For the whole of the current Football Season 2009/10 I have been testing a new system that I had designed in the Summer of 2009. Now as you may know, I have never really been a great fan of Laying Systems, I much prefer backing a team to win  rather than laying it to not win. Also, if that team did go on to win you ended up losing 2 or 3 times your stake, depending on the odds and that is certainly not to my liking. So for all the layers out there, I set out to find a system that only laid poor value Home teams that were odds-on and that is the system I have been testing all season long.

So, how has it been doing? Well, we shall come to that shortly. The system is based around my Ratings Book and where we look for positive value to back a team, we obviously look for negative value to lay a team. I also wanted a system where you actually lost less than you staked when the team you laid went on to win. The only way to do this was to only lay teams below 2.0 (ie odds-on). When I find a selection I lay it to lose 1 point, which means I will win more than 1 point if that team does not win. For instance, if you saw my Posting on LTO last Friday, you will have seen that my lay tip was Sheffield Utd @1.7. I laid them for 1.43 points, which meant that if they won I would have lost 1 point, if they didn’t win I would have won 1.36 points (taking commission into account). They went on to lose and so I had made a nice comfortable 1.36 points.

For anyone who has been watching my Friday Footy Tips, you will know that my back selections have been having a horrible time but my lay selections have been in fantastic form. The back bets have also been part of systems test, obviously one that has not been going well at all and will unfortunately be consigned to the dustbin. However, the lay selections have been part of my lay system test and I can tell you that over the past 11 weeks, we have had 7/11 correct, 63.6 Strike Rate and 47% ROI.

The season long trial has produced 167 odds-on lays, of which 95 have been winners for us (57% Strike Rate), we have made 39 points profit (23% ROI), which for a lay system, I can tell you is excellent. The average odds of the lays has been 1.85. The trial has now been going for 7 months and it has done fantastically well. Assuming that it continues in this vein until the end of the season, it will have had a season long trial and produced brilliant results. There have been times in the season where we have hit a bad run, for instance the bad weather in January did for us and we had 10 lays in a row that went on to win but to counter that we had runs where we had 12/13 and 10/11 winners for us, absolutely brilliant. Just like any other system it does have its’ good and bad runs but overall it has performed to a very high standard.

For anyone out there looking to lay odds-on football teams with a system that has a  57% Strike Rate and gives 23% ROI, then I have good news for you. I do intend marketing this product next season as long as it continues as it has been doing for the rest of the season, so just watch out for it. I have not come up with a price or name for it yet but will let you know when I do. For those not interested in buying it, I will still be giving the odd selection out on LTO completely free of charge.