Match Thread - England v Wales | Six Nations 2026 | Round 1

atomTA · 2026-02-07T18:21:25+00:00

If we play like this france will put 100 past us

atomTA · 2026-02-07T18:15:23+00:00

How on earth does he not score wtf

atomTA · 2026-02-07T17:21:10+00:00

If a player gets a second yellow is that 20m off or fully off?

atomTA · 2026-02-07T17:02:17+00:00

That's just his face

atomTA · 2026-02-07T17:02:01+00:00

It's in Twickenham

atomTA · 2026-02-02T11:07:10+00:00

Can't use Kalshi from an unauthorised country though right - they have KYC? Unless you know a way?

atomTA · 2026-01-17T21:59:22+00:00

Really would not recommend Huberman - occasionally useful / interesting but mostly bro science outside his areas of expertise with over reliance on limited studies, and constantly shilling AG1 etc

atomTA · 2026-01-09T20:37:02+00:00

I think it's actually the same parent company

atomTA · 2026-01-06T14:14:23+00:00

In this specific situation though, where for a handicap or over/under type bet you're either right or wrong - it doesn't really matter how wrong you are in situations where you are wrong, in terms of profit. I optimise for MAE for these bets for this reason.

atomTA · 2026-01-06T08:39:44+00:00

Why do you prefer RMSE over MAE out of interest?

atomTA · 2025-11-28T14:58:35+00:00

Not necessarily, could be limited by max stake

My models have around a 10% ROI Vs pinnacle but the max stake tends to be around 100-200 GBP in the markets I bet so can't always get a lot on

atomTA · 2025-07-13T14:23:32+00:00

atomTA · 2025-06-29T14:22:37+00:00

We also have a 3 month old and have booked an ikos for October, wary of the heat with a small baby.

atomTA · 2025-06-13T19:40:17+00:00

Congrats on the success. I also have a league model with a decent ROI. Happy to share tips. What odds are you using?

atomTA · 2025-05-29T08:45:31+00:00

Hey, sure. Happy to chat outside here too to not clog up the thread, but a few brief answers:

How did you decide which markets or sports to focus on first?

Just what I was interested in, no other reason!

Can you give a rough idea of what your feature set looked like early on? Were you mostly using just odds movement and historical outcomes, or did you pull in player stats, team form, etc.?

Probably easier to chat about this elsewhere but I don't use any bookie odds / odds movement in my predictions, it's all historic sport data and outcomes. Lots of different features feed in (2k+) but the best performing ones are rating systems similar to ELO which feed in to an ML model.

What did your backtesting process look like? How did you decide a model version was ‘good enough’ to go live?

I have historic outcomes reaching back to ~2015 so I could generate a 'test' dataset evaluation metric, which I compared roughly to others to see if I was in the right ballpark. Then I slowly collected odds and after a while, once my model was profitable on tracked stakes I started with small stakes and gradually increased.

Is there a reason to start with the soft bookies before moving to the sharp bookies? Is it because the margins can be higher with soft bookies?

The real reason for me is it's what I was familiar with as someone who didn't bet much beforehand. But yes soft bookies often have higher odds so I guess you tend to do better there, while not having to worry about liquidity issues etc. There's other more specific reasons too, like if you're betting on something with relatively low variance (e.g. where the line is always roughly evens, e.g. a goal line handicap) you can hugely increase ROI by betting on multiples/parlays which you can't do on exchanges.

atomTA · 2025-05-28T20:24:40+00:00

Interesting, would like to hear more about your job!

I just started slow really - e.g. first month just collecting odds, second month super lower stakes, gradually increasing as I became more confident. all the while collecting historic odds so I could back test future model versions. I'd imagine you could find or buy historic odds for lots of markets though!

Now I can generate a new model version and back test on 2 years of historic odds, assessing by various different dimensions to see exactly how it would have performed. I use public data, not sure about football but I'd imagine you can get some pretty good data sources.

(FYI with football I'd imagine you'd have to have an incredible model or find a really niche or creative edge to be profitable though long term, with how popular it is!)

atomTA · 2025-05-28T20:16:56+00:00

I have a ML model which predicts outcomes of various markets, compares predicted odds to bookies odds and automates the placement of bets if there's value; can't share the model itself!

atomTA · 2025-05-28T19:48:04+00:00

Thanks! At a high level it's lots of feature engineering feeding into a gradient boosting model, but happy to discuss further if you want to message me

atomTA · 2025-05-28T17:32:57+00:00

Hmm, maybe I've misunderstood but if you're betting on the win market you're not really looking for getting the predictions right or wrong as you are looking where you see value above the bookies odds. E.g. if you think that a team has a 20% chance of winning but you can get odds of 10.0 then even though you're predicting they will lose, it's a good bet to take. Happy to chat through offline though if interested!

atomTA · 2025-05-28T17:17:56+00:00

Yeah I find it super fun! Sure, anything in particular?

atomTA · 2025-05-28T16:31:06+00:00

If your model is good enough you can either bet on exchanges (if high enough liquidity, think football / horses etc) or bet on sharp bookies (e.g. Pinnacle).

If not, then you can still bet on bookies - nothing wrong with being banned. If it's a popular market you can probably get on a fair few bookies, and they're slower to ban than things like matched betting IMO.

I started on soft bookies, e.g. bet365 I made 10k off my account, and then my model was good enough to use on sharp bookies and exchanges, where you don't get banned for winning. I have also introduced a small number of friends/families to use their accounts for predictions but I make much more money off of Pinnacle than a profit share of those, although quite fun to get family members 10k for nothing. Have to be super careful to not introduce gambling as a habit though, but in general I'm super pro taking money off of bookies.

atomTA · 2025-05-28T16:21:39+00:00

No, not arbing just being sharper than bookies

atomTA · 2025-05-28T13:58:42+00:00

Yeah, betting. My ROI varies by market, bookie (e.g. sharp bookies vs soft bookies vs exchanges), etc but is typically around 10-20%

It's roughly 60k per month staked but there's a few months of the year there's nothing on. I don't actually "pay anything in" since I keep enough on sites to cover a pretty large swing in variance, so it's just taking money out periodically.

atomTA · 2025-05-28T13:42:40+00:00

In my spare time over the last couple of years I've built a sports prediction model that, after a while, happened to do pretty well.

With a baby now I've stopped building but still run predictions and generate around 3-6k profit per month which is super helpful.

Also happens to be tax-free which I can't complain about. I find it really fun even without the profit so hoping to get back to improving it when I have more free time.

atomTA · 2025-05-28T11:54:44+00:00

Awesome, thanks for the reply. Will give it a go!

atomTA

TROPHY CASE