Fink Tank Test: This weekend's games

I’m testing the predictive and value betting ability with the Fink Tank ratings. Have a good read of the first post here to make sense of it.

So far the Fink Tank performed as follows:

Raw 1×2 betting: +3.25
With team news filter: -1.10

I’ve dropped the Asian handicap bets to ease the admin burden of tracking these.

Too early to say anything concrete with the bulk of the raw profits coming from the teams being missed out by the team filter.

This week’s qualifiers:

Fink tank has gone with the under dogs this week.

Note there’s no team news this week with Blackpool, but I ran a stat that showed that its unprofitable to back newly promoted teams in their 2nd home game. Perhaps there is an over reaction to the 1st home game trend.

The fink tank column is their predicted chance of that team’s victory. The test backs West Ham because the 6.6% chance is better than the chance implied by the odds.

At the end of the season it will be better if you only stuck to matches where the predicted chance of success was 33% or higher. For now I’ll log everything.

 

Fink Tank Test: This weekend’s games

I’m testing the predictive and value betting ability with the Fink Tank ratings. Have a good read of the first post here to make sense of it.

So far the Fink Tank performed as follows:

Raw 1×2 betting: +3.25
With team news filter: -1.10

I’ve dropped the Asian handicap bets to ease the admin burden of tracking these.

Too early to say anything concrete with the bulk of the raw profits coming from the teams being missed out by the team filter.

This week’s qualifiers:

Fink tank has gone with the under dogs this week.

Note there’s no team news this week with Blackpool, but I ran a stat that showed that its unprofitable to back newly promoted teams in their 2nd home game. Perhaps there is an over reaction to the 1st home game trend.

The fink tank column is their predicted chance of that team’s victory. The test backs West Ham because the 6.6% chance is better than the chance implied by the odds.

At the end of the season it will be better if you only stuck to matches where the predicted chance of success was 33% or higher. For now I’ll log everything.

 

Mike's Football Bets 27th August

We are starting to see some patterns form across the league now and with the transfer window closing next week, the league should start to settle down a bit. Already I have been picking out a few angles to follow this year, which I hope will be profitable as we move forward.

Readers from last year will know I’m a fan of Blackburn at home who only lost 3 games at Ewood Park last season (Spurs, Villa & Everton) and they face Arsenal in a game I think the bookies have priced up wrong. Blackburn are a very tough team who improved a great deal over the course of last season and will certainly test out the very shaky Almunia in the visitors net with plenty of high balls and crosses. I fancy the +0.75 AH with Paddy Power at 2.1 on Blackburn here, which gives us a guaranteed profit if it’s a draw and only a small loss if they lose by 1 goal.

I also am siding with another home side last weekend at fancy Bolton at 2.2 with Stan James to have too much for Birmingham, who by all accounts were lucky to beat Blackburn last week. Bolton are looking a real dark horse this season and this is the type of game they will target 3 points from.

Another strong team at home is Sunderland who also lost just 3 games at the Stadium of Light last season (Chelsea, Man Utd & Villa) and they host Man City on Sunday. Mancini’s team are strong faves but having seen how he sets City up away from home, I could see this easily being a draw. The +0.5 AH with 188bet at 2.1 therefore interests me here. Given Sunderland’s relatively poor start to the season, I am putting this one on the shortlist only though.

I am also going to invest 1 pt in the Wolves – Wigan match bet as the price on Wigan has now drifted out to 13/8 with VCbet. Admittedly Wigan have started the season very poorly but I don’t think there is that there is actually that much between the two teams so am willing to go against the crowd here.

Main Bet
1.5 pts Blackburn (+0.75 AH) V Arsenal 2.1 Paddy Power
1 pt Bolton to beat Birmingham. 2.2 Stan James/Paddy Power
1pt Wigan to finish above Wolves this season. 2.63 VCbet (Ante-post)

Shortlist
1 pt Sunderland (+0.5 AH) V Man City. 2.1 188bet

Whatever you bet on, good luck!

