Improve Your Soccer Betting is a series of articles that describe some well known and well used statistical techniques that will help the soccer punter make more informed bets. Each of the techniques has its own advantages and disadvantages and using them in isolation will improve your chances of winning. However, together they will prove invaluable in your battle with the bookies. In each article we will describe in detail how a particular method works giving you enough information for you to go ahead and create your own forecasts. We will also give you information as to where you can already find websites that use this technique in comprising their weekly soccer betting forecasts.
The statistical methods described in this set of articles will help you to arrive at a better decision about the match, or matches, that you are betting on.
In this article we will be describing the well known Win Draw Loss method.
Here are the basic rules…
The Win, Draw, Loss method is very simple and takes into account the proportion of past wins, draws, and losses over a specified period of time. By calculating the number of wins, draws and losses for both the home and away sides and then combining them it is possible to produce a statistical probability of the possible outcome of the game.
Here is how a typical calculation is made…
1. For a specified period of time the number of wins, losses, and draws are counted for each side. This could be for a whole season or you may wish to have a rolling time period, say the last six months for example.
2. The percentage probabilities for home wins, draws, and away wins are then made. For example, the home win percentage is calculated as follows:
(( HW + AL) * 100) / total number of matches
Where,
HW = number of home wins by home team
AL = number of away losses by away team
Once you have a percentage probability for each outcome a decision can be made on the most likely outcome.
Let’s look at a simple example of how you could apply this…
First of all you would collect the data for a specified period of time and for each of the three possible outcomes, i.e.
HW = number of home wins for home team
HD = number of draws for home team
HL = number of home losses for home team
AW = number of away wins for away team
AD = number of draws for away team
AL = number of away losses for away team
TOTALGAMES = HW + HD + HL + AW + AD + AL
HOMEWIN = ((HW + AL)*100)/TOTALGAMES
DRAW = ((HD+AD)*100)/TOTALGAMES
AWAYWIN = ((HL + AW)*100)/TOTALGAMES
This gives you a percentage probability for each of the three possible outcomes.
Now let’s extend this to provide 1, X, 2, 1X, and X2 predictions…
To do this we can employ a simple voting system, here is how it works:
First we set three thresholds;
DRAWTHRESHOLD = 35%
AWAYTHRESHOLD = 45%
HOMETHRESHOLD = 55%
Then we initialise our voting counts for each method;
DRAWP = 0
HOMEP = 0
AWAYP = 0
Now we compare each of the calculated probabilities against our thresholds to arrive at a vote count for each outcome;
IF DRAW > DRAWTHRESHOLD THEN
DRAWP = DRAWP + 3
ELSE
HOMEP = HOMEP + 1
AWAYP = AWAYP + 1
END IF
IF AWAYWIN > AWAYTHRESHOLD THEN
AWAYP = AWAYP + 3
ELSE
HOMEP = HOMEP + 1
DRAWP = DRAWP + 1
END IF
IF HOMEWIN > HOMETHRESHOLD THEN
HOMEP = HOMEP + 3
ELSE
DRAWP = DRAWP + 1
AWAYP = AWAYP + 1
END IF
This means we now have a total vote count for each of the three possible outcomes.
Next we can deduce our final 1, X, 2, 1X, and X2 predictions based on the voting as follows;
IF HOMEP > AWAYP AND HOMEP > DRAWP THEN
PREDICTION = “1”
ELSEIF AWAYP > HOMEP AND AWAYP > DRAWP THEN
PREDICTION = “2”
ELSEIF DRAWP > HOMEP AND DRAWP > AWAYP THEN
PREDICTION = “3”
ELSEIF HOMEP = DRAWP AND HOMEP > AWAYP THEN
PREDICTION = “1X”
ELSEIF AWAYP = DRAWP AND AWAYP > HOMEP THEN
PREDICTION = “X2″
ELSEIF HOMEP = DRAWP AND HOMEP = AWAYP THEN
PREDICTION = “X”
Now it’s your turn…
Of course you may choose to use different values to those shown above and by experimenting you may come up with better values to use. So, you could create better threshold values and decide to collect data over any period of time you like. Experimenting with threshold values and durations will let you home in on the best settings for you.
If you have the necessary skills you could go away and build your own spreadsheet of data or even write a piece of software to take in results and fixtures and apply the Win Draw Loss method to your data. Or, if you’re lazy like me, you could grab some free software that already does this for you. 1X2Monster and Footyforecast have been providing this kind of facility since 1999. A total of seven different statistical methods are used to determine the outcome of each game played in each league, and a comprehensive record of how each method in each game performed is kept. Apart from how each tip performed within its respective league 1X2Monster also provides the league tables of how each league has performed in successfully predicting outcomes of games. The league tables of prediction performance are produced for home win predictions, draw predictions, away win predictions, and for overall predictions and are invaluable tools to the soccer punter when deciding where to target their European soccer betting predictions.
Here is a list of all the articles in this series…
How To Make A Profit From FREE 1X2 Soccer Picks
Improve Your Soccer Betting Using The Rateform Method
Improve Your Soccer Betting Using The Footyforecast Method
Improve Your Soccer Betting Using The Win Draw Loss Method
Improve Your Soccer Betting Using The Simple Sequence Method
Improve Your Soccer Betting Using The Score Prediction Method
Improve Your Soccer Betting Using The Superiority Method
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