15th – 21st Bookings Model Update

Another Tuesday, and another write-up. I’ve spent a lot of time tweaking the model this week, and have also worked on a few impromptu ideas – plenty of things to cover in this write-up.

I’ve collated the data and had a look into a couple of additional factors to potentially incorporate into the model, tested a new strategy to boost profit, added a new league in and have been considering what the next steps might be for this project. But lets start, as always, with the…

Weekend Results

View Results as a pdf here – Bookings Model Tracking – Week Recap (3)

A stunning weekend saw us over 10 units up on main lines, really on the right side of variance this time around. That sees us propel up to a 20+ unit position in April, which is fantastic. This is how the P/L looks since tracking began….

Definitely more time is needed for tracking, but it has been a really promising start. Hopefully with a few tweaks a improvements consistency can be maintained.

Lifetime Results

A few changes to report here – Championship results have pulled back a bit, but La Liga has proven to be quite lucrative recently. There was a significant difference between those two league not too long ago, now they are hovering around the same win percentage.

Premier League continues to perform the best, Serie A and Scottish Premiership also up there. Still need to be wary of Bundesliga though. Unders remain the play, targeting those fixtures with the greatest difference.

Investigations

Surpemacy vs Split

I mentioned last time that European fixtures were throwing up some questionable numbers as the code doesn’t account for first leg results – handicaps were particularly affected. It was also noticeable how handicap bets were often highlighted when a big team players an underdog – PSG for example. The model would always lean towards PSG handicap on cards, but it would rarely win.

Based on that, I needed the model to account for supremacy in the handicap predictions, and first needed to determine the relationship between supremacy and total split. I had the data for final splits at hand, but needed to source pre-match supremacy. Luckily, this was possible.

The challenge was to attach a supremacy to over 900 tracked games – time-consuming and labour-intensive, but I’ve been working through it and can share some early results below. Beofre that, we would expect a high split for game with a high positive supremacy – in other words, the home side accounts for most of the bookings when they are the massive underdogs. And by extension, a low split for games with high negative supremacy in which the home side accounts for very few bookings when they are heavy favourites. A steady gradient expected with a positive correlation.

And the graph is pretty much what we would expect. Note that the above data includes Premier League, La Liga and Bundesliga results from January onwards, so it’s a decent sample size, but can and will be much larger. But it cuts perfectly through 0.5 at a 0 supremacy, which again makes sense. Once finished, it will be a case of finding the slope of the line, and factoring that into predictions for the split.

More Cards Towards the End of the Season?

Second change, as we approach the end of the season, card lines have began to inflate, probably because there is a lot more on the line, suspensions are less important now. Things like time-wasting and arguments seem to happen more often with emotions heightened. Based on that, I wanted to have a look into how the total number of bookings points has changed over the season, whether there has indeed been an increase in cards as the season goes on, or whether that is just some sort of bias.

These results are actually more surprising – there actually seems to be a decrease in cards going from January to April for Ligue 1, La Liga, and Bundesliga. Serie A has remained relatively constant, while Premier League and Championship have seen a slight increase. April is still incomplete, but it will be interesting to see how those values change over the last 6 weeks of the season.

New Laddering Strategy

For the last few weeks, I’ve moved away for laddering high-value bets, and have instead opted to pivot for doubles / trebles. I found that it’s incredibly difficult to predict games with 10 or even 0 bookings points shown in total. That meant that for the high-value games which I decided to ladder, profits would often be wiped out when the main line wins only – as all of the higher lines would fall.

With combinations, however, this wasn’t the case. And we were rewarded in these such cases of narrow-wins, which were a lot more common than an extremely low card makeups. Trixies in particular proved very successful this weekend in particular.

A trixie works by having 3 selections split into four bets – 3 doubles, and a treble.

So far, I probably prefer the strategy of doubles and trebles as opposed to ladders, and would recommend it to those who tail the bets. I don’t think ladders are off the cards though, a bit more time is needed to devise a set of criteria. If a game looks exceptional value compared to the model prediction, it could well be worth a ladder – these games will certainly pop up every once in a while over the course of a season, but we just need to be better positioned to spot them.

Off the top of my head, the Liverpool vs Man City game earlier this season pops out – that was always going to be a quiet, cagey game, and we got a 4.5 line. 0 cards were shown in that game – the perfect one to ladder.

Adding Australian Lines

I’m not sure if this is new, but bet365 are offering cards line on the Australian A-League which I’ve just noticed. Their season is coming to an end in a few weeks, but I thought I would add in predictions anyway – the more the merrier.

That now takes us up to 10 leagues – European Big 5, Championship, Scottish Premiership, MLS, Brazilian Serie A and now A-League. So now we’re looking at around 120+ predictions / games covered on a busy week.

Plan going forward

With the season ending in just under a month, and after a fantastic week, naturally I’ve been thinking about the next steps for this project. Ideally, I would love to monetise the cards code – it’s a project I’ve dedicated so much time and effort to over the last few months, and believe it is worthy.

There always seems to be ways of improving this model, it has already been able to deliver solid results, but I’m still seriously optimistic. Next week, I’ll do a deeper dive into the Brazil Serie A & MLS results, and try and devise a preliminary strategy for approaching the start of the 2025/26 European season in August.

As always, I appreciate your support on this project!