The Gruesome Foursome
The Gruesome Foursome
With the English Premier League finally resuming a full fixture schedule this weekend, it is time to look back on a previous offering and in doing so, take stock of my attempt to achieve data driven betting excellence.
In what seems so long ago (if only for the simple reason that it is was) I served up a foursome of Premier League matches and took a look at them from the Over/Under 2.5 goal market and even though Manchester City vs West Ham was delayed by a week, I can finally take stock of the results.
First up here they are in terms of predictions:
| League | Home | Away | Over 2.5 | Over 2.5 Prediction |
| Premier League | Everton | Crystal Palace | 38.00% | Under 2.5 |
| Premier League | Brighton | Watford | 48.00% | Ignore |
| Premier League | Sheffield United | Bournemouth | 38.00% | Under 2.5 |
| Premier League | Man City | West Ham | 66.00% | Over 2.5 |
NOT GOOD, NOT GOOD AT ALL
Basically what you see above, is a case of everything that could gone wrong, did go wrong and the only outcome that saved my blushes was the fact that I decided not to take a punt on the Brighton vs Watford game.
Apart from that it really was a case of opposites attract, as the three recommended bets all ended up doing the opposite. Which has meant that ther percentage strike rate of success has taken something of a hammering (something that I wished happened to West Ham)
This means with the sample size increasing to 59 – 40 matches have been attached to the correct Over/Under outcome and that means with it just being over two thirds correct, the overall percentage rate of success is 67.79%.
Which means as the sample size is increasing, the success rate is shrinking. That in itself is not to be overly unexpected, but there is an issue in that we don’t want to this to continue for much longer and we will need this to stabilise at some point.
Where we are at a three quarter success rate for ‘GoalBot’, that has migrated down to two thirds and although this is still a little better than gut-instinct, we could do with a blockbuster week to reverse our fortunes.
Something that I hope will be the case this coming weekend, as there is a full fixture schedule on the horizon and one that offers us plenty of opportunities to make some correct data driven football predictions.
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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