The crazy 2019-2020 EPL season has mercifully come to an end. We can look back and learn. For the first 29 rounds, we carefully avoided congested fixtures and made a 43% profit on turnover, placing value bets and betting amounts as suggested by my round-by-round posts.

Had anyone bet on the 9 rounds of congested fixtures, there would have been a 35% loss. If anyone bet equally on all underdogs for those 9 congested rounds, they would have had a 43% profit, which tells you how unpredictable the top teams were. Unexpectedly, they would rest top players or just go through the motions to preserve their players for cup matches. A number of hopeless underdogs won.

When play resumed with round 30, all rounds had congested fixtures through round 38, the last round. After rounds 30 and 31, I wrote that the games seemed to be reasonably played without the major surprises we usually have with congested fixtures. For rounds 32-38, using value bets with the usually amounts bet, there was a 7.7% profit on turnover. Betting on all underdogs would only have paid a 3.5% profit. The congested fixtures for round 32-38 were much more predicable than earlier congested fixtures, but still less than half as profitable as the average for all past seasons.

That’s like saying someone had COVID but the case wasn’t as bad as it could have been. I think it’s better not to have COVID at all and next season, I think we should resume not betting when fixtures are congested. The teams should have about a week before and after each match or fixtures are congested. I understand that there will be an effort to schedule to avoid congested fixtures due to cup matches.

Meanwhile, stay well!

Ray Stefani