The current form of teams is another factor bookmakers take into consideration when deciding the odds. There are different ways to determine how strong the form of a team is. Most systems use the results of a team's last five matches to arrive at a fair assessment of its current form.

"The current form of teams is another factor bookmakers take into consideration when deciding the odds. There are different ways to determine how strong the form of a team is. Most systems use the results of a team's last five matches to arrive at a fair assessment of its current form.

Most systems would give a higher weightage to an away win or draw than to a home win or draw respectively. A typical example would be to give 3 points for a Home Win, 1 point for a Home Draw, 5 for an Away Win and 2 for an Away Draw.

Also, some systems would give extra weightage to the most recent results by multiplying the number of points of the most recent game by 5, the next most recent by 4 and so on.

A less simplistic view of Game Form should be adopted however, as form mean different things to different classes of teams.

To illustrate, consider the above weighted system of Game Form that gives extra significance to the results of the most recent matches. Based on results of a large sample of match results, the weighted version performed considerably poorly than the non-weighted version.

Upon close inspection, it was found that for most teams that won their most recent game, especially by a big margin, they were likely to do less well in the next game. The fact that the weighted system gave the most points to the results of the most recent game meant that a lot of form points were given to teams that were likely to do poorly in the subsequent game.

The reason for this phenomenon is relatively simple and yet not widely recognized by the betting public."

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