Mike

Mike’s Football Bets 27th August

We are starting to see some patterns form across the league now and with the transfer window closing next week, the league should start to settle down a bit. Already I have been picking out a few angles to follow this year, which I hope will be profitable as we move forward.

Readers from last year will know I’m a fan of Blackburn at home who only lost 3 games at Ewood Park last season (Spurs, Villa & Everton) and they face Arsenal in a game I think the bookies have priced up wrong. Blackburn are a very tough team who improved a great deal over the course of last season and will certainly test out the very shaky Almunia in the visitors net with plenty of high balls and crosses. I fancy the +0.75 AH with Paddy Power at 2.1 on Blackburn here, which gives us a guaranteed profit if it’s a draw and only a small loss if they lose by 1 goal.

I also am siding with another home side last weekend at fancy Bolton at 2.2 with Stan James to have too much for Birmingham, who by all accounts were lucky to beat Blackburn last week. Bolton are looking a real dark horse this season and this is the type of game they will target 3 points from.

Another strong team at home is Sunderland who also lost just 3 games at the Stadium of Light last season (Chelsea, Man Utd & Villa) and they host Man City on Sunday. Mancini’s team are strong faves but having seen how he sets City up away from home, I could see this easily being a draw. The +0.5 AH with 188bet at 2.1 therefore interests me here. Given Sunderland’s relatively poor start to the season, I am putting this one on the shortlist only though.

I am also going to invest 1 pt in the Wolves – Wigan match bet as the price on Wigan has now drifted out to 13/8 with VCbet. Admittedly Wigan have started the season very poorly but I don’t think there is that there is actually that much between the two teams so am willing to go against the crowd here.

Main Bet
1.5 pts Blackburn (+0.75 AH) V Arsenal 2.1 Paddy Power
1 pt Bolton to beat Birmingham. 2.2 Stan James/Paddy Power
1pt Wigan to finish above Wolves this season. 2.63 VCbet (Ante-post)

Shortlist
1 pt Sunderland (+0.5 AH) V Man City. 2.1 188bet

Whatever you bet on, good luck!

Mike

Fink Tank Test: This weekend’s games

I’m testing the predictive and value betting ability with the Fink Tank ratings. Have a good read of the first post here to make sense of it.

Last week the Fink Tank performed as follows:

Raw 1×2 betting: +2.56
Raw with Asian Handicaps:
-0.64
With team news filter:
-0.54

Too early to say anything concrete with the bulk of the raw profits coming from the Blackpool bet which didn’t make it through the team filter.

This week’s matches:

Quite a few, with a home bias.

That first bet is a Double Chance on Birmingham as there is value in the draw and Birmingham according to Fink Tank.

Fink Tank Test: This weekend's games

I’m testing the predictive and value betting ability with the Fink Tank ratings. Have a good read of the first post here to make sense of it.

Last week the Fink Tank performed as follows:

Raw 1×2 betting: +2.56
Raw with Asian Handicaps:
-0.64
With team news filter:
-0.54

Too early to say anything concrete with the bulk of the raw profits coming from the Blackpool bet which didn’t make it through the team filter.

This week’s matches:

Quite a few, with a home bias.

That first bet is a Double Chance on Birmingham as there is value in the draw and Birmingham according to Fink Tank.

Mike’s Football Bets 20th August

A good start to proceedings last week even if somewhat surprised Blackpool won 4-0 but it just goes to show the unpredictability at the start of a new season and why we keep our powder relatively dry. Speaking of Blackpool I had a long look at the markets for their game away at Arsenal this weekend, which will be the first major test of their defence.

The bookies expect lots of action with under 2.5 goals as short as 1.49 (67% chance of occurring) which seems pretty fair and I also considered the -2 Asian Handicap line on Arsenal at 1.83 with Paddy Power. Last season at home the Gunners won by 3 or more goals (37%) on 7 occasions and by 2 goals on a further 6 occasions (31%). Its worth noting as well that against the bottom 12 teams of the league that you would have lost money only once (The 1-0 game against Wolves) betting on Arsenal -2 at home. It is the start of the season though and Arsenal did not show great penetration away at Liverpool so this is just a shortlist bet this week.

