The Pyckio Blog

Interview with our Football PRO Tipster Skeeve

by Daniel Mateos · No Comments

skeeveSkeeve is a PRO Tipster specialized in the English National League, who made profit for sixteen consecutive seasons with his pre-match picks. He’s been proofing his bets to Smart Betting Club for fifteen years (since March 2008) and he also proofed his bets to Joseph Buchdahl’s Sport Tipsters between August 2012 and its closure in May 2015. To date (17 Feb 2023), he has achieved a 11.2% Yield in 756 picks.

< < As a special promotion, we will give you 30% extra picks FREE if you buy any pack of skeeve picks before Sunday, February 26 >>

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Interview with “manumma”, our MMA PRO Tipster

by Daniel Mateos · No Comments

nishikori picturemanumma is our only MMA Tipster PRO. As you can read, he is a true connoisseur of this sport and his results show it. In Pyckio since 2014, his statistics in Pyckio at Pinnacle odds (as of January 28, 2023) show a Yield of 5.1% in 2167 picks.

<< As a special promotion, we will give you 30% extra picks if you buy a pack of manumma picks before Wednesday, February 1 >>

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Guess the best PRO Tipster of 2023 and your picks purchase will be FREE

by Daniel Mateos · 1 Comment

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RULES OF THE PROMOTION

- This promotion is only applicable to those purchases made between the 21st and the 31st of December 2022.

- It’s applicable to all the package of picks of all the PRO Tipsters you buy. For example, if you buy 50 picks of PRO Tipster A  and 1000 picks of PRO Tipster B and PRO Tipster B ends up being the best of 2023, your purchase of 1000 picks will be FREE. If PRO Tipster A ends up being the best, your purchase of 50 picks of PRO Tipster A will be FREE.

- If any of the PRO Tipsters you have bought ends up wbeing the best of 2023, we will create a credit in your account for the value of the picks you have purchased. with no expiration period. If you buy 1000 picks of PRO Tipster B for a price of 1000€ and he wins, we will allocate a credit of 1000€ in your account so that you can buy any package of picks, the GrandMaster subscription or any new product we can launch in 2023.

- Only those PRO Tipsters who are in our rankng list at 31 December 2022 are considered for this promotion. If a new PRO Tipster gets into our ranking in 2023, he will not be considered.

- To appoint the best PRO Tipster of 2023, we will take into account the total number of units won and we will consider a stake 1 for all the picks. That is, the particualr staking plan of each PRO Tipster won’t count. The profit/loss will be calculated with a stake 1 for all the picks.

- A minimum of 100 picks submitted in 2023 is needed so that the results of a PRO Tipster are considered. If a PRO TIpster gets out of the PRO area or leaves our platform for whatever reason in 2023 without having made at least 100 picks, his/her results won’t be considered. However, if he gets out of the PRO area or leaves our platform with at least 100 picks submitted in 2023, his/her results will count.

Your betting portfolio: Difference between the “Yield” (ROI) and the”Return” (ROC)

by Daniel Mateos · 1 Comment

Yield-ReturnIn the sports betting world the Yield or ROI(return on investment) is often confused with the Return of your betting portfolio or ROC (return on capital). In fact, they are 2 different things:

Let’s imagine we have won 2,400 € in one year, as we have been able to grow our bankroll from 3,000€ to 5,400€. The return of our investment has been (2,400/3,000) = 80%. When talking about betting, the Yield is the ratio of total profits to total money bet; that is, how much we win (or lose) for each euro waged. If we have made 500 bets in one year, with an average bet of 50€, we have bet a total of 25,000 €. Our Yield is 2,400€ / 25,000€ = 0.096 = 9.6%.

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Deconstructing nishikori, the tipster

by Daniel Mateos · 2 Comments

Our Tennis ATP PRO Tipster nishikori has made an extense and deep analysis of his tipping activity under different angles. We present you here his work since he began submitting his ATP Tennis picks in Pyckio in March 2016, for you to have a broader view of his skills and results.

Summary

First of all, it’s important to highlight that all his results has been registered at Pinnacle Sports odds exclusively (as for all our tipsters) and it’s the platform Pyckio, not the tipster, the one who grades all picks. Moreover, he only tips in ATP matches, the most liquid Tennis market. He doesn’t do minor tournaments like ITFs or Challengers.

Summary

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To date (20 August 2020), nishikori has produced a 8.39% yield in 3,283 picks, with high single digit yields every year, with the exception of 2017, where he achieved a 5.6% ROI in 853 bets. Due to the pandemic, he has only submitted 89 picks in 2020 so far.

