Those who deal with the stock market and other financial products in general, often talk about their performance last year or about statistically worthwhile results over the last three or five years.
Investors analyze their long-term return on stocks and mutual funds. Betting is another thing, of course, but there can be a similar approach there also. Anyone involved in betting has to invest in the statistics, which are available in most sports.
At the same time, we often hear about systems that are very successful. How this betting system or the other made 8-1 last week and so on. How would you feel if a system had 56% success over 100 matches? Sounds good enough, but is this success statistically confirmed?
We would like to clarify a few things, which remain quite vague in the minds of many bettors. This will help you realize how effective or not your betting system is.
Everything is numbers
Those who deal with mathematics, like to quantify things. When something is statistically significant in mathematics, it means that it is probably real, valid and can be confirmed. So if it’s 95% significant, that means that it’s 95% probable for that the case we’ve actually made to be really true. This of course means that there is another 5% probability that the assumption is wrong.
But how can we use this fact? Statistics and maths allow us to see if our approach is right or wrong. They tell us how much we need to study a system and give us guidelines on how much we should stick to.
Usually success in betting means that we have to be correct in our predictions at a rate of around 51-53%. Suppose we want to test how good a 55% success system is. The answers will be given to us by the statistical data.
If our system has 57% success on a sample of over 1 million matches, we will probably agree that everyone is very good. Is it statistically significant? Yes it is. If we are talking about 100,000 games in our sample, is it the same case? Yes, it is statistically significant.
Time is money
In general, we would say that if our sample is over 2,000 matches and the figure reaches 57%, then our system is statistically significant and successful.
The smaller the sample of matches, the greater the corresponding success rate should be to consider that a betting system really works. In a large sample of matches, the percentage is decreasing and the law of large numbers takes over from there. With time we know that all systems have their ups and downs. However, the large sample of matches and results is what reaffirms or not the effectiveness of our betting system. So do not hurry, show patience, and you will finally be rewarded for it.