My one main bet this week is on Stoke who face an out-of-sorts Spurs team who will have more than one eye on a crucial Champions League qualifier on Tuesday. Stoke is the last kind of place you want to travel to before such a big game and they have a very decent home record. Spurs also are a much stronger team at home and I fancy the +0.25 Asian Handicap on Stoke at 1.98 with 3 different bookies. We win half our stake even if its a draw and I expect a low-scoring game with few chances, which is the Stoke way.

Other angles that came under scrutiny but didn’t qualify as a bet include Birmingham (-0.25 AH) at 1.98 against Blackburn, however I am very worried about the draw here. The same goes for Man City (-0.25 AH) at 2.02 at home to Liverpool. I also don’t envisage many goals at Eastlands but the bookies seem to have the market about right at 1.73 (57% chance) for the under 2.5 goals option.

A note as well on some season bets I am keeping an eye on including the Wolves – Wigan match bet over at VCbet. With Wigan facing a rampant Chelsea this weekend I feel the odds on this may go out further so will hold fire on this just yet.

Main Bet
1 pt Stoke (+0.25 AH) V Spurs 1.98 Ladbrokes, 188Bet, SBOBet

Shortlist
1 pt Arsenal (-2  AH) V Blackpool. 1.83 Paddy Power

Whatever you bet on, good luck!

Mike

Mike's Football Bets 20th August

A good start to proceedings last week even if somewhat surprised Blackpool won 4-0 but it just goes to show the unpredictability at the start of a new season and why we keep our powder relatively dry. Speaking of Blackpool I had a long look at the markets for their game away at Arsenal this weekend, which will be the first major test of their defence.

The bookies expect lots of action with under 2.5 goals as short as 1.49 (67% chance of occurring) which seems pretty fair and I also considered the -2 Asian Handicap line on Arsenal at 1.83 with Paddy Power. Last season at home the Gunners won by 3 or more goals (37%) on 7 occasions and by 2 goals on a further 6 occasions (31%). Its worth noting as well that against the bottom 12 teams of the league that you would have lost money only once (The 1-0 game against Wolves) betting on Arsenal -2 at home. It is the start of the season though and Arsenal did not show great penetration away at Liverpool so this is just a shortlist bet this week.

My one main bet this week is on Stoke who face an out-of-sorts Spurs team who will have more than one eye on a crucial Champions League qualifier on Tuesday. Stoke is the last kind of place you want to travel to before such a big game and they have a very decent home record. Spurs also are a much stronger team at home and I fancy the +0.25 Asian Handicap on Stoke at 1.98 with 3 different bookies. We win half our stake even if its a draw and I expect a low-scoring game with few chances, which is the Stoke way.

Other angles that came under scrutiny but didn’t qualify as a bet include Birmingham (-0.25 AH) at 1.98 against Blackburn, however I am very worried about the draw here. The same goes for Man City (-0.25 AH) at 2.02 at home to Liverpool. I also don’t envisage many goals at Eastlands but the bookies seem to have the market about right at 1.73 (57% chance) for the under 2.5 goals option.

A note as well on some season bets I am keeping an eye on including the Wolves – Wigan match bet over at VCbet. With Wigan facing a rampant Chelsea this weekend I feel the odds on this may go out further so will hold fire on this just yet.

Main Bet
1 pt Stoke (+0.25 AH) V Spurs 1.98 Ladbrokes, 188Bet, SBOBet

Shortlist
1 pt Arsenal (-2  AH) V Blackpool. 1.83 Paddy Power

Whatever you bet on, good luck!

Mike

Football Over-Reactions and How to Benefit From Them

The few days after the first weekend of the football season are always a fascinating time to observe some of the over-reactions that the football betting markets take after just 1 round of games.

Its often a time like no other as a single result such as Wigan’s thumping by Blackpool has a much bigger impact on their odds in certain markets than at most other times during the season (the final few months excepted).

These over-reactions can be a very good thing though as this in turn can open up some interesting looking value bets if you know what your looking for.

