Is the Score of 2:1 a Good Situation to Bet on a Losing Team?

In football, it is not always that a team scoring first wins a game even despite the generally accepted idea. Thus, a lot of gamblers believe that the score of 2:1 is fragile, which represents a good opportunity for comebacks. So, it is necessary to undertake a specific research to answer the interesting question of whether it is true. For this, there was analyzed the information from a single Premier League season.

From the very beginning, it should be mentioned that a belief in the comebacks has much in common with usual cognitive biases that tend to make gamblers arrive at wrong conclusions. Recency bias and confirmation bias are the most widespread cases faced by ordinary gamblers. The former implies a strong belief that things happen exactly as they appeared to be before without paying attention to a current state of affairs, while the second distortion is represented by the situations when gamblers look for isolated pieces of information in order to support their points of view. In any case, all the betting decisions must be made according to the careful analysis of the relevant information rather than to intuition.

Playground for Comebacks

As for the EPL mentioned above, there were 132 games that had the score of 2:1 at some point in the game. Of course, these points were different for the games. Thus, it took the minimum of 16 minutes to reach the desired score, while the latest point was the 94th minute of a game. As for the average figure for all 132 games, it took about 60 minutes for teams to score the three goals. With this, it should be stated that a competitive balance of the teams was almost the same for all the games.

Then, we were to predict teams’ possibilities either to score or concede a goal over the time left in each game. According to experts’ advice, the Poisson distribution is the most suitable variant here.

The given model is based on assessing the relative abilities of the opponents and analyzing their possible chances to either score or concede a goal.

Poisson Distribution & Soccer Comebacks

So, this model was applied in order to develop the implied scoring probabilities of the teams starting from the point when the score of 2:1 was reached. Once found, the information obtained was planned to compare with real results in order to identify any correlations.

If you do not like the Poisson model, it is also possible to just evaluate teams’ performance and the time remaining as well as compare the obtained information with the previous results paying attention to the statistics of a winning team only. This approach, however, cannot impress with the most reliable results.

Followed the Poisson distribution application to forecast final outcomes of the matches under consideration, it was supposed that 75% of the games would end with the same result, 20% would face draws, and only 5% of the games would witness the situation when a losing team would be able to turn events around and make a comeback.

Then, it was high-time to look at the actual statistics. To tell the truth, the results shocked because 76% of the games ended in a win of the same team, 19% ended in a draw, while comebacks were found only in 5% of the games. Thus, it is possible to say that there had been almost made the ideal prediction.

Conclusion

In the end, it can be said that even a strong intuition stating that the score of 2:1 will be obviously overturned by a losing team does not mean that this situation will happen. Thus, it is not reasonable to invest your money and resources in the information analysis in order to find any odds discrepancies because you are more likely to lose everything than to win anything.