Eurovision Betting Trends: Essential info for finding a winner

Eurovision Song Contest / Simon Hopper / 26 March 2012 / Leave a Comment

Please note, winners look like these two - Azerbijan's Nikki and Ell

"Six of the last eight winners were soloists aged 30 or under, while young Azerbaijani duo Ell/Nikki triumphed last year to add further weight to the ‘young is better’ theory."

Five high-quality nuggets to consider before striking your Eurovision bets, thanks to Simon Hopper

Betting on the Eurovision Song Contest can be a real minefield for punters, with endless reams of statistics, YouTube videos and tactical voting patterns to study ahead of the big night. However, there are a few fundamental trends to have developed over the years that are well worth adhering to. I've picked out five key Eurovision betting rules that will hopefully point you in the direction of the 2012 winner...

Defending champions never win...but most winners did well the year before
No country has retained the Eurovision Song Contest since 1994, when Paul Harrington and Charlie McGettigan won for Ireland performing "Rock 'n' Roll Kids". In fact, no defending champion has even come close to victory in recent years - none of them have even broken into the top five since Turkey in 2004. However, most winning nations did well the previous year. Three of the last four champions finished in the top five 12 months before, including last year's winners Azerbaijan who were fifth in Oslo in 2010.

Nordic and Baltic countries do well
The voting system has changed slightly in recent years but even so you just cannot ignore the superb record of countries from the Nordic and Baltic regions. Nine of the last 13 winners have been from one of these areas, while the likes of Turkey and Azerbaijan have also triumphed in this time to supplement the theory that Eastern nations normally do well. Nordic countries, in particular, are almost always at the top end of the scoreboard - over the last three years, an incredible 33% of all top five finishers were nations from this region. Geographically speaking, Germany are the westernmost winners this century, which isn't good news for the likes of France, Spain or the UK.

Sing an English language song
Eleven of the last 13 Eurovision Song Contest winners sung at least part of their song in English, while all but one of these were sung 100% in English. This is a relevant trend because a lot of acts still choose to perform in their native tongue - eight of the 25 finalists last year fell under this category, and some of the leading contenders this time around are also going down the same route.

Young soloists are dominating
Bad news for Engelbert Humperdinck fans; young solo singers are the Eurovision flavour of the month. Six of the last eight winners were soloists aged 30 or under, while young Azerbaijani duo Ell/Nikki triumphed last year to add further weight to the 'young is better' theory.

Perform towards the end
In recent years, acts performing at the end of the show have had a massive advantage. Over the last 7 years, all of the winners came from within the final 8 acts to perform on the night, and there hasn't been a genuine 'mid-division' champion since Ukraine in 2004.

Singer says Eurovision selection is an "honour" after BBC announces that he will perform for the UK on May 26. And Betfair punters slash the odds on first British win for 15 years......

...or why you should back Iceland and consider a few savers on Romania, Austria and Finland...

The Euro song wars heat up with semi no.2 where those pesky Irish brothers are likely to be a highlight (seriously)...

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US Masters Trends: Augusta dos and don'ts...

The Punter / Steven Rawlings / 23 March 2012 / Leave a Comment

Charl Schwartzel celebrates his historical fourth birdie in-a-row on the final hole last year

“Year after year, the man that dons the famous green jacket has putted with aplomb - only Luke Donald, who finished tied fourth, putted better than Schwartzel last year.”

Steve Rawlings, aka The Punter, looks forward to the year's first major, highlighting trends to follow and pitfalls to avoid at the US Masters

Forget daffodils, snowdrops and birdsong, the Cheltenham Festival hints at the onset of spring and the US Masters announces its arrival.

Its position in the calendar isn't the only reason I await the year's first major so eagerly though. With its famous azaleas, dogwoods and perfectly manicured fairways, Augusta sure is easy on the eye and I can't be the only one who fondly remembers the pre-Sky Sports days when the US Masters was one of the few treats us golf fans got, but the real reason I've warmed to the event so much is that it's a great tournament to bet on.

The magical Masters is less than a fortnight away now, so with the Georgia venue back on my mind, here's a few Augusta Do's and Don'ts.

Do back an outsider if you fancy one. Four of the last five winners have started the week at triple-figure odds. With a superb Masters pedigree, Phil Mickelson surprised no one when he won here for the third time two years ago but very few picked out last year's victor Charl Schwartzel, nor the three that preceded Mickelson. Zach Johnson, Trevor Immelman and Angel Cabrera were all shock winners.

