With any prediction system though, it is essential to refine your skill and improve your forecast ability. For example, you may choose to adjust your forecasts to take account of injuries, team selections and end of season relegation or promotion battles. To improve your forecast performance, you need to know how well you are doing. It is easy to do!

How Often?

Sure, you can say ‘we won five times this season’, but that is a fairly rough measure of your betting performance. For others, their ‘bank’ is their measure. Fair enough, but hardly a sound way to go. You know the saying “the bookies always win”. Well, that is because they are always on top of their numbers.

You should measure your hit rate every week, and compare it. Do you know what your performance was last week?

By the way, your hit rate doesn’t have to be 100% to win. If you can find 8 draws in a line on a week when there are 11 draws in the results, and you can win a tidy sum - that’s a hit rate of 72%.

Here’s a way to work it out.

Let’s say that your plan last week was a 19,000 line plan. For UK football treble chance football pools, that would be 19,000 separate entries of 8 draw selections from 49 matches.

The random odds of winning with one line (assuming that there are 8 draws in the results) would be 1 in 451 million. That’s a big number, but we have 19,000 attempts, which knocks those odds down to 1 in 24,000. Still a big number, but a big! That’s still with a random forecast.

Now, what result did you achieve?

Let’s say that there were 8 draws in the results, and your system picked 5 of those draws. Now, it maybe that those five were not in the same line - it happens. But, the forecast system you used predicted 5 of the 8 - that’s 63%. Work this out weekly, and compare it. is good. If there were 12 draws, then 63% success might give you 7, perhaps 8 draws.

You pays your money and you takes your choice when it comes to staking, but the money is wasted unless you are generating forecasts which are better than random. You only need to get it right a few times a year to cover your stakes and make a profit.

If you are have these elements in place, then you are reducing your odds from 1 in 24,000 (with a 19,000 line plan) down to maybe 1 in 8 or 10, or even lower. With a 51,000 line plan, you are looking at better than a 1 in 4 chance.

Therefore, it pays to:

* use a proper forecasting system that works, and
* measure its hit rate every week
* then stake through a syndicate so that you can afford better perms or plans

There is a lot more to being profitable with the football pools. You need to know when not to do them too, when teams will not be playing to form.

Phil Marks, March 2011
  

Back to top