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Public tips
Mat Hare
10 August 2004
The new season is here and Cod Almighty hasn't started its man v monkey tipping competition again. What's going on? Well, we decided over the summer that it was getting a bit stale, and while it hadn't yet started to get those blue
specks of mould that the last slice of white bread gets, it wasn't far off. So we decided to get off our arses and go to Tates and get a fresh loaf. Then we decided we should revamp the tips.
This year the tips will be 50 per cent bigger and hopefully a lot better. No longer is this to be the titanic struggle between one man and an imaginary chimpanzee. Instead the format will be man versus spreadsheet versus collective. Coco has been released back into the wild and will not be making an appearance this season (unless we get really desperate). His opponent, billed last year as me, will continue in the competition but now is the time to come clean and admit that all my selections last year were actually selected by a system I was running.
I felt limited by that. How can I claim to be a gambling guru when all my tips are churned out by a spreadsheet? So I have persuaded the powers that be that I deserve the
chance to put my reputation on the line, stand on my own two feet and come up with my own tips each week. So that's the man (me) and the spreadsheet (my system). Who is the collective?
This is where you lot come in. Each week we will need a volunteer from the CA readership to provide some tips. At the end of the season we tot up the returns and see who made the most money: me, the spreadsheet or you lot.
The rules of the competition have also changed a little bit. Each week the competitors will select 10 games from the weekend's fixtures and mark them as home win, away win or draw. These tips should be split into two groups of
five, in any way the tipster chooses, which will be used to create perms of three from five. The stakes for the bets must total a fiver, which means that the individual stakes for the perms must total 50p. How the stakes are split
across the perms is also left to the tipsters. The odds for the results will be taken from William Hill (only because they are the nearest bookie to work, where I will be writing the tips up, and as I don't have web access I need
to get the odds from the betting coupons or rely on someone else to get me them). CA readers will be able to get the odds from the William Hill website if that is easier.
Note that the spreadsheet system will not have the same free choices as the human entrants. Instead the ten tips will be split such that the five with the highest rating are in one perm, the remainder making up the second perm. The stakes for each perm will be set according to the calculated likelihood of each prediction being correct.
What now? For a start we need CA readers to take part, or this is a real non-starter. A few of you contacted me last year to say how much you enjoyed the column or to laugh at me being beaten by a virtual ape. So why not put an imaginary fiver where your real mouth is and take me and my system on? Email me at tips@codalmighty.com in the first instance and I will mail you
back letting you know when you will be required. There is no reason why you can't have several goes throughout the season. Indeed, only about four people read the tips, so
I should imagine the same names will crop up week after week.
The weekly tips column will return for the weekend of 14 August. Each week I will bring you the latest exciting news from the world of tips along with the predictions made and bets placed by each entrant in our competition.
Come on then – do you think you know more about football betting than I do? I've stuck my tips up on Cod Almighty in the past and you have seen what my system has churned out in the past couple of years. Can you do better – or are
you Coco in disguise? Only one way to find out...
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