FRP - What Is

Page Title: FRP - What Is
Created: 2025-03-23 20:41:08
Current: 2025-05-01 22:07:13 UTC

FRP is my long term project of Football Result Predicition.

It all started approximately 40 Years ago in the summer of 1982 when I was 16, I had just sold my ZX81 and purchased the newly released ZX Spectrum 48k.

I was fascinated with the Football Pools which my Dad did every week with Littlewoods Pools, as a child I always day dreamed of Dad winning the big prize.

One day in 1984, my best friend managed to get a copy of...

My friend however would not give me a copy despite myself asking many times. His belief was that he was going to use it himself and keep all the winnings.

So I set about writing my own football analysis program on my ZX Spectrum 48K. I just worked on the English League Division 1 (this was before the English Premier League was established) as it just so much easier to work with a single division to start with, especially when having to hand type in all the match results and other data on a Sunday from the Sunday papers.

For the first couple of years I did not bet or gamble as I was just interested in gaining experience and collecting more data, so I just kept updating data, algorithms, core code and testing.

In August 1984 I got my first job after leaving school, so with a bit more of an income I bought a car and spent time doing other things for 2 years like meeting my wife etc. Just before our wedding in May 1987 I started to put small bets on Littlewoods Pools and Zetters Pools using FRP to guide me and nearly straight away on 11th April 1987 I got my first win from Littlewoods Pools, it was only £2.05 but I was excited as this was more about the enjoyment of programming than winning.

Then on 10th October 1987 I got 2 dividends, one from Littlewoods for £0.28 and the other from Zetters for £0.20. And yes I was still happy.

Over the next several years I still got a few wins a year, though nothing big enough to retire on however it was still just the enjoyment of my programming and not the enjoyment of gambling.

In 1992 I got a Amstrad PPC-640D (My first IBM compatible PC). The Amstrad PPC-640D was an Intel 8088 running at 4.77MHz with 640KB of onboard RAM, inbuilt Green Monochrome LCD, Twin Floppy Disc Drives and an inbuilt 2400 baud modem.

I had to convert FRP from Sinclair Basic to QBasic, but with a better keyboard (than the ZX Spectrum rubber mat keyboard) data entry was quicker and I started to add more divisions (English league division 2, division 3 and division 4). This took a considerable amount of time of data entry so I looked at other ways to to capture data. For a few years I used a GeniScan handheld scanner converting the scanned image to OCR data, it took some time to master but cut the time drastically of getting data into my FRP database so much so that I then was able to add extra leagues like the Scottish league divisions.

After some more years the old PC I was using failed and the GeniScan would not work with Windows so I had to find another way of getting data into my Database so I did not do much data entry but in 2005 I found an Internet online source (www.football-data.co.uk) of football data, so I paid the £10 for lifetime access and I wrote some software in PureBasic to collect the data each night (which is still running today) and I changed the core code of FRP a few times. The online data source was fantastic, no more tedious hours of typing data and also a lot more additional data including odds and much more.

And here we are 40 Years years later and I am now 57 Years years old and I am still doing FRP in one way or another. Instead of collecting the football data on my home PC I have it running on my Raspberry Pi Server. I am now redevloping to write some location algorithms to calculate team distance travel, a full blown ratings system and also a few other ideas as well.

With 222654 match results in my database I have enough data to try many ideas.

On a side note my friend got bored entering the data after the first month and gave up however I am still doing now.