Football Food For Thought / Gary Boswell / 16 December 2008 /

The second in a short series of three where Betfair's Non-League expert The Boz reveals a few of the tricks of his trade - this time he's looking at the importance of keeping tabs on all your bets and why goalkeepers, not strikers, win their teams leagues and you punters money.

Tip number Three: KEEP RECORDS & CREATE YOUR OWN PERSONALLY RELEVANT STATISTICAL DATA

Record keeping is well documented as the key factor in the move to making your betting profitable. Not only the fiscal record that documents each bet but the plethora of statistical records that you keep and constantly update in the medium that you are betting in. Like many, when I first started betting seriously, I found the time that keeping records consumed was extremely healthy for me. It filled the vacuum I used to spend betting for fun (or as I now prefer to call it, betting for loss!). I'm not alone in being susceptible to stupid betting activity when I'm bored!

It is generally accepted that statistical data can be manipulated to support any argument or position but it is also clearly true that in the business of trying to predict what is going to happen in the future, a study of significant past trends can be of invaluable assistance.

In tennis betting, I am a great fan of player head to head records (which I access in the women's game via the WTASonyEricsson site) as I have found past encounters between certain players is a very reliable guide to how upcoming game will go.

Especially with regard to surface. In the US Open Tournament this year, I had a good bet on Flavia Pennetta to beat Shuia Peng - two players I'll confess to not knowing a great deal about and never having seen play in the flesh - simply because records showed Pennetta had a 3-0 head to head score including a decisive win on the hard surface they were about to meet on. That kind of dominant score takes some overturning. Pennetta was a short price at start of game but lengthened in play after dropping a serve first set before breezing through and I landed a tidy profit.

Of course in that case, the opponents you are playing against in the Betfair sense have just as much access to the widely available statistical data as yourself. That's the reason Pennetta started at such a short price and it is perhaps remarkable that I got the bet matched at all given the extreme likelihood of her victory.

Much better for the purposes of getting favourable odds is the statistical data that you create and keep for yourself that is not made public. To illustrate this point, I'm going to be revealing a whopper of a secret that will likely impact on my ability to get good odds in future.

As mentioned in tip number two, Betfair are paying me for this article so I feel reasonably ok that profit from the system is still being made. There is a possibility, however, that I'm about to make a gigantic mistake! Giving away my edge! I've had to wrestle with this phenomenon ever since I started writing for Betfair though. To write well as a professional tipster, you kind of have to accept a certain amount of giving away your secrets.

Those who listened in to me on Betfair radio early in the season on the Non-League show will perhaps not be surprised that one of my main idiosyncratic statistical charts concerns goalkeeping performance in the Blue Square Premier.

I actually keep a goalkeepers league table throughout the season whereby I award points for saves that have been instrumental in securing the team's result and deducting points for concedes that could have been avoided and/or have cost the side the game. Setanta show all the goals scored in this league in their weekly highlights show so I am able to keep a comprehensive and all inclusive league table and I can't begin to tell you how useful it is in ensuring both high grade result prediction and decent tipping.

In season 07/08, regulars will remember that I was always keen to oppose Torquay at short odds whenever they played decent opposition. This was because, despite Torquay being in the league's top three for most of the season, their first choice goalkeeper Simon Rayner was in the bottom three of The Boz's goalkeeper league for that same period.

Of course, Torquay were still winning when playing inferior teams overall but whenever Rayner was being tested by the better opposition, he was proving a liability and cost the Gulls roughly twenty points over the course of the season. The phrase 'good goalkeepers win championships' is undoubtedly a maxim that The Boz subscribes to.

Worth noting also that for six weeks last season, Simon Rayner was loaned out to Boston United in Blue Square North (a division lower) where he performed much better on my BSN goalkeepers table. His score was of course erased from the BSP table during this period (but re-instated with his season long record intact when he returned).

Torquay got in Southampton's Michael Poke on loan and instantly looked like they would then go on to win the league as he kept five clean sheets in six games. Sadly for Gulls fans, Rayner was recalled for the end of the season run in and I opposed them in the championship six pointer against Aldershot and the play-off second leg against Exeter - both games that Torquay would not have lost had Rayner not been keeping goal.

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