Along time ago, before the lottery had been invented in the UK everyone played the football pools. You had to guess which football matches would result in a score draw - a draw, but not 0-0. If you managed to pick 8 matches you would win the jackpot, which was a million pounds. It's still a lot of money now, but 30 years ago it was a fortune. In the mid 1990s I wrote a program to help people to enter the football pools. It worked in a similar manner to Lottery Cracker and it analysed previous weeks to see if there was a pattern and then tried to predict next week's draws. Here is the program. It is over 10 years old and was written using Visual Basic 3 running on Windows 95. It still works on Windows 95, 98, ME and XP, but it's very very dated of course. It's here because someone somewhere might find it useful.

Pools Cracker

Pools Cracker! 2 is designed to help you to enter and play the football pools run by Littlewoods, Vernons, Zetters and others. It will pick entries for you using a variety of prediction methods and perms, store your entries on disk, check them for you to see whether you have won anything, and handle multiple players in syndicates with ease. If you play the pools, Pools Cracker! 2 is essential.

It has been designed for the new 49-match coupons which were introduced on August 17th 1996 and offers standard 8 from 10 pools entries up to 8 from 14.

It can help you to pick your entries by first analysing past results and then by attempting to predict the outcome of next week's matches. However, there is no tedious input of data, such as match scores, whether it was home or away, league positions, and so on. Of course, this would be one way of tackling the problem of predicting the pools, but there's an alternative method - analysing the pools coupon itself!

Ignore the team names on the coupon and just regard it as a list of 49 match numbers. By analysing which of these coupon numbers reguarly contain score draws, which don't, whether there are any patterns and so on, Pools Cracker! 2 can make some surprising conclusions - and use them to your advantage by improving your chances of winning.

For instance, did you know that you almost never get all the score draw matches landing on odd numbers on the pools coupon, or all even numbers? When you check your pools entry do you check that you've not picked all odd or all even numbers? You should! Most of the time there are 40% - 60% odd numbers, and very rarely 100% odd or 100% even. Pools Cracker! 2 will automatically pick pools entries in the most common range.

That's just one factor affecting the outcome of the pools, and there are several more - all highlighted by Pools Cracker! 2. In short, the program aims to improve your chances of winning the jackpot by using powerful analysis and prediction methods to choose the pools entries that have the most likely chance of winning.

Requirements: Windows 95, 98, ME, XP. This software is over 10 years old and is just for fun. If you want to use it you'll need to enter some football pools results because those in the program are out of date. Get them from Sporting Life. Note that in the summer when UK teams are on holiday, results from Australia are used.

   Download the full program - it's free!

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