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 Studysoccer.com has a database of over 70,000 football matches. For each of these matches, the following information is available:
 After logging in, you should see a screen similar to the screen below. Click on the image to see a larger version.  This screen is where you specify the betting strategy which you wish to evaluate. You can filter games based on all the criteria detailed above. On the left of the screen are two drop down menus, which are used to select the home and away teams whose performance you wish to analyse. You can select "All Teams" from either of these lists, or you can click on individual teams. You can select multiple teams by holding the "Ctrl" key on your keyboard while making your selections.  You can also filter results by the league positions of the home and/or away teams, goals scored, etc. The middle of the Historical Analysis screen contains a grid of drop-down menus and text boxes.  The drop down menus can be used to select either >,<, or =. The text boxes can be filled with numeric values. By default, the text boxes contain -1. Numeric values can be entered in the text boxes. In general:
* These filters wrap around seasons. For example, the stats for "Last 10 matches" for a team on their first game of a season will be based upon the last 10 games of the previous season. In order to determine what a particular dropdown list and text box represents, cross-reference it with the row and column titles. For example, the dropdown list and text box at the intersection of the two lines in the diagram below is used to specify a filter based on the average number of goals scored by the home team over their last 10 league matches (home and away).  Results from the database can also be filtered by date. You can specify that only matches within a particular range of dates should be returned by filling in the appropriate values in the text boxes in the top right hand corner of the screen.  You can also specify that the matches returned by the search are of fixtures where the odds for homewin,draw,awaywin,over 2.5 goals, and under 2.5 goals fall within certain ranges. The text boxes that are used to specify these values are on the right hand side of the screen.  You can specify that only matches from particular leagues be returned by using the League menu on the right hand side of the screen. As with the "Home team" and "Away team" lists, multiple options can be selected by holding down the "Ctrl" key on your keyboard while making your selections with the mouse.  Finally, you can select the wager that you wish to analyse the performance of, and whether you wish to back or lay the wager using the pair of dropdown menus in the bottom right corner of the screen. The five wagers for which odds are available are shown in the diagram below.   If you want to find out how much you would win if you bet on all matches in the database from the Premiership where the hometeam had scored on average more than 1.5 goals per game since the start of the season, select "Premiership" from the league drop down list, then select ">" and "1.5" for "Average goals for (total)" for the home team. Choose "Back", and "Full time home win" from the Wager drop down lists. These operations are circled in red in the screenshot below.  Press Submit query. You will now be presented with a screen which detail all the matches in the database which meet these criteria. Click on the image to see a larger version.  At the top of the page are links to the other sections of the site (a link back to the Historical Analysis page, to the Current Standings page, to the Team lineups page and the Inplay Odds Calculator). In the middle of the screen, the criteria that have been the matches are filtered by are stated. If you scroll down the screen a bit, you will see more results (the first result returned is only visible at first).  As you selected "Full time home win" for the wager, all matches which finished in victories for the home team will be highlighted green to represent winning bets, while all other matches will be highlighted in red to indicate losing bets. The results presented are under the following headings.
You can see from the above image that the "Average goals for (total)" box for the hometeam is checked already. If you want to see additional data for the fixtures matching the criteria specified, place a check in the appropriate box (for example, "Average points (total)") and presh the "Refresh" button. The results screen will be updated so this additional column of data is present, as demonstrated in the screenshot below...  The "Winnings" column keeps track of how much you would win or lose if you placed level stakes bets on each of the fixtures matching your criteria in the order that the results are returned. If there are more than 300 results matching your criteria, your results will be split into pages of 300. You can navigate throught the pages of results using the  and  buttons at the top of the results screen.
Your overall winnings for this search are summarised at the bottom of each of these pages. The screenshot below shows this summary (as with all the screenshots on this page, click on it for a larger version).  The summary details how many matches fitted your criteria, how many of these matches resulted in wins for the wager you specified, how much you won or lost by placing level stakes on all these matches, and your winnings/losses as a percentage of your total amount staked (your Return on Investment, ROI). You can sort the results returned by clicking on any of the column headings. For example, if you wanted to sort the results in order of the average goals scored by the hometeam, you would click on that heading. If the results are currently unsorted, they will be sorted in descending order. If the results are currently sorted, the order will be reversed. The screenshot below shows the results sorted in descending order of "Avg hometeam goals for (total)".  The results are now ordered in the desired order. This feature is useful for determining if placing bets on matches where an attribute is above or below a certain limit would be more profitable than the general criteria specified. 
Studysoccer.com allows you to analyse how laying betting strategies perform. It is important to note however, that we don't have historical odds available to us for online betting exchanges. We cannot assume that you can lay bets at the same odds as highstreet bookmakers on betting exchanges. For this reason, the odds used for calculating odds for "lay" bets are approximations. The odds for "lay" bets are approximated as follows:
It must be emphasised that at present, the odds that are used by studysoccer.com for laying bets are rough approximations, based on odds available from highstreet bookmakers. They are not based on actual odds from betting exchanges. Bear this in mind when analysing laying strategies on studysoccer.com. Imagine that we want to examine how much we would win/lose if we layed the awayteam under these conditions:
After pressing the "Submit Query" button, we will see the results of this strategy in the screenshot below, which is the top of the results screen. Note that the wager is described as "Lay FT2", and the two filters we specified are listed. 
This next screenshot below is the bottom of the results screen with details of the overview. We can see that 2624 matches fit our criteria, 2178 of these were winning bets (ie the awayteam did not win), our net loss was -124.6616 (assuming level stakes), representing a negative return on investment of -4.7508%. 
We can also pick fixtures where the hometeam and/or the awayteam is one of a set of teams. For example, let's test the hypothesis that in the English Premiership League. teams from the north of England perform especially badly when they play away to teams from London. We will investigate if betting on the London teams in these matches is a profitable strategy. The London-based home teams are:
From the home team drop down list, we select the teams from London. Multiple teams can be selected from this list by holding the "Ctrl" key down while making selections. Make sure you deselect "All teams" from the list first. This operation is circled in red in the screenshot below.  From the away team drop down list, we select the teams from the north of England. As before, multiple teams can be selected by holding the "Ctrl" key while making selections. Remember to deselect "All teams" first. Then ensure that "Back" and "Full time home win" are selected in the wager dropdown list, and press "Submit Query". These operations are circled in red in the screenshot below.  The top of the results screen returned will look like this...  Encircled in red in the above screenshot are your search criteria. Note that the league is set to "Premiership", and that the Home team and Away team fields contain the lists of the teams you selected. We can scroll down to the bottom of the results frame to see what our overall winnings would be had we followed this betting strategy (see screenshot below).  We can see this strategy proved to be quite successful. Out of 159 matches, 99 resulted in home wins. Our overall winnings (assuming level stakes, 1 unit per bet) were 12.553. This was a return of investment of over 7 percent. |