ACCA (again sorry!)

Just wanted to vouch for everything Foggy has said regarding no lay accas in this and other threads. I didn’t think I would come even close to the kind of returns he has been making doing them, he sounds far more meticulous than I am.

I only work out my profits every three or four months, and for the last three months I have made just over £4000. Over 95% of this profit has come from no lay accas.

This has been the easiest £4k I have ever made, the amount of work involved compared to the rewards has been terrific. Unfortunately I have now been restricted at one bookie and I will be amazed if the rest of my accounts last until xmas.

Once my footie insurance accounts have gone I might look into doing this in the shops, although living in a rural area might make this impractical.

Want to issue a massive thank you to Foggy and others who have been so helpful in providing information to enable me to achieve these results.

@ Foggy, your absolutely right using the no lay method there is always a chance of losing your entire bank. I had already made a few thousand pounds profit from the more conventional match betting techniques. I was prepared to carry on until I had lost £1k and would re evaluate if that happened (ie. was I doing something wrong, had I completely misunderstood the methodology).

I think I was fairly lucky, I was in profit right from the first weekend. Although I did have some draw downs, I never came close to going into the red.

As mentioned in my last post I don’t keep detailed records of each and every bet. Perhaps I should be a bit ashamed to admit it, but I don’t use a spread sheet to record all my bets. All I do is keep accurate records of any money I put in or take out of my bookie and exchange accounts. Then every few months add up the totals and work out my profits.

Having said that, I have a rough idea of around where I am up to. Regarding my biggest draw down, it would have been in the region of £200. When this happened I was already up over £1k and so was never concerned about it.

I did a few things to try and minimise variance.

1. If I had accas with four winning legs, and the fifth taking place on other days (this happened a great deal of the time), then I always laid the last leg off using Matts risk free calculator. The loss in EV is really small, and I think this helped in limiting the draw downs.

2. I tried to get at least 80% return on each F.B.

3. I took your advice and didn’t do any accas which provided less than 10% EV return. Most of them tended to be around the 20% level. I did however often give up a little bit of EV in exchange for a higher win rate. Some pros may well laugh at that, and if one could be sure ones accounts would last for years then it would be a mistake.

The way I looked at it though, was my accounts can be gubbed or restricted at any time, so given that fact, I would be better off giving up some EV and get a better win rate, because I might not have the accounts long enough for the EV to even out.

I also think the end of the footie season both here and abroad may have helped too. I have not looked at any stats for previous years, but in the last month of the major league footie seasons the favorites seemed to win more often than they normally do. I had some weekends in that last month where almost every acca was either a win, a FB or gave me the chance to lay off the last leg using the risk free calc.

@ Kron I just use Matts risk free calculator and when I do the EV calcs there is very little difference between laying and not laying the last leg. You lose a little bit of money (long term) doing it this way, but it helps reduce variance.

As mentioned previously accounts often don’t tend to last long term so I felt reducing variance was more important than maximising profit.

@ Foggy, I should have listed one more thing in my list to try and reduce variance.

4. With bookies such as Coral where the overall acca has to come to at least odds of 4. The first four legs would be really low (think its a minimum of 1.11 now) and then the last leg would be high enough to make the over all up to 4. This meant I had a much better chance of having the first four legs win, and so enable me to lay off the fifth using Matts calculator.

I assume the last two games are being played simultaneously or are over lapping. If not then you could lay them sequentially, Matt has recently produced a new calculator that will work out the lay amounts for you. I have not used it as I usually don’t bother laying unless the first four legs have won and there is time to lay off the fifth using Matts risk free calculator.

For you final outcome you wrote:-
1 & 2 lose: Exchange + £7.60 (2 x £3.80), Profit = £7.60

I think you need to deduct your initial stake from this figure so your final profit when the last two legs lose should be £2.60.

Thank you for taking the time to reply Dave.

Thought I might have been missing something, still is nice to know that I was nearly there and the rest of the logic stacks up.

Yes the two games are simultaneous. I didn’t think about this type of outcome when placing the bet, though now I think I’ll lay the remaining two. Given the calcs, worst outcome when laying is a 40p loss with best case being +£34.41. Without laying worst case is £5 loss with potential return of £40.81. Seems that without laying them I’m essentially risking £5 to gain an extra potential £6.40 which doesn’t seem worthwhile to me!

Thanks again for your time and sorry again for the newbie questions, just thought it best to check that I wasn’t completely off track before going ahead and doing it!

Eskander

As often is the case with these accas laying or not laying makes little difference to your expected value (EV), but laying does help to smooth out the variance. I often make mistakes when doing EV calculations so don’t take the following as gospel. In fact if I was you I would probably do my own EV calculations it will pay off in the long term if you want to make some decent money from accas.

I think the probability of the last two legs both winning is 30.8%.
The probability of one of the last two legs losing is 55.5%.
The probability of the last two legs losing is 13.7%.

You can use this information to work out what the EV of laying is and I get a figure of £12.42. This figure is very close to the EV value of £12.56 which is the figure I get if you don’t bother laying.

If you or anyone else spots a mistake please let me know, as mentioned previously I often make errors when doing these calculations.