Friday, January 9, 2009

European Champion's League Match day 8 - Soccer Giants Kicked Out

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It came without warning. Many football analysts and supporters were totally taken by surprise. But by the time the matches were rounded up, some of the big teams in this year's competition had been kicked out unexpectedly.

Real Madrid FC, Barcelona FC and Arsenal FC, clubs that are football giants in Europe had all lost out to teams that they were expected to beat.

When the champion's league knockout stage draw paired Barcelona and Liverpool together, all expected an easy ride for the former. After all, they were the reigning champions, and were one of the top teams in Europe on current form. But a two to one loss right on their home soil meant that they had to win by two unreplied goals in the return leg at Liverpool. They could only manage to score a lone goal, however and that meant that they lost out on the away goals rule.

The Barcelona fans and many other football followers worldwide were stunned by this result. Many had expected the Barca team to at least reach the finals of this season?s competition. They were one of the best teams around and had given very good displays all year round. Alas, however, they had lost to a smaller club by comparison.

Although Liverpool were the European champions in 2005, no one had expected them to cause a major upset by beating Barcelona, at least on paper.

After the match, some analysts attributed the shock defeat to the recent turmoil in the team. The scorer of the lone goal at Anfield, Eidur Gudjohnssen in a press interview after the match made comments that seemed to corroborate the fact that all was not well with the team, as was being widely speculated.

Now, the Barca team can only realistically hope to aim for the Spanish league title and the King?s cup.

They still have a good shot at winning, as they are still on top of the la liga, ahead of second placed Sevilla on goals difference.

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Wednesday, May 7, 2008

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

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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.

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Friday, February 1, 2008

How To Make A Profit From FREE 1X2 Soccer Picks/Tips

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Home In On The Best Picks And Tips From Hundreds Each Week. Many football (soccer to our American friends) picks and tips sites provide only a few picks/tips a week, some only one, with many charging huge amounts for the privilege. In this article I will show you how to get the very best from hundreds of free and low cost picks and tips every week by answering these four questions.

What if you were able to pick the absolute best picks from hundreds of weekly picks/tips greatly increasing your chances of success? What if those picks/tips are chosen based on the past performance of similar picks/tips and those picks/tips are all created using a combination of several tried and tested statistical methods? What if you could know whether draw predictions, home predictions or away predictions are more successful for the English Premier League, the Italian Serie A, the German Bundesliga, or many other leagues across Europe? What if you could do it all for FREE or very low cost?

Well now you can. If you're interested then read on.

Some Tips Are Better Than Others. Using well established statistical methods along with automated software it's possible to generate hundreds of soccer tips every week for many leagues, theoretically you could cover all of the major leagues in the world. So what, why would you want to do that? Surely many of the tips will be grossly inaccurate but on the other hand many will be correct so how can you determine which will be successful and which not? It would be much better to just concentrate on one or two matches and predict their outcome by intensive and careful focused analysis.

On the face of it the above responses that I have seen over the years have some merit and deserve careful consideration, there is a good argument for focussed analysis of a single match with the aim of trying to predict its outcome. However, consider this, when a scientist runs a statistical analysis how many data items do they select as a representative sample? One, two... or more? When carrying out statistical analysis the more data you have to work on the better the outcome. For example, if you wanted to calculate the average height of a class of school children you could just take the first two or three as a sample. But if they are all six feet tall they are going to be highly unrepresentative so obviously you would get all their heights and calculate the average from those, the result is a much more accurate answer. It's a simplistic example but hopefully you see my point. Obviously you can apply that argument to a single match by collecting past results for each side and carrying out statistical analysis techniques using that data, but why restrict your analysis to that one match?

We know that if we make hundreds of automated tips, based on sound tried and tested statistical methods, that some will be successful and others won't. So how do we target in on the best tips, the ones most likely to be correct, and how do we do it week after week? Well, the answer is to keep a record of how each and every tip performs, some tips are better than others and we want to know which ones. At this stage, if your thinking how can I possibly calculate all of that information for every game, in every league I want to cover, and do it every week, then don't worry I'll show you how it's all done for you at the end of the article.

