PICKING PLANS

It is not for us to pick your entry for you. This part of Classic Value.com will not be
telling you that “Plan XXX is the best plan” or that any one plan is better than any other.

Instead, we hope to make sure that everyone understands the different types of plan available, how the plan list has been compiled and how to make the best use of it. We have also had to work within some limitations as explained in a moment.

Your first decision must be, “How much do I want to stake?” Teaming up with others at this point can make a lot of sense, because the more you stake the more likely you are to win. That’s why we have advice on the site about forming and running a syndicate.

More seriously, you should always apply the golden rule of gambling which is never to stake more than you can afford to lose. With Pools, it’s best to think in terms of staking the same amount every week for a long period. Players who hord their stakes for one big bet on just one week’s games can be horribly caught out by a freaky distribution of the draws.

If you are a complete beginner, we suggest you have a good look in our Pools A-Z. Reading it all through will help you get your bearings, but especially relevant here are the entries on FULL PERMS, PERMUTATIONS, PLANS and BLOCKS/BLOCK PERMS. All these entries have strengths and weaknesses:

FULL PERMS: Because they cover all possible combinations of 8 within your total selections, you know that if you trap eight score-draws, you must win a Top Dividend and collect multiple minor dividends. Their problem is that they very rapidly get increasingly expensive with each additional selection. The smaller ones are especially vulnerable if you get voids amongst your selections: one void in an “8 from 10” renders 80% of the lines incapable of scoring 24 points.

From the 70s onwards, countless Top Dividends were won by 8 from 10s or 8 from 11s, but that was partly because so many players did not know anything about plans, or did not want to know anything about them. Classic Value.com had not been invented!

PLANS: Using plans instead of full perms to cover extra games will mean you are more likely to catch enough score-draws to have a winning chance, but if you catch eight score-draws you are trusting to luck if they ALL line up. Many plans that have won jackpots have done so by doing better than they are guaranteed to do. These days, when there are only nine score-draws or fewer, the Top Dividend often goes to lines scoring less than the maximum possible, though, so you may not need your plan to line up all your draws to hit the jackpot.
At one extreme, plans can approach the status of full perms: those guaranteeing “7 if 7” or “8 if 9” are in that group and our exclusive analysis shows you the high percentage chances of success such plans can have. At the opposite extreme, almost any plan covering 20 games or more will have a thinner guarantee unless it has plenty of lines. They can be a lot of fun because most weeks you might catch most of the draws, but if you take this route you must be realistic and not assume that just because you might have caught 8 score-draws, you must have won a Top Dividend. Only full perms can do that. Our plan descriptions and analysis should help you have realistic expectations.

BLOCK PERMS: Their weakness is that you need your correct selections to fall into a particular pattern. In many cases, you need your score-draws to fall 50-50 between the top and bottom groups of selections. Their strength is that if you do get your correct picks in that kind of pattern, then the cover can be intense and your chances excellent.
Some blocks offer close or intense cover like small full perms, while other blocks offer only thin cover. Many plans consist of sets of block perms or are in fact just a single block perm. Where the latter is the case, our description tells you. Because there is an act of multiplication within block perms - the total lines in the top block are multiplied by the total lines in the bottom block - then multiple dividends can be your reward if you get four or five score-draws in both halves.

As you make your choice, take full advantage of the info in our plan descriptions and analysis which you can access by highlighting the plan in the menu of the Plan Selector and then clicking on “analysis”. Never before has so much information about Pools Plans been made available - not even to the Pools Companies. The Classic Value analysis showing what you chances are if you get 6-10 score-draws has never been done before. Such detailed description of guarantees has never before been offered. Our aim has been to make sure everyone knows exactly they stand before they start.

Our starting point was all the plans on the Littlewoods computer where they lurked within software over 30 years old. There were nearly 1,400 and we have pruned that down to around 1,000 by eliminating duplications. Some duplications remain because we wanted to offer all the plans registered either by national papers or current Pools companies and all the plans that we knew have been popular in the past.

Many newspaper plans were actually devised for them by one of the Pools companies and many liked to offer their readers the same plan under different guises. I would guess at least two dozen organisations registered the plan that covers 16 matches in 30 lines to guarantee two lines with 6 if 8. The plan covering 12 games in 57 or 60 lines to guarantee 8 if 9 has also been a great favourite.

We reckoned that some people might have Lit Plan 2 as a favourite, while others might have always liked Daily Mail Plan H - without knowing or caring that these two are, in effect, the same. The list within our Plan Selector makes these duplications easy to spot because all the plans are listed in ascending order of cost. However, not all the plans that have the same number of lines covering the same number of games actually are the same plan, so do check our plan descriptions and plan analysis.

Organising these plans and knocking them into shape so they can be used interactively on the net, then analysing them and tracing guarantees has been a mammoth task. Our thanks are due to readers of the Racing and Football Outlook for contributions to the latter. The documentation is an on-going process but this was the state of play as we launched the site:

PLAN ANALYSIS: We are looking to reveal your chances if you get 6-10 score-draws and this involves running every line of every plan through all possible combinations of 10 within the total selections. Even within just 24 selections there are 1,961,256 possible combinations of ten, so checking a plan with just 1,500 lines involves nearly 3 BILLION separate calculations! And that would be for just one of the five categories we examine. Within 48 games there are over TWENTY BILLION possible combinations of 10. In due course, we may hire a university computer to complete the process for all the larger plans, but in the mean time those numbers I hope explain why we have had to leave blanks for some of those plans either covering more than 20 games or having more than 1,000 lines or both.

PLAN CHARTS: When you click on the “chart” link, Classic Value displays the plan showing you the lines in the order in which they are to be found on Littlewoods’ computer, which may not always coincide with how they have been printed on charts distributed by Pools Companies or newspapers. We have had to limit these to plans of 1,000 lines or less simply because tests have shown that some browsers on some computers might struggle to handle larger graphics. These charts have to be generated on request and pagination problems mean they cannot easily be contrived so that it is possible to print them out.

BEST VALUE PLANS: Within the descriptions, we have started to indicate which plans achieve their main guarantee(s) in the least possible lines. Cross-checking 1,000 plans is a complicated
process and this is on-going. This is a way of highlighting the most efficient plans and that will suit some of you. It does not mean they are better plans – after all, the extra lines in less efficient plans may be the ones that win you a prize.

WINNING PLANS: For three or four seasons in the early 90’s, plans achieving larger wins on the different coupons were monitored. Details of some of these wins have been added to descriptions for interest. If such details are absent from the description of a plan, it does not mean that that plan has never won anything much! Given that plans have been used for nearly 60 years on the Treble Chance, not just three, it’s a reasonable bet that ALL the plans on Classic Value.com have won something at some time or other.

SOCCERLOTTO PLANS: Some of these were originally Perman Plans. We have now taken plans by long deceased Pools Companies or publications under the SoccerLotto umbrella as well.