Correct Score Laying Blog

It's been a while

2010-05-27T04:43:00.000-07:00

Apologies for the lack of updates. I have a number of work projects on the go of late which have kept me preoccupied. At one point I didn't gamble for a whopping 3 days in a row(ridiculous...i know)!

I have found the time though to begin design a database to fill with historical tennis match data. There are a number of things I want to analyse. Not only player abilities but also trends such as the correlation between the match win price and the 1st set result.

An example would be players priced to win @ between 1.01-1.05 win the 1st set %x of the time.

There's that plus a whole bunch of other queries it can answer. Plus I have a few general handicapping ideas I want to try so i'm quite excited(sad I know) about finally finishing it.

2010-04-24T03:37:00.000-07:00

Been betting a lot more basketball recently. I've layed LALakers to win the championship @ 4. Kobe Bryant is declining and even at his best is not even worthy of comparison to LeBron James. imo Lebron James may surpass Jordan as the greatest player ever.

Cleveland and Orlando are the 2 best teams in the league and by a considerable margin i'd say.

As a side note: I'd been playing around with some of the blogger themes, as you no doubt have noticed. In doing this I accidentally deleted all my links. So for those of you that exchanged blog links with me I apologise and will be tracking you down in the next few days(though if you're reading this just putting your blog link in the comments will save me a great deal of time).

regards

CSL

Bankroll management and the Kelly criterion

2010-04-05T12:01:00.000-07:00

Kelly criterion is the optimal strategy to maximize capital growth.

It's premise is that with a greater edge, a gambler/investor's stake should increase. Now the problem with betting the full Kelly stake is we have to know our exact edge to be sure we're betting the correct amount. Since few (if any) do, the answer is to bet fractional Kelly.

My personal preference is 1/4 to 1/2 Kelly dependent on the league i'm betting on.

An example:

Lets say we think team x will beat team y 2-0 3% of the time and this score is available to lay @ 19 on Betfair.

Laying at 19 is the inverse equivalent of backing at 1 + (0.95 * (1/19)) or 1.05. This is assuming %5 commission.

We plug the %97 win expected winrate and our 1.05 price into the kelly calculator and it tells us we should risk %37 of our bankroll. Now betting half kelly with a £5k roll equates to £925 risked. But for simplicities sake we can round down or up to the nearest unit size.

Had we been laying @ 25 our stake would have been smaller or laying at 15 it would have been greater.

There is an excellent Kelly calculator here: http://www.sbrforum.com/Betting+Tools/Kelly+Calculator.aspx

This one works for multiple simultaneous events.

Don't forget the one thing every correct score layer needs! a Betfair account.

(sign-up from the link below and receive £25 free)

2010-03-13T15:39:00.000-08:00

Looking forward to the WorldCup. Correct score laying wise internationals and cross-league games(CL, FA Cup etc.) are more difficult to analyse, though i'll have a more lengthy post about it nearer the time.

Not completely unrelated to that.............. I have built up a decent position on USA outright winner market at prices ranging from 82-90. Obviously they have very little chance of winning. However that doesn't matter, we simply lay the bet off after the group stage when it will drop significantly.

Bonus Arbritrage

2010-03-04T15:10:00.000-08:00

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For those that don't have Bet365 accounts already, they're giving away £200 when you sign up to a new account. This is a great bonus to take risk-free advantage of with Bonus Arbing via Betfair.

It's unlikely(though not impossible) for you to find a +ev bet to arb but a neutral ev or even slightly -ev bet is fine since we're doing it with free money. The idea is to bet the max £200 then lay it off on the exchanges.
There is a work through requirement of 3x the bonus amount but this doesnt matter, the idea is we want to lose on bet365 and win on betfair before we hit the work through and if we haven't done it after the 3 bets we can just withdraw from Bet365 anyway.
Heres how's it's done:
Step 1: Deposit £200 with Bet365 and bet it all on Team X @ evens(example price).
Lay off Team X on Betfair @ 2.02(or if you're lucky 1.90).
We take a small loss(or profit) on this match but get £200 free from Bet365.
Step 2: repeat Step 1 on the next match if we win on Betfair we're done and £200(- the small loss from the arbs) richer. If not we repeat again until we win on betfair or hit the workthrough requirements and withdraw our profit from Bet365.
An easy way to make some risk-free money!

Correct score laying profit & ROI

2010-03-03T10:33:00.000-08:00

What is a good return from correct score laying?
Well, anything over 0%!
A skilled gambler should easily be able to hit well over %2 ROI laying correct scores over a significant sample. %1 should be achievable by most and is a good target to aim for.
1% doesn't sound like much but it can add up to significant sum over time.
(For those that don't know ROI means return on investment and is the profit shown as a percentage of total amount wagered.)
For example: A gambler with a £3k bankroll spending a few hours a week laying correct scores should easily be able to lay an average of 10+ games per week. Laying to a £1000 liability per bet gives a total amount wagered of £10k per week. If he hits his %1 ROI target thats £100 a week, or a little over £5k profit over the year.

