How to compare football betting strategies

Same selections, same prices, same order, separate bankrolls. BetBuddy runs its four strategies this way in production: every qualifying pick is offered to all four plans, each with its own independent virtual bankroll, so the only difference between the four ledgers is stake sizing.

Return alone ranks strategies by how much risk they took. Put risk-adjusted measures next to it or the most reckless plan always looks best right up until it doesn't.

• ROI on the starting bankroll — the headline.
• Maximum drawdown — the depth of the worst peak-to-trough fall.
• Longest losing run — what you would have had to sit through.
• Closing line value — whether the selections were priced well, independent of results.
• Settled sample size — the number that qualifies all of the above.

Most impressive strategy comparisons fail on one of these before the numbers are even examined.

The strategy hub shows all four plans side by side with their tracked figures, the statistics page aggregates them, and the history page lists every settled selection with each strategy's stake and profit on the same row. Skipped bets are recorded as skips rather than removed.

Betting carries financial risk and no staking plan removes it. Historical performance does not guarantee future results, and BetBuddy runs in paper mode: stakes are simulated and no bookmaker account is connected.

Most published strategy comparisons are unusable because each plan is tested on a different set of bets. If the selections differ, the comparison measures selection quality, not staking, and any conclusion about the plan is unsupported.

The only clean design runs every staking plan over the identical, chronologically ordered sequence of bets, at the same recorded prices, from the same starting bankroll. BetBuddy runs four plans that way over one shared selection stream, which is why the differences in the published history can be attributed to sizing.

• Same selections, same prices, same order, same starting bankroll.
• Report the settled-bet count next to every metric.
• Record skipped bets explicitly rather than dropping them from the sequence.

Profit alone ranks plans by luck as much as by design. A defensible comparison reports return on starting bankroll, maximum drawdown, the largest single stake, and the number of settled bets, so a plan that earned its return by taking far more risk is visible as such.

Read drawdown before return. Between two plans with similar returns, the one with the shallower trough is the one a human can actually follow to the end of the sample.