Results Are Not Always The Same. Simply keeping a record of how each of the hundreds of tips we make actually perform against the eventual result is not enough, what we need now is a way of analysing that data and grouping it logically to get the best from it. Results are not always the same, in other words a tip that shows one possible outcome for match A and the same possible outcome for match B will not necessarily produce the same result (i.e. a correct prediction or a wrong prediction). Why is this? Well there are hundreds of reasons why and you will never be able to account for them all, if you could you would no doubt be a millionaire. When trying to predict the outcome of a match you may look at such qualitative things as the current injury list of each team, the team sheet, morale of the players, etc. We can also look at Quantitative factors using our statistical methods to predict the outcome of the match, so we may look at such things as past performance, position in the league, or more tried and tested statistical methods such as the Rateform method. We can use all of this information to predict the outcome of match A and the outcome of match B and still not have the same result, part of the reason for this is, as explained before, that we can not account for all the factors in a match, it's impossible. But there's something else, something we can account for which we have not yet thought about.

When we look at one match in isolation we only look at the factors concerning each of the two teams in the match, but why not expand this to look at how the other teams they have played are also performing? 'Why would we want to do that?' I hear some of you say. Because results are not always the same. Let's say our prediction for match A and match B is a home win (forgetting about the predicted score for the moment). What else can we take into account to improve the prediction of a home win? We can look at the performance of all the home win tips made for the same competition that the match is being played in and then make a judgement based on that new information. This is great as it gives us an extra factoring level to take into account that we did not have before.

Looking across all the home win predictions in a single league will give us a percentage success rate for home wins for that particular league, but we can improve on this even further. We can do this by doing the exact same exercise across many different leagues and obtaining a percentage success rate for each league. This means we can now look for the league which produces the best overall home win prediction success rate and look for home win predictions for the coming fixtures. By default we know that that league is more likely to produce a successful outcome for a home prediction than any other. Of course we can employ this technique for away win and draw predictions as well.

How Tight Is The League? Why does this difference between the leagues occur? As with trying to predict the outcome of a single match there are many factors that make up this phenomenon, but there are just a few major factors that influence why one league should produce more home wins through a season than another. The most obvious of these could be described as the 'tightness' of the league. What do I mean by 'tightness'? In any league there is often a gap in the skills and abilities of those teams consistently at the top of the league and those at the bottom, this is often expressed as a 'difference in class'. This difference in class varies markedly between different leagues with some leagues being much more competitive than others due to a closer level of skills throughout the league, 'a tight league'. In the case of a tight league the instances of drawn games will be more noticeable than with a 'not so tight league' and home wins will most likely be of a lower frequency.

So, let's say we are interested in predicting a home win, armed with our new information about the 'tightness' of leagues we could make predictions for matches throughout a season for as many leagues as we can manage, and watch how those predictions perform in each league. You will find that the success of the predictions will closely match the 'tightness' of a particular league, so where a particular league produces more home wins then we will have more success with our home predictions. Don't be misled, this does not mean that just because there are more home wins we are bound to be more accurate, what I am taking about is a success rate in percentage terms of the number of home predictions made which has nothing directly to do with how many actual home wins there are. For example, let's say we make one hundred home predictions in league A and one hundred in league B, and let's say that seventy five percent are correct in league A but only sixty percent in league B. We have made the same number of predictions in each league with differing results, and those difference are most likely due to the 'tightness' of each league. League B will be a 'tight' league with more teams having similar levels of 'class', whereas league A has a wider margin of class when it comes to the teams within it. Therefore we should pick out the best performing league concerning home wins and make our home win selections from that league.

We Have To Be Consistent. Of course there is more to it than that. It's no good just taking each tip and recording how it performed we have to apply the same rules to each and every tip made. You have to make sure that the parameters you set for each predictive method you use (e.g. Rateform, Score Prediction, etc.) remain constant. So choose your best settings for each method and stick to them for each and every prediction, for every league, and for the whole season. You must do this in order to retain consistency of predictions within leagues, between leagues, and over time. There is nothing stopping you using several different sets of parameters as long as you keep the data produced from each separate.

If you are wondering what the parameters are then take the Rateform method as an example. Using this method we produce an integer number that represents the possible outcome of a match (I'm not going to go into detail about the Rateform method here as that's the subject of another of my articles). You can set break points that represent a home win and an away win, so if the resulting rateform output for a match is higher than the upper breakpoint then that match could be deemed a home win. Similarly, if the resulting rateform output for a match is lower than the lower breakpoint then that match could be deemed as an away win. Anything that falls in-between is deemed a draw.

