How an unprofitable betting system can make you money

Today on Predictology we ask the question “Can an unprofitable system still make you money?”

And in our opinion the answer is yes, which may surprise you a little but let us show you how.

The dream of any football betting punter is to discover a proven football betting system that really works. Predictology was created for that very purpose, to help people like you and me find really powerful and profitable betting systems, whether that be fully fledged betting systems or a combination of successful micro betting strategies.

However, the advantages of Predictology don’t end there. You can also let Predictology do the heavy lifting for your own research and filtering process to identify winning selections.

For example, a similar process is used to identify potential winners in a horse race by filtering out selections/horses that don’t fit a certain criteria or have no chance of winning.

Many professional horse racing punters will tell you that before they try and work out which horse may win a given race they look to strike through the horses that CAN NOT win the race. This helps by lowering the field of vision that you are concentrating on, saves time and then allows you to spend more time on the potential winners and in turn identify the most likely winner(s).

To illustrate this, I will use the excellent GeeGeez.co.uk which is easily the best horse racing form resource around. (New to GeeGeez? Try it out for 30 days for just one pound here)

One of the race card views you can access on GeeGeez looks like this:

Now one of the things I really like about GeeGeez is that I can cross out any of the runners in a race to narrow my shortlist down before I start my deeper research, like so:

Now we have narrowed our shortlist down to three contenders, which are the only ones with some resemblance of winning form under the current race criteria. Marley Firth looks the most likely winner or you could look at betting the top 3 in a dutch, placing an exotic bet or conducting further research.

Anyway, we have digressed a little here but we it felt important to illustrate just what we were talking about before moving on. So, how do we apply this line of thinking to football betting and Predictology.

Let’s take an easy example and look at matches where one team is set to kick off as an odds on favourite.

On any given weekend there are over a 100 matches across the top 22 European leagues that will have a team that is a strong, odds on favourite. Logic would dictate that these sides will have a strong chance of winning their games but equally it is not as easy as simply backing each team to win – as we will shortly see – but with the right research there is value to be found in teams who are odds on (we will cover the impact of Favourite / Long Shot bias in a future article).

Let’s start the process at the beginning and we will show you how you can use Predictology to create filtered reports (like in our example with GeeGeez above) allowing us to hone in on the games that potentially have the greatest value and are worthy of our extra attention.

• 1. You can easily set up a report in Predictology which will show you all the games for the current fixtures which have teams who are odds on (the below example focuses on home teams, you would just replicate this and select Bet Venue: Visitor to get the away games)

• 2. This will then highlight all of the games for the up coming fixtures which are odds on at home (or away), like so:

Bel. Jupiler Pro League 2017/18

Bet365Pinnacle

EUUK

1X2Over/UnderAsian HandicapAsian ExtendedBoth Teams to Score

DATE/TIME		EVENT NAME	1	X	2
2 Feb 19:30		Antwerp – Waasland-Beveren	2.00	3.39	3.75
3 Feb 17:00		Lokeren – Standard	3.79	3.29	2.00
3 Feb 19:00		Eupen – Gent	3.60	3.50	2.00
3 Feb 19:00		St Truiden – Kortrijk	1.85	3.60	4.00
3 Feb 19:30		Mouscron-Peruwelz – Genk	3.79	3.29	2.00
4 Feb 13:30		Anderlecht – Mechelen	1.39	4.50	7.50
4 Feb 17:00		Club Brugge – Charleroi	1.44	4.33	7.00
4 Feb 19:00		Zulte-Waregem – Oostende	2.04	3.75	3.25

• 3. You can then Export all of the selections to excel for further analysis

As you can see below, for this particular weekend we have 74 matches with the home team expected to start odds on and that is before we even start to look at the away teams.

• 4. Simply backing all odds-on teams to win this season at home would not be profitable as the below table demonstrates

• 5. Add a additional filter to refine our shortlist

But rather than simply dismissing this, we are using this as a top-level filter to begin our analysis. We could then add another criteria or filter, such as an ELO rating to refine the list further to identify the highest qualify odds on games.

Again, not profitable on it’s own but we have brought it much closer to break-even and increased the strike rate by more than 10%

• 6. Now, like in horse racing example, we have a smaller more focused list for us to go and do our own detailed research

Here is an example from the previous weekend where the Saturday selections for away teams was reduced down to a more manageable list of potential bets.

In fact we had seven selections with six of them priced at 1.50 or higher and all bar one were winners.

How you approach these selections from here is up to you but here are couple of trains of thought to consider

1. Do they help refine and filter our potential bets we were going to make from other research / systems
2. Can you identify one, two, or three selections from within this list that confirms them as value
3. Perhaps you could look at small multi bets such as doubles, trebles or Trixie bets

However, whatever you do from this point, the fact remains that a unprofitable system has helped you identify a manageable list of selections with a very high chance of winning – all achieved by running a report that takes a couple of moments to generate.

So far we have used odds on matches as a common and easy to understand example. That said, there is nothing to stop you applying this thinking to other criteria or metrics. For example, one report I regularly look to run is one that looks for teams with a minimum or maximum ELO rating then filter them by their opponents – do they have X ratings advantage over their opponent – does this then present a value bet?

One of my systems I use regularly looks for teams with a minimum ranking of 1,600. They must also be 70 ratings points higher than their opponent.

This filter worked well the previous Friday when it highlighted just two selections for the day.

In this instance it was a very easy choice to back both St Mirren and Ein. Frankfurt as singles and also as a double which led to a nice payout to get the weekend started.

Again, blindly backing every team on this report would not leave you in profit but when used wisely to narrow the field, coupled with a combination of additional research, experience and intuition, it can sure make finding potentially winning bets a whole lot quicker and easier.

Predictology

We have created an incredibly powerful new betting platform which gives you all the tools you need to create your very own football betting systems!

By becoming a member of Predictology you get instant access to the following:

• Over 200,000 matches and growing…
• 22 leagues covering 10+ seasons… and we are adding more leagues all the
  time
• Run and test systems in seconds with our custom built server
• Assess over 100 variables, criteria to build the perfect betting system
• Auto bet alerts – one email per day with all of your selections from all of your systems
• 1-click betting – place your bets straight from the Predictology platform
• A full video guide series which will make you a system building expert in not time at all
• Three custom rating models for you to use
• Value tracker reports – we will tell you the matches the bookies have priced wrong every week in one simple report
• 10 week playbook which shares some of our own most pro table betting systems
• And much, much more