Introduction

Welcome to my blog!

I started this to capture and keep a record of the bets I make on various American Football leagues. These bets are based on a system I developed using a combination of the Elo rating system for the competing teams and an analysis of historical betting odds. I was inspired by fivethirtyeight and their modelling efforts but my models are 100% developed and maintained by me. Elo is a simple concept that anyone can use.

I run three separate models. One each for the National Football League, Canadian Football League and College Football FBS games. These are 64% accurate in predicting the winners of NFL or CFL games and 72% accurate for college. From a prediction point of view, these are mostly just simple Elo models with a few, bespoke, subtle quirks. The real trick comes in determining when to bet, this was the hardest part to evaluate and I'm always looking to enhance this aspect.

I am from the UK and don't really understand American Football at all. I followed the NFL last season for the first time ever whilst developing these models so I pretty much understand the rules but can't hold any sort of intelligent conversation around strategy and the nuances of the game. This does not matter though as the modelling is independent of my personal knowledge of what is going on.

What I’ll be doing on this blog going forward:

• When I talk about ‘edge’ I specifically mean the difference between how my Elo model rates a team’s chances of winning and the equivalent chance the bookie’s odds give them. A positive edge means the odds give them less of a chance that I do, negative edge means the odds have them at a higher probability of winning than I do. There are probably other terms I might use in a slightly non-standard way but can’t think of them just now.
• I will not be posting bets before the games happen, so you will you just have to trust me when I post them retrospectively. Perhaps I will just state in advance if I am betting on anything and how many bets there are per week but I am not going to guarantee I will do that as sometimes bets only become viable just before a game starts and I’ll be more interested in monitoring the lines moving than posting something on the internet that no one will read.
• I will not be posting many specific numbers involved (except maybe actual odds). I have put a lot of hours into creating these models, there is no real gain in me giving anything away for free. One thing you might notice is the low volume of bets. Bookmakers are good at their job (or they’re broke and out of business) so the odds tend to match up to my models pretty closely. This means there are not that many good betting spots to be found. To date, there have been 31 games in the CFL this year and I have placed 3 bets (all winners btw, not to spoil a forthcoming post…).
• I will post my predictions, in terms of winners, before the games start. Well...I might do, if I get around to doing it in time.