How To Improve Your Soccer Bets Using The Win Draw Loss Method

How To Improve Your Soccer Bets 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 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.

Here is a list of all the articles in this series?

How To Improve Your Soccer Bets Using The Rateform Method
How To Improve Your Soccer Bets Using The Footyforecast Method
How To Improve Your Soccer Bets Using The Win Draw Loss Method
How To Improve Your Soccer Bets Using The Simple Sequence Method
How To Improve Your Soccer Bets Using The Score Prediction Method
How To Improve Your Soccer Bets Using The Superiority Method

Malcolm Nossiter is the owner of http://www.1x2monster.com and http://www.footyforecast.com. He has been providing hundreds of 1X2 tips every week since 1999.