What variables are relevant to predict the future results of a football team? Are there any inefficiencies in the betting markets that can be exploited? How many games are necessary to correctly measure the level of a team or a footballer? Is it better to bet on a team that is on a winning streak or is it better to bet on a team that is on a losing streak? What is the probability that a team that has just been promoted will be relegated in the next few seasons? What is the optimal size and composition of a team squad? How are the best and worst clubs different? What are the best bookmakers? In this book the reader will find the answer to these and many other questions about the beautiful game, thanks to data mining techniques applied to a historical database of more than 200,000 football matches and a statistical approach explained in an easily accesible style.

During the last few decades, commercial gambling has increased substantially throughout the Western world. More people than ever before have access to sources of legalised gambling, leading to bumper revenues for the institutions involved. Naturally enough, this has led to an increased interest in the area of the economics of betting. This book addresses the issues raised by the continued growth of the gambling sector. How can we model the behaviour of people who seemingly act irrationally? What are the implications of different tax policies with regard to gambling? Are casinos capable of taking money away from state-run lotteries and the causes they fund? Can bookmakers’ odds be influenced in such a way as to make the gambling market inefficient? The authors in this volume provide insights based on data from many different countries, including England, the USA, Australia, Spain and Cyprus. This volume brings together work which addresses the economic impact of the huge growth of commercial gambling in the Western world, as well as trying to model the cognitive processes which can explain why individuals are prepared to behave in such apparently irrational ways. This book was published as a special issue of Applied Economics. The academic editor of this journal is Mark P. Taylor.

The degree to which markets incorporate information is one of the most important questions facing economists today. This book provides a fascinating study of the existence and extent of information efficiency in financial markets, with a special focus on betting markets. Betting markets are selected for study because they incorporate features highly appropriate to a study of information efficiency, in particular the fact that each bet has a well-defined end point at which its value becomes certain. Using international examples, this book reviews and analyses the issue of information efficiency in both financial and betting markets. Part I is an extensive survey of the existing literature, while Part II presents a range of readings by leading academics. Insights gained from the book will interest students of financial economics, financial market analysts, mathematicians and statisticians, and all those with a special interest in finance or gambling.

What does it take to create a winning sports betting model?Many people are interested in learning how to make smarter sports betting wagers. Not many of those same people are excited at the prospect of learning applied statistics to better inform their choices. You can't entirely blame them. Statistics has a well-earned reputation for being somewhat inaccessible by non-academics. It is a field filled with heavy terminology, confusing formulaic notation and concepts not fully relevant to the beginning sports bettor. To make matters worse, nobody in possession of a positive edge model is all that keen to show you how it works. As a result of this, sports modelling successfully requires a toolbox that you largely have to assemble for yourself. This book is my attempt to correct that, as I pull back the curtain on Excel spreadsheet models and techniques I developed in my first few years of sports betting. It is designed to give you an accessible crash course on modelling that will get you up to speed on the key relevant principles of statistics with a minimum amount of heavy technical jargon. You'll learn the most effective concepts in an easy-to-understand way and greatly speed up your learning curve in the process. Best of all, I'll walk you through sports betting models for many major sports: NFL, NBA, NHL, AFL and the English Premier League. You'll even be able to download these spreadsheet models and work your way through them while following this book.We'll be doing all of this in one of the most user friendly programs available: Excel. This program might not be the expert's first choice of platform for modelling work, but you'll be surprised just how much you can do with a spreadsheet or two.If you're ready to take your sports modelling to the next level - open this book, fire up Excel, and let's get to work. See you on the inside.

The 7th IEEE/ACIS Conference and the 2nd IEEE/ACIS Workshop on e-Activity (IWEA 2008) featured researchers from around the world. The conference organizers selected 23 outstanding papers for this volume of Springer’s Studies in Computational Intelligence.

This book is a distillation of Racing Post expert Kevin Pullein's extensive knowledge on how to make money when betting on football. His weekly column in the Post is hugely popular with sports betting fans. In this masterwork Pullein explains how you can work out what is likely to happen during a football match and how you might be able to exploit this knowledge profitably by betting. In each chapter there will be both theory and practice, in separate but complementary sections. The theory will always be simply explained and illustrated, and will satisfy both the more-specialist and the less-experienced reader alike, each of whom will be able to get out of it want they want most - as well as a lot of other things beside.