The Upper Tier
The Upper Tier
If you read my previous article on the Over 2.5 goals market, you will know the operations have been scaled up considerably and although there is now scope to carry out a data driven betting approach to England’s top five leagues, it doesn’t mean the Premier League project has been parked.
Especially when you consider that I have a 77.7% success rate in terms of recommended bets for the English Premier League and even though last weekend gave me little to write home about, it is time to try my luck once again.
Therefore, without further ado, here is what has been recommended by ‘GoalBot’ this weekend:
EVERYTHING IS UP FOR GRABS
What is interesting here, is that all of the nine matches (West Ham vs Liverpool has been postponed due to the league leaders Club World Cup duties) fall either side of the recommended threshold and there are no games that are considered too close to call.
Which means, that the sample size that I will be testing will be at it’s biggest and more importantly, to preserve the 77.7% success rate, I am going to have to return seven correct predictions this week – so this will be the biggest test yet.
As I mentioned previously, saying that three quarters of all recommended matches are correct, is certainly something that makes for a good headline and statistically is true. However, it only gains additional credence with more and more games being tested.
WHAT WILL BE THE NATURAL SUCCESS LEVEL?
Once say 100 games have been tested, then we will get a better idea of how effective this idea has been and to be honest you probably want to be operating at a least a 60% hit rate (for single line bets).
That’s because, if you are operating on the basis that 55% probability of Over 2.5 goals being scored is the threshold required to place a bet, then you need to be exceeding that level to determine whether the project is a success.
You cannot turn around and say “my model works less than half of the time” when you need more than 55% probability to part with your money (from an Over 2.5 point of view). Therefore I am aiming to get at least 60 matches correct from the first 100 that were sampled.
Hopefully last week was just ‘one of those weeks’ and an element of normal service can be resumed this time around. Of course, you personally don’t need to bet on all nine and to be honest I would advocate a maximum of five this time around.
While if I was going to offer my two pence, the quintet that I would plump for would be:
Aston Villa vs Southampton
Manchester City vs Leicester
Tottenham vs Chelsea
Brighton vs Sheffield United – Under
Newcastle vs Crystal Palace – Under
That’s the Premier League picks taken care of, but as mentioned elsewhere I have also increased the scope of data driven betting analysis and in a separate article to this, I will offering up a raft of picks across England’s top five leagues.
If you do happen to place any bets this weekend on the basis of the stats above and happen to get a winner, please do send your betting slips and I can add you to the winners enclosure. Fingers crossed that is the case and there’s a little Christmas bonus on the way.
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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You can also check out my Premier League Podcast on Soundcloud