Don't take any notice of the no Aussie winner stat. It's true that no player from Down Under has triumphed yet but there's absolutely no reason why. Greg Norman came closest, famously blowing a six shot lead with a round to go in 1996, and Adam Scott wasn't far away last year either. He traded at a low of [1.39] before Schwartzel's birdie blitz and two fellow Aussies were also placed. Jason Day tied Scott for second and Geoff Ogilvy finished tied fourth. There are plenty of contenders from Down Under again this year and it's not a stat to give any credence to.

Do back a hole-in-one on day four. There have been seven aces in the last eight years and six have them have come on the 16th hole on Sunday. I see no reason for the organisers to end the practice of placing the pin in a favourable spot there and if you wait until the end of play on Saturday before backing Yes in the Hole-In-One market you may well get rewarded handsomely.

Don't back a debutant. Jason Day's 276 total last year was the lowest for a first-timer and a magnificent effort but other than the first two champs (Horton Smith in 1934 and Gene Sarazen a year later), Fuzzy Zoeller, back in 1979, is still the only other player to win on debut.

Do get involved in-running and do concentrate on the leaders. Schwartzel was tied 7th after round one last year and that's the furthest back any winner's been in six years after day one.

Don't back dodgy putters or poor scramblers. It's very hard to nail down exactly what constitutes the perfect Augusta type- hence the big price winners of late! Length off the tee is a distinct advantage but plenty of short hitters have won. Recent champions Zach Johnson and Mike Weir are hardly big bombers and Jose Maria Olazabal, Mark O'Meara and Ben Crenshaw weren't renowned for getting it out there off the tee either. Finding the greens with regularity won't harm your cause and when you do miss them, keeping mistakes to a minimum is crucial, so excellent scrambling is key, but most important of all is putting. Year after year, the man that dons the famous green jacket has putted with aplomb - only Luke Donald, who finished tied fourth, putted better than Schwartzel last year.

Do put the radio on if you're serious about trading. It can drive you bonkers trying to watch the event on TV whilst listening to it on the radio at that same time but if you're serious about making it a profitable week, it may just be worth it.

Don't back anyone outside the final pairing on Sunday. Schwartzel benefited from Rory McIlroy's spectacular collapse last year and a Stuart Appleby stumble let in Zach Johnson in 2007 but they're the only two winners not to have started day four in the final two-ball in the last 20 years.

And finally, do enjoy the week. It's a joy from start to finish and it's very nearly here.

Our man's off to a poor start in Morocco, where they've only just started playing round two, but it's better news in Florida where both his picks start well, and he's got his eye on Tiger Woods too now......

With so little course form to go on, Steve looks to last week for the bulk of his five selections at this week's Race To Dubai event......

The Punter takes a look at this week's PGA Tour event, where Tiger Woods bids to win his seventh Arnold Palmer Invitational......

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US Masters Trends: How to find the identikit Augusta champion

US Masters / Paul Krishnamurty / 18 March 2012 / Leave a Comment

Is Nick Watney the next Masters champion?

"Champions over the last 20 years had already played an average 8.65 Masters, with only four making fewer than six appearances."

With the first major of the year always played on the same course there's plenty of history and statistics to go through in an attempt to find the 2012 winner.

Brits have a poor recent record. Aussies even more so.
In an era when the UK boasts the world's top-three ranked players, following this rule defies both the market and basic logic. Nevertheless, Augusta has not been a happy hunting ground recently for Brits, with none of our boys winning since Nick Faldo in 1996. Still, at least our stats compare very favourably to Australia, who have never provided a Masters champion.

Thirty-somethings with plenty of Augusta experience tend to fare best
At 26, Charl Schwartzel rather bucked this trend last year but 11 of the last 20 champions were in their 30s and only Tiger Woods won at a younger age than Schwartzel. A second stat, therefore, that counts against 22 year-old, British, tournament favourite Rory McIlroy and it doesn't bode well for third favourite Phil Mickelson either, who will be bidding to become the first over-40 to win since Mark O'Meara in 1998. The average age during the last 20 years was 32.55.

Debutant winners very rare, champions tend to have plenty of Augusta experience
Champions over the last 20 years had already played an average 8.65 Masters, with only four making fewer than six appearances. Once again Schwartzel and Woods bucked this trend by winning on their second attempt. Unsurprisingly on a layout where course knowledge offers a huge advantage, no debutant has won since 1979. Keegan Bradley backers beware!

Favour multiple winners and proven major champions
Eleven of the last 20 winners were already major champions, of whom nine were winning at least their second Masters title. Even the unlikeliest champions were multiple winners on the European or PGA tours, besides one exception. Zach Johnson had only won once on the PGA Tour, although he did have a couple more to his name on the competitive Nationwide Tour. Otherwise, the least prolific was Angel Cabrera, who had only four previous titles to his name although the Argentinian was hardly short of credentials, having already won a US Open. Of the players currently trading below [100.0], this trend counts against Bradley, Jason Day, Webb Simpson and Rickie Fowler.