Do It For FREE Or Very Low Cost.

So how do I get all this information without having to calculate it all myself?

Footyforecast.com has been delivering this kind of information, week in week out, on its website since 1999. It covers eighteen leagues across Europe including; English Premiership, Scottish Premiership, Italian Serie A, German Bundesliga, Dutch Eredivisie, Spain, France, to name but a few. 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. A lot of this information is totally free to site visitors but for a small subscription fee you can gain access to the data from all eighteen leagues. Apart from how each tip performed within its respective league Footyforecast 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 predictions. You can visit the Footyforecast website by using the link below:

http://www.footyforecast.com

So there you have it. Hopefully I have shown you how to target in on the best leagues in order to raise your chances of success when predicting 1X2 results, and, although I offer no guarantees, I'm fairly confident that this method will improve your profits.

Malcolm Nossiter MSc is the site owner of the popular Footyforecast website which has been delivering hundreds of 1X2 tips since 1999. Footyforecast has a large following of satisfied subscribers and visitors. You can visit by using this link: http://www.footyforecast.com

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Thursday, January 17, 2008

Simple Theory for Soccer Betting

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Many soccer punters put a lot of effort to study on players, team strategies and odds movement but lose their bet at the end. In fact, soccer betting is simple. You should only pay attention on recent team statistics and bravely put your bet accordingly regardless bet against strong team.

Why is soccer betting popular?

If we were to compare other sports with soccer, soccer has the highest occurrences for weak team to beat a strong team down especially in English Premier League. Let's turn back the clock; can any of you recall the UEFA Championship final?? Clashed between Man.Utd and Bayern Munich in 1999 where Man.Utd successfully won Bayern Munich by 2 goals during 2 minutes injury time. For those who bet on Bayern Munich, how hard for punters to accept this, unfortunately this is the FACT. Well, as you can see, this is the most interesting part in soccer betting. There is a saying, "a football is round, therefore it might have unpredictable ending".

What is the simple theory in betting world?

Everything in the world is sharing the same natural concept and also follows the same trend. There is no exception for soccer betting. The theory is simple. When a graph makes an incline, of course the line will keep climbing and stop at a stage. No matter how high it reaches or how low it drops, there is always a stop to it. I would confidently say that only in minor cases, the graph will move up and down continuously within a short period of time. As example, you could notice that most market share will always have gradual incline and then follow by long dropping line repeatedly. You could also notice that the rich gets richer and poor gets poorer. In sports betting, I believe some of you did experience before winning streaks which you kept winning non-stop even though you simply put your bet. In contrast when encounter down period, even if you work hard to make analysis or follow the bet of your lucky friends but finally lose too. Why? The only answer is natural concept and trend. We must agree and follow the trend.

How betting trend works in soccer betting?

The rule of thumb is do not be stubborn to confidently place bets on teams that continuously lost and have the thinking that they would make a come back. This is totally wrong. Maybe you will win at the end by follow this type of betting strategy but how much capital you need to have and how much you need to lose before you can win the bet. Based on the trend concept, if a team is keep losing, the graph for them is dropping, we should bet against them until the graph reach a pit stop. In contrast, if a team turnover from lose to win, we should start chase the team to win until stop stage. How simple is it? Win keeps winning and lose keeps losing.

Which team to bet from among of uncountable matches?

When using the trend concept in soccer betting, it is safer if we use it to bet on strong team and only focus on climbing graph. Meanwhile, we put our bet only on strong team when they are in win stage. The reason to choose strong team is they need points to secure their position at the top of the league table. In addition, strong team with higher strength could easily win if victory is a must.

The last but not the least, I am sure you will have doubts on my simple theory - trend. I could tell you that my theory has been proven. I have been using the betting strategy for 2 consecutive years and it really works for me. From my bet statistics, it hits more than 75% accuracy.

Joseph Linhard (Soccer Statistics Net)

http://www.soccerstat.net - provide soccer statistics based on Asian Handicaps and Fixed Odds for European major leagues, cups and World Cup, with tips and soccer team statistics.

http://www.soccerstat.net/ah-league-summary.jsp - Your first place to start before you place your bet.

email: soccerstat@soccerstat.net

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Short Sided Round Robin Format for Basketball and Soccer

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The computer age has bestowed some unforeseen blessings on the sports world. Math whizzes are now using the personal computer to track game results to a level never before possible, and sports are the better for it. The book "Moneyball" chronicled the way Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland Athletics used obscure statistical analyses to scout and deal for talent. Now, a variation of this method has spilt over into basketball with a number of NBA teams using statistics in a similar manner. These methods were described in a recent Sports Illustrated article titled "Measure of Success." Described as simply as possible, these statisticians track how well a team does when a player is on the floor, versus how well they do when they aren't.

