Accurate Football Predictions for Beginners: A Simple Guide

Football is filled with the glory and the drama of the unexpected win, the shocking loss, and the surprising move that changed everything in a heartbeat. The fun of watching a football match is the uncertainty of the outcome. If we knew with 100% accuracy how a game would turn out, there would be little reason to watch. However, when it comes to betting on football matches, that uncertainty can make the difference between a massive win and a devastating loss—for the gambler. 

The value of betting just on the European Premier League is nearly 80 billion euros per year. So, wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to predict what will happen during a football match? While there is no surefire way to guarantee an outcome, there are some strategies that can help you to make more accurate football predictions.

In this article provided by crypto casino experts from BestCasinoBitcoin, we’ll take a look at some of the most popular football betting systems, their benefits, and some of the factors you should consider when developing your own betting system. While we can’t guarantee perfect accuracy, a carefully developed and researched football betting system can help you to make more accurate predictions—and increase the likelihood of your bets paying off.

Betting Systems: The Starting Point for Predictions

The most common way to make football predictions as a bettor is to have a betting system. A betting system is a set of rules that guide the decisions you make when betting on football. There are many different ways to develop these betting systems, and each has positives and negatives. There are six key factors that you should consider as you develop your football betting system. These are:

 

1. Profitability. First and foremost, you want your betting system to make you money. So, the rules that you develop to guide your betting should yield a positive expected value, which means that the amount of money that returns to you over time should be greater than the money you invested in the betting process.

2. Bankroll Management. Your system should be geared to the size of your bankroll and take into account how much you are willing to put at risk. Your system will need to have a plan for what to do when you hit an inevitable losing streak and adjust your stake size accordingly. 

3. Consistency. A betting system should take the long view and avoid making rapid changes in response to short term fluctuations or streaks. It’s typically a stronger position to rely on mathematical formulas and probabilities rather than a reaction to a hot streak.

4. Risk management. Any strong betting system needs to account for the risks involved with betting and have strategies in place for handling risk. For instance, you may want to have stop-loss limits in place and avoid bets with especially high risk-to-reward ratios.

5. Adaptability. All of this talk about rules shouldn’t cause you to overlook the fact that a good betting system also needs to be able to adapt to the changing conditions of the football landscape. As information comes in and developments occur, your system should adjust to keep pace with new data.

6. Testability. A strong betting system should produce the expected results when applied to a sufficiently large data set. Those results should be consistent across samples and runs, and it should be able to withstand statistical tests and be free of bias.

But, you may be asking, how does one create such a system? We’ll look at specific strategies below, but the key to any system of prediction is the question of probability.

Probability: When to Play the Odds

Everyone knows a little bit about the basics of probability, the measure of how likely a given event is to happen. But when it comes to making football predictions, we need more than just hunches and instincts. If you are going to bet on an outcome, it’s essential that you be able to estimate accurately the probability of that outcome occurring. Many factors go into creating such an estimate, including team form, player availability, head-to-head records, and even less obvious factors such as the weather forecast. Analysis of this data helps to yield a probability for any given outcome during a match.

 

This probability, however, isn’t enough on its own to make an effective bet. After all, bookmakers are also able to calculate probabilities and assign the odds of any given bet based on their estimates. The trick is to identify areas where the oddsmakers have underestimated the probability of an outcome, thus making your bet on that outcome more valuable. In order to have long-term success as a sports bettor, you need a prediction model that can convert bookmaker odds to probabilities and identify those areas where there is hidden value due to a difference between the bookmaker’s odds and a fair estimate of the probability according to your own system.

Developing a Football Prediction System

There are a number of ways you can develop your own football prediction system. They fall into a few basic approaches. Let’s take a look at a few of the most common:

1. Grading Systems. A grading system is one of the most popular ways for new bettors to calculate their own odds and identify value opportunities in the betting markets. This system assigns grades to particular factors such as team performance or quality, and the combination of these grades can allow you to make predictions about the likelihood of future outcomes. For example, you might group teams within a league based on their level of quality; however, it is important to recognize areas where you are making subjective judgments and quality in order to avoid bias in your grading. It’s also important to remember that even when teams share the same grade, they may not be fully equal to one another. But by combining graded factors and comparing historical outcomes with upcoming events, you can calculate the probability of a win or loss under specific conditions.

2. Rule-Based Systems. By contrast, rule-based systems involve identifying rules or criteria that can signal the probable outcome of a match. For example, you might identify a rule that teams that experience a head injury are more likely to lose (or win!) a match, or a team that is playing an opponent ranked in the bottom three of their league is more likely to win. You would then apply this rule to determine which teams are more likely to win their next match. By combining several rules you have identified, you can identify the teams that have the most factors pointing toward a win going for them at any given time. Of course, these rule-based systems tend to be inflexible and do not always take into account emerging situations. 

3. Poisson Distribution. This system is used to calculate the likely number of goals a team will score during a game. In short, this system uses the average number of goals the team has historically scored to develop a probability that a team will score a specific number of goals (0, 1, 2, 3, etc.) in their next game. Of course, it’s a little more complicated than that and the predictions that are generated through a Poisson distribution cover a greater range of information, such as the strength of a team’s attack.