Backing the Draws - Enhancing the Strategy

Last month, I looked at the strange phenomenon where blindly backing the draw in the Premier League resulted in some quite impressive profits (read the article here). We found that simply backing the draw in every Premier League match returned £668.90 on £10 stakes, giving an overall ROI for the three season period of 5.87%.

Draws are rarely the most exciting of results, but they can be hugely profitable

We then looked at narrowing this selection down by focussing on matches where the Under 2.5 goals price lay below certain thresholds. It appeared that by focussing solely on matches where the Unders were favourite, we could boost these returns up to 10.73%.

A valid question that a number of people raised in the comments was whether it would be better to refine our selections by focussing on eliminating strong favourites, rather than by using the goal expectancy. As a first test, I looked at all those matches where the average price of the favourite lay below the 1.50 threshold.

	Staked	Profit	ROI
2010/11	£3,040	£435.80	14.34%
2011/12	£2,890	-£97.20	-3.36%
2012/13	£2,960	£603.50	20.39%
Total	£8,890	£942.10	10.60%

As we can see, this strategy returns some impressive figures. Over the three seasons, £10 stakes on every match where the favourite was at least 1.50 would have returned profits of £942.10 at an ROI of 10.60%. Indeed, in both the 2010/11 and 2012/13 seasons, the ROI was exceptionally high, even peaking at over 20% for last season.

However, can we make this even higher by changing our definition of a strong favourite? The table below looks at these figures for different definitions of strong favouritism:

Odds of Favourite	Total Matches	Total Profit	ROI
< 1.20	1117	£898.90	8.05%
< 1.30	1033	£1,022.50	9.90%
< 1.40	967	£1,041.60	10.77%
< 1.50	889	£942.10	10.60%
< 1.60	806	£783.30	9.72%
< 1.70	739	£776.10	10.50%
< 1.80	664	£563.80	8.49%
< 1.90	569	£469.70	8.25%
< 2.00	481	£408.90	8.50%

As we can see, there is not a great fluctuation of the ROI at any of these levels, although excluding favourites below 1.40 would appear to give the highest ROI at 10.77%.

Finally, can we increase our ROI even further by combining the two strategies that we have looked at? We have noted that excluding favourites priced below 1.40 has the highest rate of return for this strategy and we saw that excluding any matches where the price on Under 2.5 goals was greater than 2.1 was the optimal form of the previous strategy. So, if we combine the two, can they improve on the returns? The table below shows the results:

	Staked	Profit	ROI
2010/11	£2,630	£461.00	17.53%
2011/12	£1,360	£153.70	11.30%
2012/13	£2,230	£507.10	22.74%
Total	£6,220	£1,121.80	18.04%

The answer would seem to be a resounding yes. By taking all those matches from earlier where the favourite is greater than 1.40 and applying the additional filter of excluding high scoring matches, the returns are really very impressive. Over the past three seasons, there were 622 matches that matched both of these filters. By staking £10 on each of those 622 matches, you would have seen profits of £1,121.80, working out at a ROI of over 18% - an excellent return for any system.

If anyone has any further ideas on refining this, feel free to mention them in the comments section and I will endeavour to research them further...

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