Fink Tank Value System Update: Big Winners landed

It’s been an interesting festive period to say the least with the big teams  appearing to join Wayne Rooney in focusing more on the festive cheer than their hard working opponents.

Most of the top teams were over turned in the festive/ new year period with last night’s Man U defeat the icing on the cake. It’s been a bad period for Alex Ferguson, but the Fink Tank value system has had a cracking time. Here are some of the bets it picked out recently:

• Villa to beat Chelsea away at 14.8.
• Blackburn to beat Man U away at 21.0
• Sunderland to beat Man City at home at 7.0
• Fulham to beat Arsenal at 4.33
• Bolton to beat Everton away at 7.5
• Newcastle to beat Man U at home at 5.5

Dectech provide analysis and ratings for football and are the engine for the popular Fink Tank column in the Times.  Dectech generate ratings which can be used to provide value bets when compared to available odds. We tested their English Premier League ratings in the 2010/2011 season were very pleased with the results, returning over 50 points level stakes profit. 

How we test it: 

For our test, we use the predictions from Fink Tank/ Dectech and only bet when the predicted % chance is better than the predicted chance implied by the available bookmaker odds. Fink Tank/ Dectech provide their predictions in the form of estimated probabilities for the home win, draw and away win. You can then compare this to the available odds to assess whether a particular game offers value.

We then take a bet if the ratings give a team a better chance of winning than the available odds imply. E.g. if the ratings give a team 50% and the odds imply it has just a 40% chance then you’d take the bet. It doesn’t guarantee a win, it means that the team is more likely to win than the odds imply (in theory). Click here for a more details explanation of how we find the value selections.

2011/2012 Results So Far

The ratings were struggling on the Premier League until the Christmas break, there just weren’t enough shock results that the ratings really capitalised on last season. The top six dominance was explored more in this blog.

What a difference a week makes! Things changed in the last fortnight as the top six finally let slip with the shock results mentioned above. It could be argued their dominance was too much above average so a correction was overdue. Either way it has caused quite a bounce in the results for the season so far.

Results are a mythical 1 point (or £1) on every bet.

Here’s the home & away comparison.

Interestingly, the returns so far mirror the first half of last season where the away bets stormed away and the home bets lagged. The reverse happened during the second half of the season. The results so far can be attributed to one or two big results, which is again what happened last season.

Things could have been even better too depending how certain bets were treated. For the Man U Blackburn game, the ratings signalled value in the draw in addition to the Blackburn away win. For simplicity a Double Chance bet of Blackburn/ draw was picked out at odds of 6.0 when in reality the draw was only small value so a Draw no bet or straight Blackburn away win might have been better. Taking the straight Blackburn away win would have doubled the season’s total to 41.71 points, while the draw no bet would have seen a 34 point tally for the season. Coulda woulda shoulda…

The Championship

We’ve also been tracking the bets for the Championship this season and these too have been showing promise:

Find Value Qualifiers On Our Forum

As the Dectech/ Fink Tank ratings are available for free, you can work out the qualifiers yourself, but we do the leg work for our members every week on our members only forum where we list all the value bets for you. All you need do is follow what we suggest!

For more tests of ratings, tipsters and systems like this, consider joining the growing community at the Smart Betting Club.