Scoring against the bookies

A pair of football-crazy researchers have created a computer code which seems to beat the bookies at their own game.

Research associate Mark Dixon and postgraduate student Michael Robinson have stored the results of all professional English soccer matches played in the past three years.

Their programme calculates the probabilities of cup and league results compared to the odds offered by bookmakers. Over the first 30 weeks of the project the programme would have yielded a 10 per cent return on their money. At least, it would have done if the researchers had had the cash and confidence to place all the computer's suggested bets.

Mr Dixon says he was tempted to disbelieve the computer model when the project kicked off because its suggestions seemed unlikely.

"It is doing a lot better than if you bet randomly, where you would expect to lose about 25 per cent over a period of time," said Mr Dixon.

"My experience is that intuition is random. Even being quite a football fan, I quite often disagree with what comes out of the programme but personally I would follow it now whatever," he said.

The researchers decide where to place a bet when their prediction differs from the bookmakers.

"If the bookies have put the odds of Preston beating Blackpool at nine to one, that means they think Preston have a 10 per cent chance of winning," said Mr Dixon.

"If we use our computerised model and it calculates that the odds on Preston are four to one, we think Preston has a 20 per cent chance of winning. We would bet on it because if we put Pounds 1 on Preston, we would get Pounds 10 back."

Football fans may be interested to know that before last weekend he calculated the next premiership champions as Manchester United (65 per cent probability) or Blackburn (34 per cent).

But trying to win a fortune is an extra-curricular activity for Mr Dixon, whose day job at Lancaster University involves research into sea level. "It is a big project to work out how high you have to build sea walls around the British coast based on statistical results, which is more important than Southampton winning at the weekend," he said.