Shortlist
If sticking strictly to the above four trends, only five players currently trading below [100.0] meet all the criteria. They are Tiger Woods, Nick Watney, Sergio Garcia, Bubba Watson and Brandt Snedeker. All are multiple winners, in their thirties, making at least their fourth appearance at Augusta. Many more would qualify if considering players currently trading in triple-figures and given that four of the last five Masters winners began the week at well above [100.0], looking for outsiders might well be the best plan.

With Rory McIlroy gobbling up attention at the head of the market punters are forgetting about other Augusta contenders with some spectacular prices available on good players with a genuine chance of Masters glory, says Paul Krishnamurty...

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Rory McIlroy is the new World Number One after a two-stroke victory at the Honda Classic. But joint runner-up there Tiger Woods was in imperious form himself and things are tight in the Betfair US Masters winner market....

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Cheltenham Festival: Make sure the trends justify the means

Features / Simon Rowlands / 31 January 2011 / Leave a comment Free £25 Bet View Market

Binocular prepped for the Champion Hurdle at Sandown in February 2010 and may do so again this year

Our resident blogger Simon Rowlands points out the shortcomings of some types of conventional trends analysis...

"The fact is that “trends” often seem to exist when they are looked at crudely and weaken or disappear altogether when the data is looked at in a more sophisticated manner. This is a point well worth bearing in mind at this time of year more than most."

Mark Twain is most often cited as the source of the phrase "...there are lies, damned lies, and statistics..." Whether or not it was he who first said it, it is a good job that the author of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer did not then cast his sceptical eye over racing, else he might have added "...and, finally, there are trends."

It is not that all trends are worthless, any more than that all statistics are worthless, just that rather a lot of them are. Their value depends not only on the information that is used but on how that information is interrogated and the conclusions that are drawn from it. Trends frequently fall down in this area.

Views about trends are never so much in evidence than in the lead up to the Cheltenham Festival. There is some justification in this. No race meeting in Britain - and possibly in the world - exerts the kind of pull that the Festival in March does. Horses are targeted at it from months, and sometimes years, in advance. Only good horses win there - well, almost only - and any systemic biases are likely to be crucial.

With that in mind, I thought I would do a quick reprise of some of the possible pitfalls of so-called trends analysis with six "golden" rules. My apologies to anyone who has read something similar from me before, but bad trends analysis seemingly won't go away.

1. Beware of small samples. If you look at most data on a microscopic basis you could easily convince yourself that a trend exists. I backed three winners out of four bets yesterday, but it would be wrong (VERY wrong!) to take that as representative of my betting as a whole.

2. Beware of big samples. The way to offset small samples is not to go so far back into history that the information you are using has little or no relevance to what is about to happen now. Trends, if they exist at all, tend to change over time. Keep things as contemporary as seems suitable.

3. Do not consider only winners. This is a common mistake. While winners are what most people get paid out on, a trend (if it exists) should potentially apply to all horses under consideration. Winners represent only a small fraction of the runners in races.

4. Take into account not just whether a horse wins or loses, but the degree to which it wins or loses. Should a non-winner that was beaten a short head be accorded the same significance as a non-winner that was tailed off? No.

5. Compare realisation with expectation. Horses of a certain age group might have won a given race 80% of the time, but that is neither here nor there if 80% of the time is exactly what you could expect from that age group's representation.

6. Do not apply filtering techniques unless they are strictly justified. The flawed reasoning is that you should rule horses out successively according to whether they "pass" certain criteria until only one or a few "qualifiers" are left. As an example of the folly of this, one criterion could be that a horse is rated a certain figure or higher, another could be that it had been born in a certain month. It is very unlikely that the criteria are of equal worth, and yet crude filtering implies that they are.

I was reminded of the pitfalls of conventional trends analysis by a recent internet discussion as to the worth of a horse prepping for the Champion Hurdle in a given month, a discussion that seems more significant than usual in view of the number of horses already having been put away for the Festival.

Seven of the nine winners of the Champion Hurdle since 2000 had their previous race in February. Then again, more horses - both winners and losers - had run most recently in February than in any other month. However, that is still a strike-rate roughly twice what could be expected.

Sixteen of the twenty-seven placed horses in the Champion Hurdle in the same period had prepped in February. That is roughly one and a half times what could be expected from that age group's representation.

However, if you consider all horses over the period - and the degree to which losers were beaten, not just simply that they were beaten - things become less cut and dried still. In terms of percentage of rivals beaten, which is usually a better way of looking at such matters, horses running in the Champion Hurdle that had prepped in February came out top again, but only just and not to a degree that should be a cause for excitement or a betting strategy.

