Just a quick update on the lay bets analysis. You might remember that laying short priced favourites at a shorter price in play didn’t produce a profit to a fixed stake but the results looked good to a fixed liability. Well I have now trialled this with a £2 liability each time and the results weren’t nearly as impressive as the last lot of workings.
Your actual profit and loss is: -£223.51
You risked a total of £1520.35 so this is an ROI of -14.7%Your profit/loss for lay bets risking a liability of £100 each time would have been: -£10156.7 (-13.35% ROI)
After 761 bets a loss of £200 was made an ROI of -13.35%. This was disappointing as I had high hopes from the last set of data which was from a sample size of half this amount. So, why were the results so different and why no profit?
Looking back a bit closer it’s pretty obvious and if you take out the Tsonga win at 1.01 the first set of results would also have made a loss. This kind of approach seems pretty reliant on these huge wins at low prices and we didn’t get them this time such is the variance of these lays.
That’s not to say that there won’t be a handful of 1.01 favourites losing at The French Open next week but after a month and over 700 lay bets this strategy is definitely nowhere near as fruitful as I hoped and not worth continuing with.
It’s proving very difficult for me to find an automated way of profiting on the tennis without trading manually but I’ll keep trying. The attempts so far haven’t been particularly ingenious admittedly but I wanted to start simple.
The betfair analysis tool doesn’t take commission into account either and the results look even poorer after that. Overall I’m pretty surprised by the results and it based on the overall findings it seems you’d be better off backing favourites who start well as long as their price isn’t too low. 700 bets is a pretty decent sample size and you’re not going to be affected by variance backing favourites like we have been laying them here. Cue the next experiment… !
On a more positive note, our Premier League Value Selections finished in 3rd position (Under Webbo) in the Friendly Tipster League ran by Cassini at the Green All Over blog. Trying to make a profit based on Pinnacle’s closing prices is a tough test. It shows a lot about your true worth as a tipster and whether you have an edge or not. If anyone thinks they have what it takes then put your money (£25 to enter) where your mouth is and we’ll see you next season!
I’ll also be taking the same value identifying approach with the World Cup and will create a separate value selections sheet for that so keep your eyes peeled.