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Surface

By surface, it’s Clay where he has obtained his best results, with 7.3 more points of yield vs. Hard. However, the Clay sample is 645 picks smaller, so we would need more bets to see if he really has a higher edge on Clay or it’s only random factor.

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Tournament

By type of tournament, he really excels at Masters 1000, with an incredible 13.6% ROI in 889 games. This might also be randomness due to the sample size. However, he has informed us that he is quite confident of having a higher edge in this type of tournaments, due to some market factors he prefers not to make public. We will keep a close eye here.

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Market

By market, the moneyline represents 72.3% of all his bets, with a 9.4% ROI. Over the years, nishikori has been focusing on the liquidity of his picks in order to protect the interest of his customers. This is the reason why in the last months/years he has been making the great majority of his picks in the moneyline, where liquidity in Tennis is the highest. In 2019 he also took the decision of waiting to see 1000€ of liquidity offered by Pinnacle, at a minimum, before submitting his picks, with the exception of the longshots.

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Odds

nishikori’s average odds is 2.56, what indicates that he likes to look for undervalued dogs and he excels at doing it. To make an odds analysis he has grouped his set of results in 4 quartiles of 821 picks (820 in the 4th q.), ordered by odds. We can notice and impressive spike in the ROI at the highest odds. He has been able to achieve an amazing 20.6% ROI in the 820 highest priced bets, what makes 61.5% of the overall profit. Therefore, it’s quite clear that he is able to find the highest value at the highest odds, what, as we’ll see later, has important implications in the money management strategy.

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Advised odds vs Closing odds 

nishikori has provided us with a thorough analysis of his closing odds. In Pyckio we currently do not register the Pinnacle closing lines, but nishikori does it personally with all his picks. According to the efficient market hypothesis, the closing odds provide the most accurate representation of the probabilities of actual results, since they reflect the most amount of information expressed in the form of wagers by the betting public. However, if this were fully true, you couldn’t win betting at the closing odds. You can find our opinion regarding this issue in our post “Pinnacle closing odds, market efficiency and tipsters’s skill”.

We can see below an analysis of the results obtained if you had bet at the advised price vs. betting at the Pinnacle closing odds; that is, at prices where everyone would have been able to bet because liquidity is maximum. We can see there is a difference of around 3 points of yield between nishikori’s tipped prices and the closing ones. That is, any bettor could have achieved a 5.4% Yield with the maximum stakes possible. If we add the betting exchanges like Betfair and Matchbook, that many times have better net of fees odds at the highest prices (where nishikori tips most) the yield would be even higher. Of course, we cannot assure that this difference between advised prices and closing odds will keep in the future. In this article the betting analyst Joseph Buchdahl explains why the tennis market might not showing full efficiency, as implied by nishikori results.

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Expected value (EV)

Strongly linked to the closing lines odds and market efficiency is the expected value analysis. The expected value line represents the expected profit, considering the true probabilities are those implied in the closing prices, and having previously removed the bookie margin. That is, if the closing price offered by Pinnacle is 2.20, as bookies are here to make money, the real price might be 2.30 for example. If the tipped price is 2.35, the EV of this bet would be 2.35/2.30-1 = +0.0217. If the tipped price were 2.0, the EV would be 2.0/2.30-1 = -0.1304. There are several ways to remove the bookie margin. nishikori has tested that the method the best represents the reality in Tennis is the “margin proportional to odds method”, the one he has used.

This yellow line therefore represents the profit he would have obtained if we assume that the closing line represent the true probabilities of the events. The difference with his real profit line is huge ( -8.6 units vs 275.3), what goes against the efficient market theory.

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Our opinion is that, although it’s true on average Pinnacle closing lines represent the best estimator of the true probabilities, this is only true ON AVERAGE, as bettors have the option of selecting those bets where they think the market is wrong.

nishikori has calculated the EV for each of his 3283 bets and has grouped them in 4 quartiles, ordered by EV. The results are the following:

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The overall expected value is a -0.3% ROI, vs the 8.4% actual ROI. If we do not remove the bookmaker margin, the edge over closing odds is 2.97%. It can be noticed that there is not a close relationship between EV and real yield. The 2nd quartile has a higher yield than the 3rd one, even though the EV is lower. Of course, as long as the sample gets bigger the results will be more statistically significant. What we can also notice is that, at the extremes, the EV gains importance. The 1st quartile group of bets, with a -9.1% EV has hardly produced any profits. But the 4th quartile, with a 8.8% EV, has produce an impressive 19.5% ROI. 820 bets and a 19.5% yield is a great business.

