You will probably have noticed that Pro Football Traders has been sitting in our “Current System Tests” column for quite some time now. This is mainly due to my dithering about how, or even if , to go about testing this.
I was given this PDF with only a few weeks of last season’s games left to play. After reading it thoroughly, my first thought was “No chance, way too simplistic, not nearly selective enough and goes against the logic of easily checkable stats ” and I planned to do a One Off review and file it under Failed.
However, the book made so much of the fact that the chosen leagues were extremely profitable and had been researched thoroughly, so I thought the best plan would be to put it on hold for the summer and then give it a month long road test in the new season. One of the leagues specified as the most profitable of all was the Brazilian top division and that starts a little earlier than the big European countries so I put this into pre-testing for the early weeks of that whilst waiting for the big boys to get going. I found that my initial gut reaction was proving to be true and that Brazil was not making a profit.
The Bundesliga got going on the 10th August so I decided to official start recording full results from then on and have covered all the leagues named in the book as the best possible ones to apply the principles to.
Sadly, my suspicions where not only confirmed but were actually exceeded. In the 10 days I covered every possible bet a loss of just over 7 points was recorded. Now that sounds like a tiny loss in the scheme of things BUT we are betting at low odds here, the majority have been around 1.25 – 1.30 mark. The book uses stakes of £200 per bet in the examples (although to be fair it did say that using the more realistic £20 would easily recover the cost of the book within your first month) so if we use their example of £200 we would currently be nearly £1500 down and most winning bets adding just £45-£55 to the pot. So we need a strike rate north of 80% to make this even break even.
Whilst it’s obviously true that ALL systems go through rough patches and I only rigourously tested it for 10 days at the beginning of a new season where “shocks” are more likely, the longterm stats show that this is going to really struggle to hit enough winning bets at any kind of price.
I did have one winning bet at 1.64 but I had quite a few below 1.20 and the majority were around 1.28. The big problem is that you can’t really get away with only having one filter. I dare say the author may well be onto something here if he were to add a few more filters to cut down the number of bets. Only a few of the named leagues have any kind of stipulation about when not to bet, you place bets on every game in the other named leagues. I think it could easily be improved by adding No Bet guidelines like “If game is currently X – X then place bet A, if game is cuurently Y – Y then No Bet”
I won’t be showing my usual spreadsheet of results, I have kept one but I’m certain that the rules could be easily worked out from the games where wins/losses where recorded.
There is at least the safety net of this being a Clickbank product if you really feel you must try it for yourself but at £84 (inc Tax for UK customers) it’s at the pricey end of the market.
I recommend this to be filed under FAILED.
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