Welcome to my latest blog post, titled “The Ligue 1 Disaster.” As a passionate sports bettor, I’ve been keeping a close eye on the results of my latest betting history over the past month, and one league that has left me utterly disappointed is Ligue 1. Known for its exciting matches and talented players, the French top-tier football league has seen unexpected twists and turns that have turned my betting predictions upside down. In this post, I’ll delve into the recent woes I’ve experienced with my bets on Ligue 1 and analyze the factors that have contributed to what can only be described as a disaster. Join me as I reflect on the surprising outcomes, unforeseen upsets, and the rollercoaster ride of emotions that have made Ligue 1 a source of frustration in my recent betting endeavors.
Continue reading “Season 2022/23 – The Ligue 1 Disaster”Ensemble modeling for football predictions – Is one model enough?
The intention of this blog post, was a bit different at the beginning. At first I wanted to improve my existing ML Poisson model by adding the team market values as additional features. But as I worked on the topic, one question came more and more to the fore: Is one single model enough to BeatTheBookie?
Continue reading “Ensemble modeling for football predictions – Is one model enough?”Season 2022/23 – A turning point (in theory)
This will be the 2nd blog about my betting performance in the season 2022/23 using my ML Poisson model. The beginning of the season was a sobering one. My theoraticaly worst model performed the best and the ML Poisson model, which I am using for betting showed a really bad profit. So let’s have a look, how things changed in the 2nd part of the first season half.
Read MoreZIP model performance incl. minor leagues
Some days ago I extended my ZIP Poisson model by some additional leagues. These are: Championship, Seria B, La Liga 2, Eredivise, Liga Portugal. It’s always helpful to be able to select more possible bets. Playing more bets reduces the variance of your hit rate and provides a more stable average profit. So let’s have a look, how the ZIP Poisson model performs including the new leagues.
Continue reading “ZIP model performance incl. minor leagues”Season 2022/23 – A sobering beginning
In the past I already posted some summaries in my pick history for different models. So everybody could get an impression, how a real life betting using my models could look like and to test, whether the profit, indicated by the backtesting, can also be reached in the future. With this post I want to start such a series again for my ML Poisson model and additionally compare it to the performance of the other models. So let’s start…
Continue reading “Season 2022/23 – A sobering beginning”Poisson vs Reality
The Poisson distribution is widely used to predict the result of a football matches. Multiple articles can be found in the internet and I also already provided a comparison of different Vanilla Poisson models. But the Poisson distribution as some limitations. The Poisson distribution assumes the number of goals a team scores are independent. But everybody watching football knows, that a team being one goals behind is way more motivated to score a goal in comparison to being already 4 goals behind. So let’s have a look how a simple Poisson distribution compares to the actual scored goals.
Continue reading “Poisson vs Reality”Why is it so hard to beat the Bookie?
Image you see following picture for two different profit lines. Both betting simulations are based on the same stacking method: Each identified value bet is set with 1 unit flat stack. Which of both simulation would you prefer? I think the answer is easy.
Of course everybody would prefer the green proft line. But both profit lines are based on the same predictive model. All predictions and bet selections are based on the EMA10 Vanilla Poisson xG model, which I already used for multiple blogs.
The difference between both lines: The yellow line represents the betting profit, when betting against the provided odds of a bookie. The green line represent the betting profit, when betting against a bookie without the bookie margin. This bookmaker margin eat up the whole advantage of the model.
Betting with numbers – How I select my bets
Of course I don’t write all these blogs and create the different models just for fun. Of course I am using my data and my models for betting. So I thought, it would be a good idea to explain my process of selecting bets based on my predictions.
Continue reading “Betting with numbers – How I select my bets”Scoring functions vs. betting profit – Measuring the performance of a football betting model
“What’s the best model?” – That’s a very important questions, when creating, training and testing new predictive models for football. Various machine learning algorithms and packages offer by default a set of scoring functions like accuracy, log-loss, brier score or ROC-AUC, which measure the accuracy of a probabilistic prediction. But I already recognized in older posts, that the best model based on a scoring function, was not always the best model, when it’s about using the prediction results for betting. So let’s have a look and compare the rank of some scoring functions in comparison to the betting profit of some models.
Continue reading “Scoring functions vs. betting profit – Measuring the performance of a football betting model”The predictive power of xG
“Goals are the only statistic, which decide a match” – sentences like this appeared not only once, while reading discussion about the latest xG statistics of single matches on Twitter. Even if the statistic xG is more and more used by sport journalists and during broadcasts, the meaning and importance of the statistic is not yet widely understood. This might be caused by the usage of xG for single matches or single shots. The final result of a match and the corresponding xG values might differ a lot. But over the long-term xG is a statistic, which tells us way more about a football team than goals and shots alone. To prove this, this post will take a look at the predictive power of xG in comparison to goals. The more information a statistic contains the more it should help us to predict the result of future matches.
Continue reading “The predictive power of xG”
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