In summary, nishikori clearly prefers to beat the closing line, as he has said to us, and the more he beats it the better. He has even told us that he is lately focusing on trying to select high EV bets, what means selecting odds he thinks are going to drop strong. But this is different from stating that the closing line is everything. If closing odds represented the true probabilities always, it would be stupid to bet near the close.

Money management

In the chart below you can find the results under 3 different money management strategies: flat stakes, fixed profit and unit impact. Unit impact is the least well known and is midway between flat stakes and fixed profit.  This method holds constant the difference in the bankroll between winning and losing. That is, every bet has exactly the same impact in the bankroll, no matter how long or short the price is. You can read more about these 3 staking strategies here.

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nishikori tips 1 unit flat stakes in Pyckio and, as you can see, it has been proved to be the most succesful strategy. The reason is obvious. As we have seen, nishikori achieves his best results at the highest odds. Therefore he bets the same stake at 10.0 price than at 1.40. This means that the evolution of his profit line depends more on the higher priced picks than on the lower ones. When we asked him why he didn’t balanced more his staking, betting more at lower prices and vice versa, he replied us that he is aware that he provides more value at the longest odds.

If you follow his picks, the risk of adopting this strategy is that a bad run of several high odds missed bets can produce higher drawdowns than if you follow a “fixed profit” or “unit impact” strategy. However, in the long run you bankroll is very likely to get much higher. In the chart above, the yield for the flat stakes money management is 9.4% (275.3 units), versus 6.30% (206.8 units) in unit impact and 6.0% (196.6 units) in fixed profit.  To sum up, flat stakes seems to be the best strategy in the long run if you follow him, but be careful not to risk too much per bet if you don’t want to have big drawdowns.

Drawdowns

nishikori’s maximum drawdown has been 33.87 units with his flat stakes strategy. This compares with 35.9 if he had followed a fixed profit strategy or 37.4 with unit impact. This might seem to contradict what we have just exposed above. However, this has more to do with the great overperformance of his highest odds bets. Some few bets won at very high prices can make the difference. In the future, we would expect the flat stakes method to have highers drawdowns, although also a higher potential.

Mind vs Machine in Sports Betting

by Daniel Mateos · No Comments

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I am the Pyckio PRO Tipster nishikori and I have been involved in Tennis betting for many years. At the beginning I had my ups and downs but in the last years I have been able to earn a living from this activity, both with my personal betting but also with the income I receive as a Tennis PRO Tipster. My tipping revenue helps balance the swings of my personal betting. As time passed and I could get to maintain my near 2 digits yield in a relatively liquid market like the Tennis ATP, my confidence that I could make a living out of my tennis expertise grew. My statistics to date (2 March 2020), registered at Pinnacle Sport prices, are the following: 8.4% Yield in 3283 Tennis ATP picks, in 4 years. Although you can never assure this, in the light of this numbers I am quite confident that I have an edge in the ATP Tennis market.

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How to apply de Kelly criteria in your betting with the “Unit Impact” method

by Daniel Mateos · 6 Comments

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Note: This post is based on the following work. Barge-Gil, García-Hiernaux (Pyckio shareholders), A. (2019): Staking plans in sports betting under unknown true probabilities of the event. MPRA Working Paper 92196. University Library of Munich.

Kelly staking method has been shown to maximize long term growth of the bankroll (Kelly, 1956) and also median fortune (Ethier, 2004). The Kelly formula tells us that the percentage of bankroll to be staked in each bet is:

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Interview with our Football PRO Tipster futunver

by Daniel Mateos · 6 Comments

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Futunver is right now our top International Football PRO Tipster. He started tipping in Pyckio in 2016 and after 1820 bets he has been able to achieve a 8.3% Yield or ROI, what translates into a 226.6% return on capital (ROC) if we had bet 1.5% of our bankroll per bet and without deducting any fees.He has been producing positive results for 9 consecutive months and is now in the top 3 of our ranking  table. His strategy is based on looking for the local victory. This type of picks represent around 95% of the total. In this interview you can know more about him.

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Interview with our Volleyball PRO Tipster Julio Velasco

by Daniel Mateos · No Comments

foto juliovelasco3With the 2018 Volleyball Men’s World Championship, that has just started, we would like to present you a great insider in this sport and an awesome tipster. He is our Volleyball PRO Tipster Julio Velasco, who works as a Volleyball coach and has been linked to the Volley world since many years ago, since he was a child. To date he has been able to achieve a 12.2% Yield in 1053 picks and has stated he is confident to maintain a 10% objective ROI in the long run. In the interview below you can read more about him and his insights into this sport.

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