The figures were: February 52.8%; December 51.8%; January 50.1%; and other months well behind. There is little in it between those three months, which provided over 90% of all runners, in other words.

The fact is that "trends" often seem to exist when they are looked at crudely and weaken or disappear altogether when the data is looked at in a more sophisticated manner.

This is a point well worth bearing in mind at this time of year more than most.

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Cheltenham Festival: Make sure the trends justify the means

Features / Simon Rowlands / 31 January 2011 / Leave a comment Free £25 Bet View Market

Binocular prepped for the Champion Hurdle at Sandown in February 2010 and may do so again this year

Our resident blogger Simon Rowlands points out the shortcomings of some types of conventional trends analysis...

"The fact is that “trends” often seem to exist when they are looked at crudely and weaken or disappear altogether when the data is looked at in a more sophisticated manner. This is a point well worth bearing in mind at this time of year more than most."

Mark Twain is most often cited as the source of the phrase "...there are lies, damned lies, and statistics..." Whether or not it was he who first said it, it is a good job that the author of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer did not then cast his sceptical eye over racing, else he might have added "...and, finally, there are trends."

It is not that all trends are worthless, any more than that all statistics are worthless, just that rather a lot of them are. Their value depends not only on the information that is used but on how that information is interrogated and the conclusions that are drawn from it. Trends frequently fall down in this area.

Views about trends are never so much in evidence than in the lead up to the Cheltenham Festival. There is some justification in this. No race meeting in Britain - and possibly in the world - exerts the kind of pull that the Festival in March does. Horses are targeted at it from months, and sometimes years, in advance. Only good horses win there - well, almost only - and any systemic biases are likely to be crucial.

With that in mind, I thought I would do a quick reprise of some of the possible pitfalls of so-called trends analysis with six "golden" rules. My apologies to anyone who has read something similar from me before, but bad trends analysis seemingly won't go away.

1. Beware of small samples. If you look at most data on a microscopic basis you could easily convince yourself that a trend exists. I backed three winners out of four bets yesterday, but it would be wrong (VERY wrong!) to take that as representative of my betting as a whole.

2. Beware of big samples. The way to offset small samples is not to go so far back into history that the information you are using has little or no relevance to what is about to happen now. Trends, if they exist at all, tend to change over time. Keep things as contemporary as seems suitable.

3. Do not consider only winners. This is a common mistake. While winners are what most people get paid out on, a trend (if it exists) should potentially apply to all horses under consideration. Winners represent only a small fraction of the runners in races.

4. Take into account not just whether a horse wins or loses, but the degree to which it wins or loses. Should a non-winner that was beaten a short head be accorded the same significance as a non-winner that was tailed off? No.

5. Compare realisation with expectation. Horses of a certain age group might have won a given race 80% of the time, but that is neither here nor there if 80% of the time is exactly what you could expect from that age group's representation.

6. Do not apply filtering techniques unless they are strictly justified. The flawed reasoning is that you should rule horses out successively according to whether they "pass" certain criteria until only one or a few "qualifiers" are left. As an example of the folly of this, one criterion could be that a horse is rated a certain figure or higher, another could be that it had been born in a certain month. It is very unlikely that the criteria are of equal worth, and yet crude filtering implies that they are.

I was reminded of the pitfalls of conventional trends analysis by a recent internet discussion as to the worth of a horse prepping for the Champion Hurdle in a given month, a discussion that seems more significant than usual in view of the number of horses already having been put away for the Festival.

Seven of the nine winners of the Champion Hurdle since 2000 had their previous race in February. Then again, more horses - both winners and losers - had run most recently in February than in any other month. However, that is still a strike-rate roughly twice what could be expected.

Sixteen of the twenty-seven placed horses in the Champion Hurdle in the same period had prepped in February. That is roughly one and a half times what could be expected from that age group's representation.

However, if you consider all horses over the period - and the degree to which losers were beaten, not just simply that they were beaten - things become less cut and dried still. In terms of percentage of rivals beaten, which is usually a better way of looking at such matters, horses running in the Champion Hurdle that had prepped in February came out top again, but only just and not to a degree that should be a cause for excitement or a betting strategy.

The figures were: February 52.8%; December 51.8%; January 50.1%; and other months well behind. There is little in it between those three months, which provided over 90% of all runners, in other words.

The fact is that "trends" often seem to exist when they are looked at crudely and weaken or disappear altogether when the data is looked at in a more sophisticated manner.

This is a point well worth bearing in mind at this time of year more than most.

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