1. Computerised Football Predictions – The Benefits

Let’s say that you are reasonably familiar with the performance ratings of the two teams involved in an upcoming football match. That would mean that you are probably capable of making a reasonable prediction for the match outcome, and possibly the score-line too. However, the most important issue has to be what the level of reliability is for that prediction – especially if you are thinking of placing a bet on what the actual result will be.

Now, let’s say that a group of your trusted friends has programmed their computer to make predictions for football matches. And suppose they claim that their program’s outputs would enable you to make consistently better betting decisions than if you tried to achieve the same thing for yourself manually. Naturally, despite them being good friends, it would still be perfectly reasonable for you to express some degree of scepticism about their claims. You might therefore decide to ask them to let you run their program by yourself for testing purposes, without any interference from them. That would simply be demonstrating prudence on your part, wouldn’t it?

Well, we recognise that you don’t know anything at all about us, and that, at this stage, we are therefore far removed from proving to you that we (and the product we offer) can be trusted, because you have seen nothing at all demonstrated by us. So, we have therefore gone the extra mile to see that you will be able to conduct extensive and comprehensive testing of our soccer predictions product. In fact, the computerised Program we have developed (the Predict-A-Win Program) will allow you to run the predictions for any previous season in the past 5 years (and, for some Divisions, well beyond that), and then you can thoroughly test its outputs via the many reports the Program generates.

Now, when we talk about testing our Program and its outputs, we are not just talking about making sure that the predictions our Program makes look reasonable. What we offer goes way beyond that. The Users of our Program will be able to make match betting selections based on a whole range of different criteria, and then test out what would have happened in terms of the returns on their betting across many past seasons, using the actual Odds that were offered by the Bookmakers. This means that our Program’s Users will have far more confidence in their final selections than they have ever been able to achieve for themselves before.

Our online Program interface is designed to be accessed directly via the Internet and is linked to a copy of precisely the same software that we use to produce our weekly postings for the Soccer-Predictions.com website. Not only that, the online Program will be already fully loaded with precisely the same input values and data that we ourselves use for making the predictions we post each week on that website. Further, access to our Soccer-Predictions.com website’s postings will always be totally free-of-charge for everybody who subscribes to our online Program service. Our prediction website’s postings can therefore act as the benchmark for making worthwhile soccer predictions that those making use of our Program can try to better. In fact, by concentrating on just one single Division that should be perfectly possible, because for our website postings we employ exactly the same input parameters for all 20 of the Divisions we cover, without any differentiation made at all between them.

Our Program is designed to allow the User to modify the values of all the different input parameters that we consider are necessary for making worthwhile football match predictions (such as, for example, the points system to use for match Wins and Draws, or the mix to use of a team’s performance rating at the Home venue compared to the Away venue). The User can then run the whole of a previous season’s fixtures to obtain predictions for all the matches that were actually played, where the output for the anticipated score-lines is then automatically generated. Our Program’s standard prediction run also automatically produces data for a total of 12 different “Standard” Prediction Methods. On top of that there are 4 “Compound Derivative” Prediction Methods that are based on an analysis of the level of the ‘Reliabilities’ of the teams to produce results in line with the Program’s predictions. There are also 4 “Enhanced” Prediction Methods currently still under development, and which employ somewhat different approaches than those of the “Standard Derivative” and “Compound Derivative” Prediction Methods.

The Users of our Program will also be provided with all the reports necessary for checking the validity of the outputs in many different ways. It can then easily be determined which Prediction Method is giving the best results and if any particular input parameters need to be modified in order to get even better results for both the past season testing and current season’s weekly prediction runs.

Now, we understand the scepticism with which many people view football predictions generated by a computer. That is fully understandable where they have not been able to control in any way the inputs into the computer program or been able to validate the integrity of its outputs. But online access to our Program will allow the User to control the inputs and validate the outputs at every step of the way. All our Program will do is undertake all the donkey work of the many tens of thousands of calculations needed to produce predictions for the up to 250 football matches that are played each week in the major European Football Leagues. And we update the Program weekly with all the fixtures, the Bookies’ Odds being offered and the actual results once known, thereby saving the User so much research time.

We are aware that many people have developed their own spreadsheets so that they can attempt to do what our Program does. However, we know from our own experience that all such efforts can only ever be inferior to what we now offer, primarily due to the limitation of spreadsheets (and which needs lots of hard work to update each week). A far better prediction method is provided by employing a system operating on databases, which is what our Program is built on. The application of databases also allows our Program to do its work very quickly. That leaves the Users free to spend their valuable time analysing our Program’s outputs, which then leads to far better betting decisions being made. All-in-all, therefore, it does not require too much thinking to come to the conclusion that, using the human brain in conjunction with the inputs to a highly sophisticated computer Program (where that same brain has chosen the inputs to the Program), must be far more effective than applying the brain to the contents of a limited and often inadequate spreadsheet.

To anybody thinking that they can simply put a specialist team together to write their own computerised football prediction program, we just offer the advice that it has taken us many thousands of hours to get the our Program to where it is today since the year 2000 (when we first started), and the initial development cost of £250,000 was spent within the first 3 years. Since then, far in excess of that amount of both time and money has been spent again in tweaking almost every aspect of the Program. However, since improvement of the Program had become the primary hobby for our programming team, the amount of money expended is water under the bridge for us and which we have no regrets about. But we felt that we should warn others having a like-minded idea of developing their own program that getting to the same point where our Program sits today will take them a fair number of man-years of inputting and testing. And by then we will have developed our Program to be even better. So why bother trying to outdo us when, for a very small fraction of what we have spent, anybody can get instant access to our Program and save themselves a fortune (as well as many years of headaches)?

To ensure that our Program’s Users will be able to use our Program to its full potential, we have written a Manual that explains in great detail what the features are that can be seen on each and every one of our Program’s screens, as well as what the different functions and applications of each of those features are. However, please note: Our Program is the product of more than twenty years of computer development work, and so mastering its application in a worthwhile manner is not for the faint-hearted. But, for those who are willing to put in the required effort, we know that the results for them personally will be very worthwhile.

Having said that, the User Interface for our Program has been structured so that anybody can just jump in, start playing around for themselves, and then produce their own set of soccer predictions data. However, it is inevitable that Users will want to know how to improve their outputs, and the contents of our Manual will enable them to do just that.

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