Everyone Has To Eat

Its fair to ask just why we see such over-reactions in odds so soon? Well I put it down to the hyped up nonsense we read and hear in the media. Most reporters understand a season is 38 games long and so a team should be judged over the long-term, but then constantly writing this doesn’t sell them newspapers. Everyone has to eat after all! Therefore they often find a story and blow it out of proportion and voila, there is a knock-on effect with bookies and punters. Thats not to say that everything we read and hear is reactionary and untrue but with a shrewd approach you can pick out the wheat from the chaff and potentially benefit from this.

To give an example, lets look at Wigan’s defeat by Blackpool, which was very a poor performance from the home team admittedly.  If taking a different approach you may wish to consider how Wigan have been very inconsistent and ended last season with a 8-2 thrashing yet were taking on a side with fantastic momentum from last season. Call this the ‘Burnley’ effect if you will as they beat both Man United and Everton in the first 2 home games last season – where are they now?

Contrast Wigan then with a team like Wolves who had a good start beating Stoke 2-1 at home. How would you judge these 2 teams (Wigan and Wolves) in a season match bet today?

Well Victor Chandler have an market offering such a Wolves – Wigan season match bet and before Saturdays game, both teams were priced at 5/6. Following Saturday’s games, you can now pick up Wigan at 6/5 whilst Wolves are as short as 8/13.

That’s one heck of a drift for Wigan who last season finished only 2 points behind Wolves. Can so much be taken from just 1 game and is this an over-reaction? My spidy senses tell me so!

Relegation Odds

There are plenty of other areas where we see significant changes simply based upon one game such as the popular relegation market. The aforementioned Wigan were as big as 9/4 before Saturday’s game but now have been slashed into 11/8. Similarly a team such as West Ham have gone from 11/2 to 9/2 after their 3-0 defeat away to Aston Villa.

Next weekend we will see even more changes and movement in odds especially if we see yet more freakish results like in the Wigan – Blackpool game.

I firmly believe that value can be found in these kind of markets if you dig around and take a sensible long-term view in these first few weeks. Good luck if getting involved in these kind of bets and do drop us a line either via email or on the forum if you are.

Testing the Fink Tank

Over the world cup we put Castrol rating’s prediction model to the test and were quite impressed. Sadly they aren’t applying their model to make predictions for domestic games, but we’ve another public and well researched model we’re going to be putting to the test this season.

The Fink Tank is a football prediction model developed by Dectech with academic research on football probabilities from the university of Warwick. The Fink Tank was the engine for many an interesting football column in the Times newspaper. Sadly that column appears to be no more, but the ratings are still available.

The ratings are used to create a percentage chance that the home or away team has of winning, with the draw also taken into account.

In a past edition of our magazine we put Fink Tank’s predictions for previous seasons to the test with some interesting results. So this season we thought we’d continue to test the ratings model using live odds.

Value bets:

Bets are taken when Fink Tank’s ratings give a team a better chance than the odds currently imply. To ease the admin burden, we’ll just be tracking the Premier League.

The downside of Fink Tank is that its model does not take into account team news. So if a star player is injured, the ratings don’t adjust. This season we’ll be trying to account for this by running a team news filter.

Castrol ratings provide a score of individual players based on a variety of statistical factors. The team news filter will check each team for injury news and make it a no bet if a star player (as deemed by Castrol) is not playing. We’re also not sure if Castrol accounts for the fact the promoted teams stats will be against weaker opposition so we’ll also be applying the team news filter to promoted teams for the first few weeks.

We’ll be tracking the raw results and the results with the filter applied separately so we can see which works best.

Without further ado, here’s this week’s qualifiers:

The value is in relation to the home or away odds. Not the actual bet selected. In most cases we’ll be using the home & away odds, but from time to time if the underdog is really long odds, we might apply a handicap bet.

The team news filter takes out the newly promoted teams. Villa are without their top defender (going by the latest team news) and Man City (Spurs’ opponents) have added a significant batch of new players recently which may make Fink Tank’s ratings a little obsolete for a few weeks. Everton becomes a no bet if Cahill doesn’t play.

This is just a tracking experiment, so please don’t back these.