SELECTION STRATEGIES

Selection strategies are ways of selecting the matches to include in a football pools entry, and there are various different selection strategies for you to choose from. The easiest is to pick your matches at random, but this effectively reduces the football pools to a lottery, so it isn't advised if you want to make the most of your ability to exercise skill and judgement in order to improve your chances.

Assessing the form of football teams is a much better way of selecting matches. If you are playing games like Soccer 7, Premier 10 or Footy 15 then you will want to predict how you think each of the designated matches will result and build your entry around those conclusions. If you are playing the Classic Pools or Vernons Pools you can simply look through the list of 49 matches and look for those that you think are most likely to result as draws.

Of course, when you are playing the football pools you have to bear in mind the fact that many other people will be basing their entries on their own assessment of the form. This means that if lots of matches go according to form, there could be several jackpot winners who all end up sharing the prize. For this reason, some players - particularly Classic Pools and Vernons Pools players - prefer to base their entries on Spatial Selection and Number Patterns.

Spatial Selection

It is well known in the media that text for advertisements and books tends to 'drop' on the page when someone reads it. This obviously doesn't mean that the text physically moves, it is just a visual illusion. The human eye will see the space at the top of the page to be larger than the one at the bottom. To compensate for this, many advertisers allow a larger margin at the bottom of a page than at the top, to make the page seem more balanced.

When looking at an entry coupon on a PC screen, the same illusion can occur to the entrant. The selection area will be seen as a box with the upper section of games appearing to have a larger area than those at the bottom.

Now, the entrant will usually want to spread his or her selections across the entire range of games available from 1 through to 49. So, a greater than average number of X's will be placed in the upper section of games, because it appears to be larger than the bottom half. In tests, asking entrants to place their X's in an even spread across the range, there was a definite statistical skew towards the lower numbered games which occur higher on the coupon.

Bearing this in mind, you could try making your Classic Pools or Vernons Pools entry by working from the bottom of the coupon up to the top. That way, if you happen to get 8 high score draws in a line, there is less chance of you having to share the jackpot with other players (though there will always be a possibility of this happening).

Number Patterns

Let us imagine for a moment that the results of the various football pools matches were purely random. In that case the odds of the games numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 resulting as draws would be exactly the same the odds of the games numbered 9, 14, 21, 26, 31, 43, 46 and 52 resulting as draws. It might seem impossible for eight consecutive games to result in score draws, but it is just as likely as any other eight games in a truly random set.

However, the best strategy is not to select consecutive numbers. There are so few sets of such sequences that many people will have selected them. Even if you won with eight consecutive numbers, you would only end up with a small share of the winnings. Imagine winning £3,000,000 and having to share it with five thousand others. You'd only get £600!

The key to using consecutive games on your coupon is to choose partial consecutive sequences, for example 1, 2, 3, 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15. Anybody who 'plays' consecutive sequences is likely to keep the sequence up throughout their entire selection, so by splitting your sequence, you are choosing the 'impossible' (yet regularly selected) consecutive games but splitting them in an unlikely manner.

In other words, someone else may select the games 1, 2 and 3, but they are more likely to continue with 4, 5, 6, etc. The chances of them continuing with 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15 are minimal.

Some other examples of number patterns include:

Two quartets	5-6-7-8-23-24-25-26
One quartet and two pairs	5-6-7-8-23-24-41-42
One quartet, one pair, two singles	3-11-12-13-14-22-45-46
One quartet and four singles	5-10-22-23-24-25-33-49
Four pairs	2-3-12-13-25-26-31-32
Two triplets and one pair	4-5-6-22-23-43-44-45
One quintet and one triplet	23-24-25-26-27-44-45-46

These sequences of games seem unlikely to yield score draws, but in a random set they are as likely as any other eight games. The difference is that they appear too unlikely and so less people are likely to make the same selection as you - leaving you to scoop the jackpot for yourself.

Of course, these numbers are for example purposes only. You can use a similar method even if you are selecting ten, eleven or twelve matches. However, one word of warning: Make sure your consecutive number sequences don't follow any arithmetical relationships. If you ask people to write down, say, four pairs, most of them are likely to go for something like 8-9-18-19-28-29-38-39, so those kinds of relationships should be avoided.

Conclusion

You will always need a hefty amount of luck to win a football pools jackpot, but the selection strategies outlined here could prove useful in helping you to win the biggest possible jackpot should your numbers come up. Good luck!