Betfair Soccer World Cup
We have a wide range of easy and secure ways to deposit and manage your soccer betting account. Outside of perhaps the Olympics, the World Cup is the most galvanizing sporting event in the world. A total of 32 teams from around the globe will come together in Qatar for the 2022 edition of the world's greatest tournament. Trading football on the Betfair betting exchange allows you to profit regardless of who goes onto the win the underlying football match. All you need to know about trading The World Cup Russia 2018 How to make money at the World Cup (so far) Soccer Mystic - Overview. Using Soccer Mystic to examine incentive to score.
Do you want to enter the World Cup Datathon but not sure where to start?
- Betfair International Plc is licensed and regulated by the Malta Gaming Authority. Licence Number: MGA/CL3/454/2008 17th March 2015, Triq il-Kappillan Mifsud, St. Venera, SVR 1851, MALTA.
- You can use these sign up free bets to arbitrage World Cup Futures or match odds. For example, you can back Argentina to be the Best South American Team on Sportsbet at $3.50. Then you can lay it back on the Betfair Exchange at $3.45. If the odds move on this Sportsbet offer, you can find similar opportunities by using Odds. This comparison tool can help you find betting selections that get closest to the Betfair.
Our Data Science team are sharing some resources to give you a head start.
Using the popular ELOmethod, they’ve created a set of ratings based on previous World Cups.
In THIS ATTACHMENT you’ll see two zipped files (download / unzip / open with R).
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The simple ELO file uses international matches from the 2010 World Cup, through to 2014. It creates a set of team ratings, based on those results, and plots them against the 2014 World Cup.
Following on from that, it uses the same method to ELO rank teams before the 2018 World Cup. The MakeIELO model will be a live submission that you’ll see on the 2018 Datathon leaderboard. We recommend you take a look at each R file and see how you can customise them for your own submissions.
For a better understanding of how the Data Science team have created the ELO ratings, please continue reading.
ELO
- The elo model is continually adjusting a team’s rating
- Before a team plays any match they start with a score of 1500
- After each match a team plays their score is updated by the result (win or loss) and the strength of the team they were playing
- In essence you’re penalized more for losing to bad teams and rewarded more for beating good teams (and vice versa)
- Thus each team maintains a continuous rating which is a proxy for how good the team is
- Implicitly in the rating system is probability of victory of a team with ELO score X vs a team with score Y
Our ELO Approach
- We set every soccer team’s score to 1500 on the first day after the 2010 WC
- We run each game between then and the start of the 2014 WC through this scoring system
- At the end we have a set of ratings for every team including both those the qualified and didn’t qualify for the world cup
- Then when we look at the schedule and we have say Argentina (who might have landed at a score of 1810) vsing Saudi Arabia (who might have landed at an ELO score of 1630) we can calculate Argentina’s probability of victory
Draws
- We needed to overcome the problem that our probability formula for two ELO scores doesn’t naturally support drawed results.
- It will say Argentina will win 72% of the time and Saudi Arabia 28% of the time
- But we know that a draw is more than possible!
- So we calculated the historical draw rates for this scenario
- To be more general we said for teams with a ELO point differential of around 200 (1810 v 1630) these matches drew 22% of the time
- Then we just adjusted the win / loss probabilities equally (11 % each) to allocate probabilities to all possible outcomes
Conclusion
Hopefully you’ve gained some confidence from the article and the two R attachments that Betfair’s Data Science team have shared.
We’ve got one other ELO educational tool on The Hub which may help your understanding: ELO Modeling for Tennis.
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