How Good is Your Football Results Forecasting?

If you are serious about winning the football pools then you will be using a proven football pools system and probably staking through a pools syndicate. This way you will be using football results analysis to provide performance indicators for the teams, and a list of match results forecasts. Then, with a syndicate you will be maximising the stake you can place. With the best plan that you can afford, which gives you the desired balance between coverage and guarantee, you will then be in a position to ensure that you have the best chance of winning.

With any prediction system though, it is important to refine your skill and improve your forecast ability. For example, you will may choose to adjust your forecasts to take account of injuries, team selections and end of season relegation or promotion battles. To improve your forecast performance, you need to know how well you are doing.

Sure, you can say ‘we won five times this season’, but that is a fairly rough measure of your betting performance. For others, their ‘bank’ is their measure.

If you really want to do it properly though, then you have to measure your performance every week, and compare it. That way you can improve it.

How successful are you? Well, in the long run you only need a small edge over random to win. Do you know what your performance was last week?

Here’s a way to work it out.

Let’s say that your plan last week was a 19,000 line plan. For UK football treble chance football pools, that would be 19,000 separate entries of 8 draw selections from 49 matches.

The random odds of winning with one line (assuming that there are 8 draws in the results) would be 1 in 451 million. That’s a big number, but we have 19,000 attempts, which knocks those odds down to 1 in 24,000. Still a big number, but a difference! That’s still with a random forecast.

Now, what result did you achieve?

Let’s say that there were 8 draws in the results, and your system picked 5 of those draws. Now, it maybe that those five were not in the same line – it happens. But, the forecast system you used predicted 5 of the 8 – that’s 63%.  Work this out weekly, and compare it.

So, you see there are two parts to this. There is the staking plan where we balance coverage against guarantee, and there is the efficiency of the forecasting. You pays your money and you takes your choice when it comes to staking, but the money is wasted unless you are generating forecasts which are better than random. You only need to get it right a few times a year to cover your stakes and make a profit.

If you are entering the pools with these elements in place, then you are reducing your odds from 1 in 24,000 (with a 19,000 line plan) down to maybe 1 in 8 or 10, or even lower. With a 51,000 line plan, you are looking at better than a 1 in 4 chance.

So,

* use a proper forecasting system that works, and
* measure its effectiveness every week
* then stake through a syndicate so that you can afford bigger plans

There is a lot more to being profitable with the football pools. You need to know when not to do them too, when teams will not be playing to form.

© 2011 Phil Marks. All rights reserved.