These measures disregard a player's contribution as represented by their scoring, rebounding and assists totals, and simply asks, "Does the team do better or worse when this player is on the floor?" They also in many cases contradict the conventional wisdom concerning the relative worth of certain players. Jason Collins, a fifth-year center for the Nets of little renown gets ranked as the fourth best defensive center in the league. Conversely, high-scoring Michael Redd of the Milwaukee Bucks is such a disaster on defense that his teams tend to lose with him on the floor, and win while he is on the bench.

While amateur coaches are sure to find these analyses interesting, is there any way in which they can employ these metrics for their own use? Amateur coaches might be able to get team assistants to gather the data needed to maintain these stats, but there is a much better way these concepts can be applied.

Virtually all teams rely heavily on scrimmage play as part of their practice routine. By adopting what I call a Roster Round Robin format during scrimmage play, coaches can get a much clearer picture of how and when individual players perform better than others. The format simply requires that sides be set to 3v3, 4v4, or 5v5, depending on available players. Players are issued reversible jerseys, and score is kept for each side. Stages are set to 3 or 4 minutes, and at the end of each stage, a team score is recorded, with each player earning points for themselves on the basis of their team result. Two players are then directed to exchange sides by flipping their reversible jersey, and a new stage is played. This pattern is continued until all possible roster combinations have been used.

For a 3v3 contest, this would equate to 10 possible combinations, thus requiring a 30 to 40 minute game. Each player earns a plus/minus score across all stages. As everyone plays under all roster combinations and points can only be earned on the basis of team results, an individual's result reflects their team contribution across all stages. In order to maintain game continuity and ensure rapid roster rotations, the roster rotations are predetermined and printed on a grid used for scoring.

Some may notice that the one thing seemingly not taken into account in this format is position play. A roster rotation schedule that disregards position play will likely result in some oddly balanced sides - think 5 guards versus 5 forwards and centers - that wouldn't reflect anything resembling a real-game matchup. This difficulty can, however, be overcome by taking positions into account when devising the roster rotations. For a 4v4 game, with players restricted to either a center/forward or guard position, there would be 9 different roster combinations required. For a full-sided game, a center position could be added, but 18 stages would be required. With three minute stages, this would be a 54 minute scrimmage game. Coaches may wish to split this size of scrimmage across multiple practices.

Would the results from any particular scrimmage mean much? For one game, probably not, as we all know the ball can bounce funny for a time. But if this format were used on a regular basis, the results should reveal which players are contributing the most to their team. These results will either confirm or deny a coach's sense of who his best players are, but there are two even bigger benefits that can come from the use of this format. First, as players come to understand this as the new measure of their play, they will be more receptive to a coach's instruction on team play. As well, players will intuitively respond to the demands of the game, and adjust their play accordingly. Simply put, the ability to measure team play translates to a better ability to teach and learn it.

The second benefit may be even more important. A system that clearly and demonstrably measures a player on the basis of their team contribution fosters team chemistry better than any other. The talented offensive player who lets down on defense can be brought to the table when the impact of his lackluster defense can be shown. Players who are frustrated because they think they should be playing more can either makes their case in the round robin practice, or be shown they're not there yet. Regardless of the case, team chemistry is advanced.

The only real barriers to this practice format are logistical. Running this practice format requires pre-numbered reversible jerseys, and scoring/rotation grid sheets. Both are available at Rejersey.com.

The format can also be adapted for tryouts and tournaments. If your team or league would like to use this format and would like help with logistics and obtaining reversible jerseys please contact customerservice@rejersey.com.

Tom Cobb is an avid soccer player and the owner of Rejersey.com. Rejersey.com is committed to providing the best jerseys for team sports while also supporting the sports that create the need for our products. Our jerseys are perfect for practice or pick-up, as well as team and tournament play. On top of this, we go a step further, and help those who are passionate about team sports with fund-raising, and organizing their teams, schedules and facilities.

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