Skybet Boost for the gubbed
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So there is some talk about this lately.
I decided to look at this week with Leicester/Stoke/West Brom boosted to 10.0 which has boosted the odds on the exchange to 9.2/9.4.
If you use the lay odds of each game as an estimate of the true probability then you have 1.89*1.99*2.22=8.35….
So the back odds of 9.2 is good value. Even taking away commission 9.2 is effective odds 8.79. If you bet £100 on it every week then it would be about £5 profit per week on average. It’s not a lot until you realise you can scale it up…..
38 weeks times 5 is £190 profit over the season on £100 stakes. I am not sure how that is a 100% return on investment as to be staking £100’s you would need a bank roll of at least £1000….
I don’t see that there is much margin though. Mark mentioned he lays off the individual legs to minimise variance but that surely eats into the small margin quite a bit…..
Anyway not passing any judgement. Just starting a conversation….
+0March 4, 2017 at 12:38 am
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I can’t remember the thread he mentioned it in now. But he was talking about using ‘Kelly Criterion’ staking plan. So rather than level stakes for example. You stake a higher percentage of your bank the bigger your edge. As your bank increases the more your stakes will too etc. Worth having a read up on.
Just looking at this example there’s not that much of a % difference between the odds and true odds. Just playing around with Kelly calculator now, say you start with a £1000 bank you would only be staking £7 if you back at 9.2. Based on the true odds roughly being a 12% chance. Say the true odds were a 15% this would jump to about a £40 stake. All based on 5% comm.
I think!
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Makes sense. People are giving away value when they lay (in exchange for cutting the variance out); if you’re prepared to accept that variance then you can take the value they’ve given up.
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Always happy to discuss any strategies available!
This is one of the worst SkyBet Acca boosts we’ve had for a while – potentially due to the last 2 both winning. Last week’s was certainly much better as it gave a higher ROI, with lower variance (was roughly 5.4/4.8). I probably won’t be going for this one as West Brom appear to have faded significantly.
Laying off the individual legs, in general, reduces variance and can even (sometimes) increase the expected return. It really depends… The methodology for this is to minimise the standard deviation by using lay stakes as variables and then recalculate the optimal % of bankroll to stake.
Another limitation of this, and all strategies on the exchange tbf, is the rate of commission which you pay.
+0The only problem with this is that the weekly sky boost acca seems to rarely come in.
I know this because I regularly use the boost to get my free £5 skyclub bet.
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lol
+0@ BillHill it seems to have come in a lot recently, so much so that sky have now restricted me to around a quid max bet on this offer.
@ Foggy great work thanks for doing this. I was going to look at this myself when I saw MarkCorrigans post about it some time ago, but completely forgot all about doing it.
I think on your figures it comes out to about £4.40 per week on average profit so £167.20 over the 38 week season.
What kind of average percentage return would you want to see before you would consider doing this offer. I note that on your acca system you look for 10% and above don’t you. I therefore assume you would only be looking at this if the figures would show a similar average return.
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Dave. Its an interesting question. 5% of £100 is bigger than 10% of £25, so even at 5% ROI I could consider it.
The variance is hugely off putting though, as ppl rightly say it doesn’t come in often. The odds this week are big. It’s quite likely at £100 stakes that you lose £500-£1000 before you start making anything back.
Mark, I’m not sure how you are laying some legs on this to minimise variance. It’s a small margin and the extra price you pay in commission etc from laying the legs must give most of the value back. Maybe this is a bad week to look at. But it surprised me when you said that laying some legs could increase the value.
I might start putting a little on and if I’m lucky enough to win on the first few weeks then could build a bank roll big enough to make it actually worth while. I’d probably put an order in on the unmatched side, so its actually gone up to 9.8 this week and see if it gets matched just to eek out that extra little edge.
To be honest though there are quicker and easier ways to get profit from your money if you have a full set of accounts.
Anyone have any tips on when the best time to get on this, does the price on the exchange go up/down. Will I get a better price Friday night or 2.30pm on Saturday afternoon?
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I must admit it surprised me as well! I will try to give the example of last week, from my perspective.
This week’s boost is honestly the worst opportunity in a long time. Take last week’s… (I was wrong off the top of my head above saying that last week’s was 5.4/4.8 – was actually 4.4/3.8).
Sky boosted Chelsea/Everton/West Brom to 5, it was 4.3-4.4 on the exchange and the individual lay odds were 1.28, 1.43 and 2.10. This implies real lay odds of around 3.84. I will always attempt to get the higher side of the spread – backing at 4.4 got filled relatively quickly. If your commission rate is 5%, then the Kelly optimal is 3.11% of bankroll; this becomes 3.58% of bankroll if your commission rate is 3%.
If you assume a bankroll of £10,000, and 3% commission rate, then you would stake £358 at 4.4, with an expected return of +11.82% / +£42.32. The standard deviation of this bet would be 125.34.
Now if you optimise lay stakes by minimising variance, you can lay £495.51 on the 1.28 leg (Chelsea), £471.09 on the 1.43 leg (Everton) and finally £161.48 on the 2.1 leg (WBA). This minimises the variance if you hold the back stake at £358 (ceterus paribus). If you’re laying at 2% commission, the expected return now becomes £31.25 (laying is costing us £11.06 in the long run). However, the standard deviation is now only 53.27. In other words, the s.d. has been reduced 57%. As there has been a significant reduction in the variance, the Kelly optimal stake is now higher.
It turns out that re-optimising would give you the optimal stake to back the acca as 5.53%! The lay stakes are also readjusted. Basically, we now stake £553 on the treble and lay £765.41 @ 1.28, £727.69 @ 1.43 and £892.98 @ 2.1. Our expected return for this is £48.28 and the standard deviation is 82.28. We have managed to achieve an expected return of +£48.28 and s.d. of 82.28 vs. the original no lay version of +£42.32 and s.d. of 125.34. Hence, it’s optimal to lay.
Of course, this is generally true, but if the boost is high variance and offers little value, like this week, then there isn’t much to play with. Sorry for the long post and hopefully not too many errors :-).
+0Seems a lot of effort for very little return.
Might aswell get a job working in a bar+0
Very clear. Thanks Mark.
I’m not sure if you have copied down your liablities instead of your stakes in the paragraph describing the readjusted stakes.
But I follow in theory. Your getting higher expected return by increasing your stakes.
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johnd, I expect the effort is a one time effort in creating a spreadsheet/calculator. After that as I understand Mark is aiming to make £10,000 over the season by plugging in the number once a week on Saturday morning.
I don’t know what barmen get £10,000 per year for working just 30 mins on Saturday morning.
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Unless you do it with a bankroll of £100k :)… In which case you could make up to £480 (in expected return) a week for 5 minutes work. Or I suppose I could get a job working in a bar…
Haha, cheers Fog. You get that it’s not just about this specific example! There’s plenty of boosts offered throughout the year (doubles, trebles etc.) which this methodology could be applied to.
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Some strange logic in here:
These don’t win
Little return for time spentThere’s no ceiling on these, you could reinvest and compound this to make serious cash.
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Too right Dan!
Now I just have to get my head around Kelly optimised staking and standard deviation, and the like.
Welcome back Mark!
+0Mark how do you calculate the stakes in your post at 10.45 on the 4th March.
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