Hi everyone,

as part of my pre-season plans I've been working very hard revamping my website, writing the second in my series of books, crunching data, formulating plans, keeping an eye on the Euro's, oh and doing a bit of my day job too.

The reason for this post is that I've been crunching the data from the last 3040 Premier League games and I wanted to share a rather useful chart I developed.

As you all know, bookmakers are very rarely fools. They have a great quantity of people working around the clock to ensure that the odds they offer don't leave them too open to loss. With this in mind, I had a look at the odds offered by Bet365 for all of the games detailed above and worked out the actual results depending on the odds that were offered. Have a look over the jump to see what I discovered....

The really positive part about thhs chart is that it looks like the standard distribution of results that you would expect for a progressively weaker home team. This implies that it can be relied on (especially in light of the sample size of over 3000).

So how can you use it? Well, to put it simply, if you simply look up the odds on offer for the home team on the Bet365 site along the bottom of the page, you will be able to see the percentage probability of each result. Whilst the percentage chances might surprise you, I imagine that they should feel about right. I would however bring your attention to two interesting facts.

Firstly, even if the home team has a big price over 3-1 (4 in decimals), there is still a 50% chance that the away team wont win. The home team has to have a massive price before you can really believe that the Away team will win easily.

Secondly, the probability of a draw remains fairly constant. You'll notice that most of the red bars are about the same size. It is the chance of a home or away win that moves whilst the draw is an ever constant.

I can understand that the picture may be too small to see so I've put a larger .pdf on-line for download. The web address is

http://alturl.com/7sxdb

The website itself is a dummy one just to hold the .pdf so dont expect there to be lots to look at - just click the football to download the document. So how does it impact the start of the season? Well it;s too early to say really as transfers are still to come into effect but currently it looks like this:

Arsenal 82% Draw 14% Sunderland 4%

Everton 13% Draw 30% Man Utd 57%

Fulham 54% Draw 25% Norwich 21%

Man City 87% Draw 10% Southampton 3%

Newcastle 40% Draw 27% Tottenham 33%

QPR 42% Draw 28% Swansea 30%

Reading 36% Draw 27% Stoke 37%

West Brom 30% Draw 26% Liverpool 44%

West Ham 40% Draw 27% Aston Villa 33%

Wigan 8% Draw 29% Chelsea 63%

Man City isn't much of a surprise but I wouldn't have put Arsenal that high to me. I think that Schwarzer looks like a nice GK bet from this very early viewpoint.

For the geeks Just as an aside for the geeks out there, I have plotted trendlines against the data in order to create a more usable prediction model. The r-squared values on all of the lines were about .95 so I feel relatively happy and the formula's, based on the polynomial, were:

Home - y = 0.0001x2 - 0.0252x + 0.8741

Away - y = 0.0003x2 + 0.0063x + 0.0186

Draw - y = -0.0005x2 + 0.0194x + 0.1035