Poolswinner

ACE (Advanced Computer Entertainment)

Spectrum, £16.50cs, £19.50dk C64, £16.50cs, £19.50dk BBC, £16.50cs, £19.50dk CPC, £16.50cs, £19.50dk PCW, £19.50dk IBM PC, £19.50dk Winning the pools sounds simple - all you have to do is predict the results of the matches. Then if there are 8 draws and you get them all, you'll win a fortune. Sadly, it's not quite as simple as that; 8.5 million people do the pools every week, and not that many of them win a fortune. So an interesting alternative to the "close your eyes and stick in a pin" method is to use a computer analysis of historical data to predict the likeliest homes, aways and score draws. Selec's Poolswinner attempts to do just that. The program requires you to enter results through the season, which you store on cassette or disk. It calculates league tables and predicts the most likely results. Also provided is a database of results for the past 10 seasons. Naturally, you need a certain amount of tenacity to get the most from the software; you have to make sure you enter as many results as possible, Saturday and mid-week fixtures. But how effective is it? Pete Chadwick of Selec points out that anyone who follows football could make a pretty good prediction of the result of, for example, Liverpool v. Charlton. But what about Bournemouth v. Wrexham? You probably haven't got a clue, but a program like Poolswinner will analyse past results and current form to come up with a prediction. Pete Chadwick claims that people who use the program regularly come out with a profit. They might not win that million quid, but they won't be crying all the way to the pawnbroker.

DOING THE POOLS... Britain's most popular flutter is on the football pools. During the last season (August 86 to July 87) a staggering £568 million was spent on the coupons. Of that massive sum, £164 million was paid out in winnings. People gamble on the pools because of the chance of winning a fortune - £1,000,000 is Littlewood's maximum first dividend pay out. But the chances of getting that kind of money are pretty slim; the most recent million pound winner was one out of 7.5 million. However, a Littlewoods spokesman reckoned that betting a level stake of £1.20 throughout the year would give you a 70-1 chance of winning "some kind of dividend" - which could be as little as 50p, or as much as that magical jackpot payout...

Sinclair User

Overall 7/10

Mike Wright 7/10

Label: Selec, [redacted] Price: £26.50 (all three) £16.50 (Fixgen plus one other) Memory: 48K/128K Joystick: None Reviewer: Mike Wright It's often said that a knowledge of football decreases the chance of a pools win. So I've no idea what the combination of Football Follower, Fixgen and Poolswinner - three pools predictor programs from Selec Software - will do for your chances. Football Follower is a database to keep track to results, Fixgen is a database of current fixtures and Poolswinner is a results 'prediction' program. Football Follower the database program for football league results provides a complete range of team statistics. It comes complete with a recent set of results for the English and Scottish Leagues, although I guess, it could be used to keep league records for most team sports. Updating a league involves entering details of all the fixtures before the results can be entered. The fixtures can be entered either manually or, by using the Fixgen program, Fixgen, the database of the current season's fixtures, can be used to prepare a fixture list for use in Football Follower or Poolswinner simply by typing in two dates. Because games do get cancelled or rearranged allowance is made for the fixture list to be altered. The whole season's fixtures for any team can be displayed or printed. Adding the results requires considerable patience waiting for the prompts to enter the number of goals for the home team then the away team match by match. And you have to be very careful to get the results right first time because correcting a wrong result can only be done by re-entering all the results for that division. League tables and statistics are produced from the main menu. On the Spectrum the league tables are given in two parts, home results first followed by away results. The statistics provided are comprehensive, showing for one team - league position, points scored, goal difference, results of the last home and away fixtures and the matches, both home and away since a defeat, score draw, draw and win and home results for the two teams or for the fixture list as a whole. The calculation of the tables and statistics is very slow but not so slow as to make the program unusable. Poolswinner, the prediction program, operates in a similar way to Football Follower. A fixture list is created, or loaded from Football Follower or Fixgen. The prediction part of the program gives lists, based on ranked probabilities, of the matches ending as scoredraws, draws, aways or homes. The predictions are based on the weighted outcome of the most recent results stored in the database of results. The weighting factor can be varied, and the team's league position can be used to affect the probabilities. The manual recommends including the league position but does warn that it will tend to produce form results with resulting lower dividends. When the results are known they must be entered before the updated league tables can be produced and the updated database saved for the next run. The results can also be saved and subsequently loaded into Football Follower. The program suite is just about the only one of its kind and difficult to imagine any feature that has been omitted, except possibly details of goal scorers. However all three units run very slowly and the editing facilities for correcting league and results details are pretty poor. I reckon this means the programs are overpriced despite being the only ones available.