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Developing Profitable Betting Systems: A Step-by-Step Guide

Data Acquisition

To get started, we need high-quality data. Luckily, a website called football-data.co.uk, run by Joseph Buchdahl, offers data on various leagues. This data includes things like games played, scores, and most importantly for our purposes, pre-match betting odds.

There are odds from many different bookmakers on this website, but we'll only be focusing on the odds from Pinnacle. Pinnacle is known as a "sharp" bookmaker, meaning they offer odds that are very close to being fair. This makes their odds more reliable for analysis.

System Identification and Refinement

Our betting strategies rely on finding patterns in past data. To do this, we run a special program (algorithm) that searches for all systems that have historically made money, with a minimum profit threshold. This gives us a starting point with hundreds of potential systems to choose from.

Next, we refine this list by considering a few key factors:

  • Simplicity: We prefer systems with fewer criteria, making them easier to understand and less prone to overfitting (fitting too closely to historical data and not performing well on new data).
  • Manageability: The system should have a reasonable number of picks per week/month so it's practical to follow.
  • Profit Consistency: We want systems with steady profits. To measure this, we use a custom version of the Sharpe Ratio, which considers both profit and risk.
  • Uniqueness: The pattern shouldn't be too obvious, like simply betting on home teams all the time (contrarian).