Saturday 19 July 2014

Sharp Move

For a bookmaker, Pinnacle Sports publish some pretty darn good betting articles, and if you have a spare week or two, and have already read everything in this blog, you could do worse with your time than take a look at some of them.

One article from November 2012 titled Why Odds Movement is Vital contained a couple of statements that are somewhat related to yesterday's post:

The most accurate way to distinguish winning and losing players is to look at the odds a player received when they made their bet, and compare it with the Pinnacle Sports closing line on the game. If a player consistently beats the closing odds at Pinnacle Sports, they are likely to be a long-term winner.
Interestingly, Pinnacle Sports have found that this test is more reflective of a player’s future winning potential than their historical win/loss record with the company.
For example, if Pinnacle Sports’ closing odds on the Steelers was 1.960, and a customer played 2.050 earlier in the week – that was a sharp bet. When a player can anticipate the line movement, and does this consistently over a series of 100 bets or more, that player is conclusively sharp, and will be up over time.
This is another area where I need to focus some attention this season, but if anyone knows where I can find closing lines on last season's football, I'd be interested. As I have mentioned before, the odds published by the Football Data web site are not closing lines, but prices collected on Friday afternoons for weekend games, and on Tuesday afternoons for midweek games.

1 comment:

Sheva said...

Dottore, you can find closing lines for all football matches on the Odds Portal site, eg here's a link for all Premier League games last season with final kick-off prices for all bookies including Pinnacles and the Exchanges. Unfortunately they aren't in such a usable format as the Buchdahl spreadsheets, but the info is all there and just requires some legwork.

http://www.oddsportal.com/soccer/england/premier-league-2013-2014/results/

It's also worth analysing the data to look for trends with regard to how teams are backed pre-match so as to give guaranteed profits before the matches have even started ;-)
Saluti.