Tips index
Background
Disclaimer
Season introduction
2003-04 season index
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Background
Each week I will be bringing you my football betting tips, exclusive to Cod Almighty. You will be able to follow my progress over the season and maybe make yourself a bit of money.
My tips are based around a system for predicting football results known as the rateform system. No system is guaranteed to be 100 per cent accurate, but this is perhaps the best system I have seen to date. So how does it work?
The basics behind the rateform system are very simple. Each team has a number of rateform points. The difference between the home team’s number of points and the number the away team has is used to predict who will win the game. Easy as that.
Where the difference is positive - i.e. the home team has more rateform points than their opponents - then we predict a home win. If the difference is negative, we predict the match will end with a win for the away side. The larger the difference, the more certain the prediction.
That is slightly over-simplified, as it doesn’t allow for draws. So arbitrary limits are set on how positive or negative the difference must be before the match is predicted as a win for the home or away team. My limits are set at 100, so if the difference is greater than 100 I predict a home win; at less than –100 I predict an away win; and other games are draws.
When calculating differences, the home team is given a bonus of 100 rateform points. This is to allow for the advantage of playing at home, on familiar turf and in front of your own fans. This 100-point bonus is only used when calculating the differences.
For each game a kitty is formed, the home team giving 7 per cent of their rateform to the kitty and the away team donating 5 per cent of theirs. The winner takes the pot. In the event of draws, the teams take half the pot each, with the away team taking the extra point if the kitty contains an odd number.
Let’s look at an example of the rateform system at work -
West Brom (840 points) v Birmingham (953 points)
First we calculate the difference between the two teams’ points, taking into account the home advantage to make our prediction.
home_points + 100 – away_points = -13
The result is negative, but not negative enough to be considered an away win, so we predict a draw.
Next we calculate what each team donates to the kitty.
home_gives = 0.07 * 840 = 59
away_gives = 0.05 * 953 = 48
kitty = home_gives + away_gives = 59 + 48 = 107
Now suppose Birmingham win that match. They take all the points in the kitty, giving them a new total of
away_points – away_gives + away_gains = 953 – 48 + 107 = 1012
and West Brom’s new total would be
home_points – home_gives + home_gains = 840 – 59 + 0 = 781
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