, how did we actually fare? Well for starters the Friday night game saw Deportivo Alaves get the better of Eibar and that meant that any hopes of a ludicrous ten-fold would not get over the line.
However, things approved as Levante and Getafe both won their games – meaning the state of play was two correct data driven football predictions out of three, could Villarreal extend the winning streak?
Unfortunately, there was something of an upset there as Real Valladolid picked up a welcome win over Vilarreal and although Atletico Madrid picked up a routine win over Granada, we were only at three out of five.
WHERE’S THE DRAWS?
Unfortunately picking the draw, seemed to be the ultimate undoing as all three games that were predicted in this guise, ended up being not the case and arguably was the tipping the point between a mid-table and league winning week.
With three out of seven going into the final stretch, things had the potential to get incredibly bleak and although Sevilla did me no favours either, at least Real Madrid and Barcelona got over the line – the latter thanks to the changes to the model beforehand.
Therefore, if you have lost track it ended up with five correct predictions out of ten for ‘LigaBot’ which for a control week is pretty much par for the course and this is gives me a decent platform in which to work with for this coming weekend.
What will be interesting though, is last week I made sure that there was less weight on the away matches but now that the ‘big teams’ are playing at home, will this cause something of an issue or will it just reinforce matters. That’s something we will find out in the next La Liga article.
Happy punting and thanks for reading. Dan
If this has grabbed your interest and you would like to discuss/feedback then please feel free to drop me a message at dan@realfootballman.com. While I am always looking for new football/data projects to work on and if you feel that my skills would be of use, I can be contacted at the same address.
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