Following the success of the World Cup simulator we built in May & June, the next logical step is to find a new competition to work on.
Potential avenues to investigate are:
- Creating a formula to recreate bookies odds.
- Creating a Premier League simulator akin to our World Cup one.
- Measuring how strong the Championship is compared to the Premiership.
- Testing the value of accumulators.
- Testing the success of different betting strategies.
If you have any suggestions for other aspects for us to investigate, please contact us - you can leave a comment on this article, use the site's Contact form, or send me a message on Twitter at @RedOwl14.
As a taster of the type of analysis we can do, we can look at the last point on the above list.
Testing betting strategies
We are going to look at three simple betting strategies, which each follow simple rules:
- Bet1 - bet on the favourite.
- Bet2 - bet on the favourite if they're playing at home, otherwise don't bet at all.
- Bet3 - on the favourite in a close match (where the teams' victory odds are within 1.5 of each other), otherwise bet on the underdog.
Below you can see the seasonal returns for each strategy, where every match has £10 placed upon in (unless no bet at all is placed):
We can also compare the simplest strategies of all:
BetWin (Bet1) - bet on the favourite.
BetDraw - bet on a draw.
BetLose - bet on the underdog.
The time series of these is shown below:
Sources
Odds Portal - historical football data, with results and average odds.
Football-Data - used to find odds missing from Odds Portal database.