New blog post by Martin Futter! How has VAR affected Football Trading on the Betfair Exchange?

[BTC]

How great does it feel to have proper football back? I don’t know about you but I for one love it! Nothing like the thrill of waiting for your team to score their first goal of the season. Sadly, for me Norwich’s first goal was an own goal for the other team and being 4-0 down at hal-time it wasn’t exactly an enthralling night. 

 

The big topic of this week has been VAR and its impact on football. 

 

I am going to look at another side of it and how it affects us Betfair Exchange football traders later on in this post. Let’s start though with how it has rocked the footballing world since being introduced to the Premier League, so much so, that it is all Talksport spent Monday talking about! 

 

Why is VAR so controversial? I think this boils down to one thing, the fan experience. All I hear on the radio and TV is that fans are losing out on celebrating goals due to VAR and I do understand this to an extent. Maybe it has taken some shine off a goal but I would argue that fans still celebrate a goal just as much as they did. 

 

Why? Well for me at least it doesn’t feel any different, there has always been a little hesitation on my part of having a full on celebration after a goal. I always want to make 100% sure the goal stands, so I would double check the ref had given it, or a late offside flag had not been raised, before going wild. In all the furore surrounding VAR in the Premier League we seem to have forgotten that for as long as I can remember many goals have been ruled out after celebrating. 

 

The second thing I have noticed is that pundits are mistaking their frustrations with VAR and the rules of football. It is not the fault of VAR that this ridiculous rule about any handball is now a foul exists, nor is VAR to blame for the fact that if you are one centimeter offside the goal is disallowed. Most if not all of the decisions so far have been correct to the letter of the law and surely that is what we want as fans! Of course some of the rules are dumb but that’s not on VAR.

 

Do any fans really enjoy football less now? This is the argument I keep hearing, it takes something away from fans. Do you really not enjoy football as much now? For me it has made zero difference. I still get just as excited as I ever have about football. Take other sports, has it made tennis, cricket or the NFL any less enjoyable? Really? Not for me!

 

So let’s get onto the trading side of things.

 

Ryan’s split stake strategy has been on a good run recently especially over this opening weekend. The strategy picks out games where goals are expected and then backs over 1.5 goals at 30mins for 50% of a stake and the same thing again 50 mins for the other 50% if the scoreline is 0-0. If there is a goal we take a profit and if not we take a loss on 70 mins. These are currently on a 9 match win streak! The trades win 75% of the time and even if you let it run you would have a 71% win rate.

 

If you are a member you know that we email these out each day and the selections can be viewed here: https://betfairtradingcommunity.com/en/trading-angles

 

So how has VAR affected the world of football trading on the Betfair Exchange?

 

It is still early days but we have definitely seen an effect from VAR on football trading. The main difference seems to be to do with goals rather than anything else. So what are we seeing.

 

Two clear patterns so far: 

• More goals are being disallowed - I don’t think there can be any doubt about this, expect this pattern to continue as the game continues to tighten the rope on the laws of the game after every goal is reviewed by VAR. 

• More penalties are being given - I think is the most common pattern of change, remember the world cup? It seemed like we had one penalty a game average! 

How can we adapt our trading for these changes? 

We may not need to change much at this stage as the two patterns above actually counteract each other, one leads to less goals and one leads to more goals. So, in theory at least, there should still be a similar number of goals in games. I would however have some concerns about backing unders score-lines, at least until we can be sure that the amount of penalties given does not spiral to a ridiculous amount. Let’s keep a keen eye on this and check in again in a few weeks.

 

As our members know we are always looking to improve our service here at BTC and continue to make you money! 

 

So I thought I would update you on a couple of things: 

 

We are currently in the process of rewriting a lot of our statistics software to improve how easy it is to use. We are also in communication with one of the big betting bot providers to see if we can partnership and make your trading even easier with more automated trading. 

 

We are always developing new strategies and systems for football trading, so that we can continue to be the best education service for those traders looking to make a living full-time on the Betfair Exchange. That’s all for this week so look out for another post next week! 

[A Former User]

I thought we’d see more penalties this season so I’ve been making use of the BoyleSports offer of double winnings if a penalty is scored, granted this only applies to correct scores & 1st goalscorer but worked for me when rashford scored the first against Chelsea. If you like a “punt” then good but you could use the matched betting approach and lay the bet off and just hope it comes on.

I have no doubt that they will drop this promo soon if it continues and I am sure that the odds will also drop with most bookies on goalscorers who take penalties for their team