Winning football pools on a regular basis seems like a dream (or pure fantasy) for many people. However, it can be done, if you have a system. How can you work the odds? It is a question that many people ask themselves!

Let’s look at the basic probabilities. With a coupon of 49 matches (games), we seek to identify a winning line of 8 point draws in the British triple odds groups if we want to win a 1st dividend (a point draw or SD is a result where both teams finish top with the same number of goals, not zero). If we bet only on 1 line (no one does, but let’s put that aside for now), then the odds of selecting the correct 8 matches out of 49 are roughly 450 million to 1. With the UK lottery, the odds are 14 million to 1 for a six number combination, by comparison.

If we bet 45,000 lines in one entry, that brings the odds down (on a purely random basis) to around 10,000 to 1. That’s getting a lot better. Now, there are complications. There will not always be 8 SD results on a given coupon, and sometimes there can be as many as 15 or even more. During the latter part of 2009, the number of tied games (both SD and no-score draw) ranged from 12% (1 no-score and 5 score-ties) to 38% (5 no-score and 13 SD) of the coupon. The maximum number of draws during that 12-week period was 14. Please see the attached chart.

Take for example a week where there are 13 ties. With 13 such draws, there are 1,287 possible combinations of the 8 required for a 1st Dividend. This helps our odds considerably: 10,000 to 1 becomes 7.77 to 1 (well, 8 to 1 for simplicity). That’s with a random selection of our 45,000 lines.

Now, let’s assume that football teams play fit (not always or consistently true), but let’s say we can predict tie games with 60% accuracy within our teams. This means we have a 20% higher chance (10% margin above the 50% random). So the odds of 8 to 1 now become 6.4 to 1 (or 13/2 if we were betting on horses). There are other ways to sharpen the odds in our favor, and much more to work on a system, but I hope this article gave you an idea!

(c) Phil Marks 2009