2010-03-03T01:14:00.000-08:00

I gave a pretty terrible and incorrect analogy in my blog post as was pointed out to me by Cassini. My point being that 350 in a row sounds a lot more impressive than it actually was.
I could randomly pick correct scores and hit at %90+ but it wouldn't be profitable.
The message I was trying to give was that you will be successful with most of the correct score lays. However, that doesn't mean you should lay at any price. Every score has a >0% chance and since it is nigh on impossible to predict a correct score to within 2 decimal places a good rule of thumb is just to avoid laying at more than 100.

Expect to win

2010-02-27T00:49:00.000-08:00

A while ago there was a correct score laying thread on one of the betting forums by a man called Scotty(I'll post the link if I can find it). Scotty successfully layed some 350ish correct scores in a row.
Now a lot of people were in awe of Scotty after this but it really wasn't all that impressive and i'll explain why.
IIRC almost all his correct score lays were priced between 100 and 300. Assuming neutral ev bets, if we take the average as 200 then Scotty's expectation is to lose 1 in every 200 times and he actually lost 1 in 350. Good yes but given that it's less than twice his expectation it's hardly amazing.
A good analogy would be a gambler getting two winners in a row at evens(2) which is actually more impressive than Scottys run of wins as it is running at double the expectation whereas Scotty was just less than double.
This is not to belittle Scotty's thread in any way, just to say that it didn't quite deserve the awe it received.

So anyway my point is that you should expect to win almost every bet and the difference between winning and losing at correct score laying(and gambling in general) is the price you take. Don't be afraid to let one bet go. If you liked it at 20 it doesn't mean you like it at 25.
For example I have a success rate of just under %98 at an average price of around 21. Now if I just took any price, that could push the average up to 30 or more and turn a profit into a loss.

Which correct score to lay?

2010-02-21T00:13:00.000-08:00

The 3 most important statistics to look at before deciding which correct score to lay are:
1. Home team GF/GA avg(when playing at home)
2. Away team GF/GA avg(when playing away)
3. League avg HGF/AGF.
The importance of the first 2 should be obvious. It shows us what the particular team would be expected to score vs an average team.
The final statistic is extremely important. It shows how many goals an average home team and away team scores. We need to compare the values from numbers 1 & 2 to the values in 3.
For example:
Team A(Home) average 1.5gf and 1.5ga at home
Team B(Away) average 1.4gf and 1.6ga away from home
Just looking at these you night think Team A was a slight favourite here or perhaps a draw was the most likely right?.............WRONG!
When we include the current league average we get a whole different perspective.
Lets say these teams play in the Premier League where this season the average game has approx 1.712hg and 1.057ag.
Now let's compare that to Team statistics.
Team A's goals for are 0.212gpg below average and their defense concedes 0.443gpg more than average.
Team B's goals for are 0.343gpg more than average and their defense concedes 0.112gpg less than average.
So just by comparing the values to the league average we can see in fact that Team B is a better than average team and Team A is distinctly below average. Team B would be the favorite here and priced at around 2.3.
I might lay 2-0(home) in this game at 20 or lower.
It is rare that I will lay a correct score which involves the favorite winning. (Note: There are some cases for example if there is very little between the teams I might lay 3-0 to the favorite)
As a rule of thumb I will also try to avoid laying 1-1 in any game except where the home team is a HUGE favorite.
I'll go more into finding the right price to lay at in another post but this should be a good start for handicapping your own games and finding mis-priced correct scores to lay.
The correct score market is a derivative of the match odds market. Meaning if a match odds result is under-priced then the correct scores likely are too.

Correct score laying strategy

2010-02-20T09:17:00.000-08:00

I'm going to talk a bit about different strategies and things to consider before you start laying correct scores.

Stick to 1 or 2 correct scores per game. The more scores you lay the more chance there is of one of them coming in(obviously). It's rare that I will lay more than 2 correct scores in any one game and when I do it's only if all my indicators are showing that laying 3,4 or more correct scores represents real value as they're well under-priced.

How high a price to lay to?.............For me personally I have two separate banks. One is for laying at low-mid prices(10-35)and the other for laying at higher prices(35-100). I have never(nor do I intend to) layed a correct score at greater than 100.
Why not more than 100? well think of it like this...often there is one correct score available to lay at 300 the implied probability at that price is %0.333 chance of this score occurring. It is impossible to predict the outcome of a soccer game with accuracy to within 2 decimal places. So if we decide to lay at 300 we have no idea if this is a good bet since the true probability could easily have been for example %0.4 in which case we just layed an outcome that should be 250 at 300 which makes the bet a loser in the long run and -ev.

more soon....

Correct score laying

2010-02-20T09:02:00.000-08:00

Hi All,
Welcome to my blog all about correct score laying. I'm going to talk about different strategies for being successful and making money by laying correct scores on the betting exchanges.

To start... for those that don't know: Correct score laying is betting against a particular score in a football/soccer match.
For example let's say that Man Utd are playing against Bolton and we think there will be at least 1 goal in the game. In other words we think the final score will be any result other than 0-0. So to lay the correct score of 0-0 we go to Betfair or Betdaq and look at the price. Now let's say that we want to make £10 and in this example betfair has the 0-0 score available to back at 11.5 or lay at 12. so we want to lay 0-0 at 12. To win our £10 we just multiply the lay price-1 by how much we want to win. 11 * £10 = £110
We must risk £110 to win £10(before commission) and we win as long as the score is not 0-0.