Moneyballin'

by Rick Nash

Some people make New Year's resolutions, but if you're a shameless sports gambler like me you make new season's resolutions. So, after a, quite frankly, ridiculous 5-5 draw between Man Utd and West fucking Brom cost me a winning record for 2012/13, I've decided to go with a more reliable, proven method this time around.

The Euro Club Index would've probably been a better website to follow than this one if you actually cared about winning money, and didn't just have some weird fetish for seeing this useless bum lose his wages. Using a complex system of algorithms based on win-probability and teams' results records, I can safely say that I have no clue how the maths behind the Euro Club Index works. But I know enough to understand that they made an 8% profit on their match predictions over the past three years and correctly called the top 7 positions of last season's Premier League at the start of the season. I like those odds, so this season I'm sticking with the form horse and basing my predictions on the Euro Club Index's probabilities. That's right, even The Accumulator is going the moneyball route.

Where I come in is that I'll correspond the best probabilities with the best value bets and try to put together attractive trebles and accumulator bets for you throughout the season, recording my own win-loss records along with my net earnings for the season to give you full perspective.

To remind you all, here are some of my own personal gambling rules (to be taken with a pinch of salt, since I'm 1-1 in actually earning money on a season-by-season basis):

Managing Expectations

by Rick Nash

That was the week that was...

• In Spain, about two-thirds of Real Madrid's members believe that Jose Mourinho is damaging the club. Rivals Barcelona continue to dominate La Liga, this weekend winning the Basque derby in impressive style (4-0 over Espanyol).
• Closer to home, Paul Lambert's time at Villa sunk to a new low with a humiliating semi-final, 1st leg defeat to Bradford in the Capital One Cup.
• Swansea continued to bring Rafa Benitez back down to earth by humbling Chelsea 2-0 - at Stamford Bridge - in the other semi. 
• Meanwhile, in the FA Cup, Newcastle were the highest profile Premier League side upset (by Brighton) in the weekend's opening tie.

Perhaps the one stellar point raised in last week's column (which was otherwise disastrous, picks-wise, with 5-upset bets yielding a grand total of €0) is that this is the year when the 'super manager' actually wouldn't be able to swoop in and save a struggling club. The expected turnaround that Harry Redknapp would bring at QPR appears to have fallen short. Martin O'Neill, previously hailed as THE 'super manager' for a struggling club, isn't having things all his own way at Sunderland. The managers mentioned in the above bullet points all continue to unceremoniously blunder, despite their considerable reputations.

We think that bringing in a big name boss who has done wonders at another club will turn around fortunes when a club is struggling, but in 2012/13, is that still the case?