Week 0: A trial run...

Seeing as I have provided an example spreadsheet above (or below, I can never work out where posts appear in these blog doohickies), I may as well go ahead and take The Grambler ® for a spin...

Firstly, some blog news; a good budski (Scotty, take a bow) has given me the idea of being a good guy and giving some of my imminent winnings to charity.  So I have decided to up the stakes already.  Two bets of £1 shall now be placed each week (on the same results, The Grambler doesn't lie!)  One of the bets will be for the Bobby Moore Fund for Bowel Cancer Research and 100% of the winnings shall be donated to them.  This is a wonderful cause that it is very close to my heart (and bowels) so check them out and consider donating please.  On the off chance that I fail to win anything at all this season, I shall donate the sum of all bets placed to the fund to avoid accusations that the money could have been better spent.  So now you have even more reason to spread the word about this blog, if you don't you clearly support cancer!

Okay then, back to business!  I have realised that the best way to do this thing is to add a first column to the fixtures list and number it accordingly (so 2 through to 21 going by the sample).  Then in the new sheet, the two Grambler formulas can be entered and pasted down the columns to produce the random numbers.  Following on from this, I have used a couple of reference and logical functions to fill in the details of each game allowing me to then place the bet.  Which I obviously haven't done this week.  Just as well really...

So here are the results from said trial run:

Success!  Well, not quite.  Whilst The Grambler may have been successful in making some predictions of sorts, only 3 out of the 7 were correct.  However, I am not ruling out my chances of becoming mega-rich just yet. 

The fixtures used here only took place in the Scottish leagues, meaning a total of just 20 games.  Had the spreadsheet managed to predict 7 results correctly, it would have done so by getting a massive 35% of the weekends fixtures right.  With 62 games taking place over next weekend, The Grambler will only need to pick the correct result for 11% of games.

I am fully aware that this means absolutely nothing but by throwing some percentages in, it makes it seem like I know what I'm talking about (see any Daily Mail article for evidence of this).

And so onwards and upwards!  The real stuff begins next weekend and I am rather excited about it.  Grambling glory surely awaits!