A number of people have reported that charges apply when you use a credit card to place entries on the footballpools.com site but not on other sites. 

I tried this and indeed there is a £2.50 charge for a £5.00 entry on the footballpools.com site but not on Brittens.  This is a 50% charge on the product price.

My bank said to me today that this is because footballpools.com have registered themselves as a gambling merchant but Brittens have not.  They also said that it is the resoponsibility of the merchant to warn online of the impending charge.

A cop out if ever I’ve heard one.

Anyway, check your bills and don’t use the credit card for pools entries on footballpools.com if you can help it.  Use a debit card instead.

This week’s football pools card has been published.  Just go to the blog and click “Latest pools cards”.  You can download this and use the spreadsheet to plan your entries.

My football selections for customers are split into 2 sections:

1. Match forecasts designed for fixed odds betting

 2. Score draw forecasts designed for your football pools entries

Customers find this very useful indeed, and an added value.  And remember, my subscriptions are halved this term!

In terms of this weekend, I’m considering Tottenham, Palace and Rotherham to oblige at home at decent prices. 

The deal with my fixed odds selections is that they must make you a profit over the month or I pay back your subscription in full within 24 hours.  This is a cast iron guarantee that you can’t get anywhere else.

For close matches that I think will end in draws, I have 6 in mind including Spurs v Man U. The object here is to beat the actual ratio of score draws on the card.

Please give us a try and subscribe to my great offer.

I think Lit Plan 153 is a great little plan.

It is a 13X entry and costs £1.60 on Littlewoods for 90 lines.  This is cheap for the guarantee of 8 if 8.

There is of course a lot of coverage loss, but the effect of this is minimised.  You are completely covered as long as no more than 2 of your score draws are consecutive.

I think that this is a reasonable assumption.  Looking at the results of this season’s UK pools my analysis shows that this was the case, for pure results on the card, 50% of the time.

This isn’t the same as looking at the shape of actual pools entries I know, but if score draws are consecutive on the results card and you hit them, then they would have to have been consecutive on your entry also.  An indirect method but still sound I think.

The big plusses for Lit Plan 153 are the 8 if 8 guarantee and the cost.

Result: Littlewoods 2nd div paid £25.  The 2% cover of the Sun Plan 40 is, however, looking pretty thin to me now!

Update #2:

The final totals on my football pools entries this week are 23, 22, 21 and 21. I’m assuming a small payout for the second prize 23 points on Littlewoods and an even small one from Vernons for the 22 points third prize. The 21s will tilt.

This is the second time this year I’ve landed 8 score draws and been disappointed in the points total - missing the first dividend on both occasions. I am now reviewing the use of Sun Plan 40.

I am planning to run with a plan I’ve used with some success in the past. It’s Lit Plan 38 which is a 15x plan with a good guarantee. Whilst there are 2 less selections than Sun Plan 40 the big attraction with Lit Plan 38 is that 8 hits are guaranteed if you have 9 draws.

Sun Plan 40 guarantees 7 if 8, but I think that this plan is one to play if you are happy with a second dividend.

I calculate that full cover of 8 from 17 is a whopping 24310 lines. Sun plan 40 covers only 600 of these. As a percentage figure this comes out at only 2% of full cover. Not a very exciting statistic.

Update Sunday night: My hopes of 24 points are dashed. I have 23 points with neither of Monday’s matches featuring on my line (Newcastle v Portsmouth, Norwich v Reading).

The dividends will be low anyway so it’s not a disaster.

I have 4 other lines sitting on 21 points with one or both of Monday’s matches to come…..

On checking my UK Football Pools entries as the results came in this afternoon I find have 8 score draws on a Sun Plan 40 entry.  With 13 score draws and 5 no-score draws with four to play I’m not expecting a massive payout.

It might just cover the entry fee.

It is really one extreme to another with the number of score draws for the last three weeks 6, 4 and 13 respectively.

Our draw forecasts are doubly valuable as you can use them for fixed odds bets and your pools entries.

Why don’t you try a free month by going to the contacts page.

I have been developing a forecasting tool over the years. The aim is to identify picks with a high probability of success. These can be homes, aways or draws.

One interesting thing about forecasting football matches is that there is a strong tendency to pick clear winners.

This is natural as it is widely believed that draws are the hardest results to forecast. The bookies know that people believe this and set the odds up accordingly with draw odds being relatively attractive.

Wouldn’t it be great to turn accepted belief on its head and bet draws with confidence?

Our forecasting model allows us to do this.

I have been working on the criteria used in our model to refine draw probability calculations. This is proving very profitable for our customers.

I advised 3 correct draws for Saturday 18^th April. The yield for turf365 customers was over 600%. Check the performance page for full details.

Our paying customers particularly value our draw forecasts as they can be used as pools picks as well as for customers’ fixed odds bets.

This makes our football forecasting doubly valuable.

You can have a month’s free selections by going to the contacts page.

A good way to think about the pools plan v perm argument is in terms of forecasting. At a basic level, you get more crosses per pound with a plan so you can afford to get more selections wrong.

You are more likely to hit the score draws using a plan just because you have more crosses on the card.

As you reduce the number of selections in the entry your forecasting needs to be much better. When you get down to an 8 from 10 full perm then your forecasting needs to be spot on which is a big ask when you are forecasting draws.

One of the big drawbacks of plans is that there is significant loss of coverage.

I had personal experience of this a couple of weeks ago when one of my lines of 17x Sun Plan 40 hit 9 score draws (and 0 no-score draws) and I ended up with 22 points. With another entry on the same card I hit 7 score draws (and 1 no-score draw) using the same plan and ended up with 23 points.

There are two points to note with this example from the international weekend of 28^th March 2009.

One is the weakness of the loss of cover of the plan I used. I was very disappointed in the points total for the 9 score draws as you can imagine.

However, the second and most important point is that I doubt very much if I would have been anywhere near hitting 9 out of a possible 11 score draws if I hadn’t had 17 selections to make.

In other words, if I had entered a full perm of comparable cost to the plan then I wouldn’ have been close enough to even be disappointed.

People have written that, in the final analysis, you pay for the number of lines of 8 you put on, and this of course is correct.

However, the challenge of forecasting score draws is so demanding that I believe using a plan to increase the number of selections available per unit cost is the best option.