Rennes – Nice. Monaco - RC Strasbourg. Ligue 1 (France).

There are a lot of stories on forums in the Internet about that if you bet on one team from time to time, you will win.

Today the team of the site Corner-stats.com decided to make a research on such strategy “bet on win (defeat or draw) of a team” and tried to find such teams in different leagues.

Any research consists of couple stages starting from:

• develop a model or hypothesis;
•  search for data;
•  hypothesis testing on these data;
• testing on future events.

All these stages of the research were conducted.

Step 1: development of a model and the hypothesis

Hypothesis: there are teams, betting on the victory of which for a long time you can have a profit.

Model: we are looking for a team, we check on the history, betting on all its matches to win for a long time with the stake of 1$ and we investigate the profit.

If the profit exists for at least 3 seasons, then the bookmaker systematically understates the odds on the win of this team and it is worthwhile to take a closer look at such a team with a view to betting on the win of such a team.

Step 2: Search for data

The data was taken from the site Corner-stats.com where there are qualitative data of both match results and bookmaker odds for these matches with a history of 3 or more seasons (in statistics, as a rule, they take the history for at least 3 years, and better - 5 years).

Step 3: Test the hypothesis on these data

For the study was taken French League 1.

Of course, you can choose the data for each match using the tournament page (or match or individual team), and then making calculations, but the site Corner-stats.com offers such a wonderful tool as "profit table", where all calculations are made in automatic mode.

So, in a few clicks, we get the profits of the teams for the French League 1, for the last 5 seasons:

Evaluation of the results: in the French League 1 there are teams, betting only on the win of which in League 1, you can have a profit during the seasons 2013/14 - 2017/18.

That is, the "Profit" tool makes it possible to test such a simple strategy as "Choose one team and bet all of its time on its win". Similarly, you can check strategies for defeat or a draw.

So, the seven teams were defined: Nice, Monaco, Caen, Angers, Amines SC, Bastia and Reims in this sample with a profit if to bet on their win.

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It is common knowledge that all match systems are checked only at a distance and preferably more matches.

Therefore, the team Amines SC can be dropped immediately, as a team that played only 5 matches. But the 3 teams played more than 150 matches, and perhaps the bookmaker systematically incorrectly evaluates these teams.

Therefore, further we will continue the research on these 3 teams: Nice, Monaco and Bastia.

It is logical to investigate how the profit changed in different seasons, because there could be a huge profit at the beginning, and all the other seasons of the team showed a loss.

So, consider the profitability of teams for the seasons, using the filter season (selected season 2013/2014):

choosing in turn all the seasons and summarizing the selected results in the table:

From the received data, the following conclusions can be the following:

• Nice lost in 2013/14 season, but all other seasons a good profit with ROI is more than 30% (phenomenal result). It is this team - the candidate for a system underestimation by the bookmaker.
• Monaco has had all the seasons profit, and in the season 2016/17 (championship) a very good profit. ROI (YIELD) is at least 4%, which indicates a slight underestimation by the bookmaker.
• Bastia has a profit both positive and negative, with great hesitation, which indicates an unstable team performance (the confirmation of instability is the departure from League 1 in the 2016/17 season).

So, testing of hypothesis in a few clicks selected two candidates: Nice and Monaco.

However, it should be noted that lately the bookmaker lowers the odds for winning both teams, correcting the mistake in underestimation:

• Nice has been lowered the average odds from 4.02 in the 2013/14 season to 2.75 in the 2017/18 season;
• Monaco has had a sharp decline in the odds from 2 to 1.5 in the season 2017/18.

At last, it is necessary to note two very important details:

1. Profit is calculated on the basis of bookmaker Bet365 odds, but always can be found better odds in other bookmaker for higher profit;

2. The odds for which the calculations were made can always be found on the page of the corresponding match of the team or on the team page (for example for Nice - https://corner-stats.com/nice/france/team/94 with the filter - all seasons, only League1, all matches):

Concerning the match between Nice versus Rennes, then using the filter home matches only for Rennes, you can see that the bookmaker givesan understated odds for Rennes victory in home matches, as the loss was 15.63in 78 home games in the 2013/14-2017/18 season and Rennes is the 2nd team with the biggest loss, losing only to Troyes:

The team site Corner-stats.com bets on the win of Nice against Rennes at a 3.30 odds and the win of Monaco vs RC Strasbourg at a 1.16 odds at Bet365.

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