I have been using computers to help me bet for the best part of my betting life. A computer betting system can be a great tool for everything from checking your odds to creating a full blown sports prediction system.

Sadly I am not going to tell you that using a computer betting system will change your profits overnight. Any system is only as good as the way it has been programmed and the data it has to work with.

There is some good news though, you don’t have to be a computer programmer to knock up a betting system. If you have used Excel or Access a few times then you probably have enough knowledge to muddle through. A computer will help you calculate the value for each bet, for each game, in each sport within minutes and highlight exactly where the best betting opportunities are for any given day.

Start by figuring out what you want your system to do. Next write your calculations down on paper to check that you have the maths right. Once you know you have things correct then you can start programming, or building your queries and macros (depending on your level of experience).

A simple starting system could be one that compares football teams home and away scoring potential. In reality you would want to add other criteria, but lets look at this to start with. Thank fully data is quite easy to come by for this as you can get data for home and away goals from any league table.

You will see that there is another useful bit of data in the image above, home and away games played. Now with this data, you can calculate the average goals a team scores at home and away. By comparing the data between two teams you can get a feel for their relative power.

Of course, the example above is too simplistic to be that much use when betting, you would really need to take into account the circumstances in which those goals were scored. For example a team in the middle, could have scored five against a lesser team who were down to ten men, this would skew the figures, so would need to be taken into account. You might also want to think about the home advantage each team have (this is more important in some sports than others), or the value of individual players or managers, ability of players in different playing conditions etc

If you think about it there are so many variables you can add it is amazing. What I like to end up with is a system that tells me the probability of each outcome, and therefore the odds for each outcome. From this you have a great tool for finding value by comparing the odds in your view to that of bookmakers and betting exchanges. It is always good to keep accounts with many betting sites to ensure you always take the best odds possible, therefore getting more return for your money.

Testing! Testing is the hard part. Not hard because it if difficult, but hard because to test a system properly can take ages. There are web sites that offer data for previous seasons, so it is a good idea to run the system as the data stood for each game of a previous year, this will tell you how you would have got on and enable you to make adjustments, test, adjust and so on. You will also need the odds that stood at the start of each game here though to tell you if the system picked up any value. Just a note here, I would never use the first four weeks of a season because teams are finding their feet and the data is building up. There is just not enough information until this point.

Now consider that no matter how good your system is there are always people who have such good knowledge that they can beat you with gut feel alone, and that you are going to have to invest a lot of time into writing a system. It is not a quick fix, or the Holy Grail. It can however be very good at finding value and growing your betting bank if you follow strict rules.
There are some off the shelf systems, but I think to really get the best you need to be writing (or designing and having someone write for you) your own system based on your knowledge and criteria. Of course you might be one of those people who has that amazing gut feel and makes a good profit with no computer at all.

Please feel free to drop me an email if you have any thoughts on computer betting systems.

Grubbers Betting Tips the home of free betting tips

Note: Never bet with any money that you are not prepared to lose. Always form your own opinion when betting and do not blindly follow tips.