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.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 8th, 2009 at 11:42 am and is filed under Pools betting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.