Winning soccer pools on a regular basis seems like a dream (or pure fantasy) for many people. However, it can be done if you have a system. How can you work with probabilities? It is a question that many people ask!
Let’s look at the basic probabilities. With a 49 match (games) coupon, we seek to identify a winning line of 8 scoring ties in the British triple chance groups if we want to win a first dividend (a score tie or SD is a result in which both teams end with the same number of goals, not zero). If we bet on a single line (no one does, but put that aside for now), then the odds of selecting the correct 8 matches out of 49 are roughly 450 million to 1. With the UK lottery the odds are 14 million to 1 for a six-number combination, by comparison.
If we bet 45,000 lines on one entry, that reduces the odds (purely randomly), to roughly 10,000 to 1. That is getting a lot better. Now there are complications. There will not always be 8 SD results on a given coupon and sometimes there can be as many as 15 or even more. During the latter part of 2009, the number of tied matches (both SD and no tie) ranged from 12% (1 unscored and 5 scored ties) to 38% (5 unscored and 13 SD) of the coupon. The maximum number of score draws during that 12 week period was 14. See the attached chart.
Take for example a week where there are 13 score draws. With 13 such withdrawals, there are 1287 possible combinations of the 8 needed for a first dividend. This helps our odds considerably: 10,000 to 1 becomes 7.77 to 1 (ok, 8 to 1 to keep it simple). That’s with a random selection from our 45,000 lines.
Now let’s say soccer teams play fit (not always or always true), but let’s say we can predict tying games with 60% accuracy within our picks. This means that we are 20% better at odds (10% advantage over 50% random). So the 8 to 1 odds now become 6.4 to 1 (or 13/2 if we bet on horses). There are other ways to sharpen the odds in our favor, and many more to get a system working, but I hope this article gave you an idea!
(c) Phil Marks 2009