Monday's FREE Tip Is Ready...

9th November 2015

Hi ,

If you’ve heard the word Archie batted about various betting forums and communities. You’re probably wondering who or what this is. Well today we are going to put an end to any questions and explain exactly what Archie is.

It is in fact a method of scoring selections and is commonly known as an Archie Score. The purpose of using an Archie score is to determine with what probability selections are based on skill or chance. Obviously the more likely they are based on chance then the less sure we can be of them, while the more likely they are based on skill the more confidence we can have in placing our money on them. You can use this on either your own selections or someones that you are following.

Luckily this is not too difficult to work out. There is some maths involved but I am going to break it down for you so that it is as easy as possible.

In order to calculate the Archie score we need to know how many winners we would have expected from our selections, based on chance. This is actually very easy to do. You start by converting the odds of all your selections into probabilities. This is done by dividing 1 by the decimal odds.

For example…

Of course you will have far more selections in your sample, but in this example we are just using five selections. You can see that we have converted the decimal odds from each of the selections into a probability.

Now, to work out the number of expected winners we simply add together all the probabilities. In our example we would have 1.2 expected winners.

So what is the Archie calculation. It looks like…

If you don’t like maths then please don’t run away, I promise it isn’t as hard as it looks at first glance.

We already know how to calculate expected winners. The only two other pieces of information we need are pretty simple…winners and runners!

And… there are no calculations are required to work out either of those pieces of information.

With these three pieces of information we can work out the Archie score.

In our example we have 1.2 expected winners. Let’s assume that we have actually had 2 winners and we know that there have been 5 runners. We have all the information we need. Our Archie score sum now looks like this…

This gives us an Archie score of 0.70

That’s great, but what does this actually mean?

In the table above you can see exactly what the Archie score means.

Look down the left hand column to find your Archie score, which is between 0.50 and 1.00, and then look into the right hand column and can see that this means the results are between 32% and 48% down to chance!

Would you want to be betting on selections that are up to 48% down to pure luck?

Probably not, you would wait until you had some more results to see if this reduced.

The higher the Archie score the more the results are due to skill and less likely to be based on chance. Personally I like the Likelihood Of Chance to be 5% or less or to have an Archie Score of 4 or higher.

This can be one of the most useful measurements in knowing when to go live with your own selections or which tipster to choose.

Back next Monday.

Michael Wilding