• Hi Guest Just in case you were not aware I wanted to highlight that you can now get a 20% discount on Inform Racing.
    Simply enter the coupon code ukbettingform when subscribing here.
    We have a lot of members who are existing users of Inform Racing so help is always available if needed.
    Best Wishes
    AR
  • Hi Guest Just in case you were not aware I wanted to highlight that you can now get a free 7 day trial of Horseracebase here.
    We have a lot of members who are existing users of Horseracebase so help is always available if needed, as well as dedicated section of the fourm here.
    Best Wishes
    AR

Are the bookies good prognosticators ?

That sounds like a silly question, because we all believe they are.
We are trying to beat them but it's not easy.

When we make a football bet we always try to outguess the bookie.
When he offers evens it means to us he sees it as a little less than fifty-fifty.
If we then bet it means that we think it is a sure win so we decide to bet.
For better or worse we are trying to outguess the bookie.

The bookies count their money but they too can be said to succeed or fail in
the game of guessing the outcome of football matches.
So last week when they said Liverpool 1.16 against Aston Villa it was dismal
as a prediction.
We too were dismal because we saw the "1.16" and we all said "yeah that's what
it is - stroll in the park".
So if he is dismal and we are also dismal you will ask "what is it you are
looking for ? we were all in the dark so forget it".

But I 'm also looking for patterns - instabilities.
Two areas of concern are those:

a) Early season - It's when all sorts of strange things happen.
Historical examples ? Many. What about France 1998 ? Two months after the
French won the world cup, their first engagement was against Iceland and
they lost. Greece 2004 ? Two months after they won the Euro in Portugal
they lost to Albania for the preliminaries of world cup 2006.
For the last one I had a feeling. They had taken all those players from the
beach and make them play football. But the bookie price for Albania was 5.00
or 5.50 as I remember.
So do the bookies regularly perform bad in the early part of the season ?

b) Popular teams and less popular teams - In the EPL the most popular teams
are Liverpool-Chelsea-City-United-Tottenham-Arsenal. The others are less
popular and fewer people follow them. In France it is PSG-Lyon-Marseille
and Monaco I should think. In Italy Juve-Napoli-Inter-AC Milan-Roma and
so on. So if we form a group of matches in which one at least of the popular
teams is playing and a second group of matches in which none of the named
very popular teams is present what happens statistics-wise ?

The question is not if me-you-anybody outperforms the bookies.
The question is within themselves what happens.

Do we have any tabulated statistics anywhere for these things ?
 
Last edited:
Hi cosmicsports cosmicsports Everything is easy in hindsight i dont believe in patterns much how can we know all the elements before hand it is impossible i believe, all i know is value is best combind with events that stay fairly constant over long periods of time so then one has much more evidence, short term stats and looking for patterns can really fool one at times with data.
 
Hi cosmicsports cosmicsports Everything is easy in hindsight i dont believe in patterns much how can we know all the elements before hand it is impossible i believe, all i know is value is best combind with events that stay fairly constant over long periods of time so then one has much more evidence, short term stats and looking for patterns can really fool one at times with data.

Not really. Remember that the Germans failed to produce the atom bomb because they mistakenly believed the U-238 resonances, from which Plutonium 239 is produced, were spurious oscilloscope statistical noise (is one of the theories why the Germans lost the race to the bomb).
 
Last edited:
Back
Top