A Gambler Who Cracked the Horse-Racing Code (2018)
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
I really don't care about the decoration of this guy's office, which drugs he prefers, how his voice sounds, the atmosphere in a horse racing venue, the outcome of a specific horse race, not even this guy's entire life story.
What was his key invention?
Edit: Skimmed the rest, and it sounds like he was simply good at statistical analysis.
Other key parts of the article seem to be (remember, I skimmed): It was a betting system where effectively people bet against each other, not a bookmaker with fixed odds, so he basically became a bookmaker.
The rest reads like many other "smart gambling" stories:
- others invested in his operation
- he first was treated as a good customer, getting an "API" to place the bets programmatically, then got that revoked as the organizers realized that other gamblers might not like that he was winning so much (from them, effectively)
Overall, I learned nothing new, and wasted my time reading ten pages of drivel. This is why I hate long-form journalism: You don't know whether the article contains any useful information until you've spent half an hour trying to find it in the description of people's looks, landscapes, weather, and similar chaff.
Also if reading the article was a total waste of your valuable time, why are you commenting about it?
I'm also not proposing to make it illegal to write long-form articles, just asking whether there is a service that transforms them into a form that I personally prefer.
>As the pack thundered around the final bend, two horses muscled ahead. “It’s Mascot Treasure a length in front, but Bobo Duck is gunning him down,” said the announcer, voice rising. “Bobo Duck in front. Mascot fighting back!” The crowd roared as the riders raced across the finish line. Bobo Duck edged Mascot Treasure, and Frat Rat came in third.
I already know what horse-racing is like. I don't need this cruft, the headline promised an explanation of a novel betting scheme and that's the only thing I'm interested in. If I'm feeling particularly crotchety I'm insulted that the author thinks I can't tell the difference between this fluff and actual content.
I too loathe long-form journalism. It seems like self-indulgence on the part of people who wanted to write creative fiction but aren't good enough to be successful at that.
It's not a research paper. The whole point is for it to take the reader to another place so they can imagine being there, not expounding on the square root of the hypotenuse which led to three commas of winnings.
The Perfect Bet, How Science and Math are taking the Luck out of Gambling, Basic Books, 2016
I learned about his book after watching his talk, which is absolutely fantastic for anyone interested in the math of gambling.
Bill Benter is featured prominently in the book.
I've noticed a little uptick in stories about gambling here, I suspect there is a strain of us at HN interested in sports analytics for financial gain. Interesting. :-)
121) Last time player had a happy meal
122) Amount of times drunk at training
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499) Hours spent playing FIFA 20 on console
500) Fashionability of latest hairstyle
A lot of the market is not tradable though. On one end of the market, gambling is often a state monopoly with high spread and high margins (if not prohibited entirely), while on the other end there are large trades going on in private or closed circles.
LOL.
In sports, you can study your opponent to predict what they might do. In business, you can really only study what your opponent did during the actual game so to speak. For example, Microsoft can't wait for Sony to release the PS4 in order to develop a game plan for the Xbox. Both have to put forward their best effort regardless of what the competition may or may not do. In sport, you are training to beat 1 opponent, in business you are trying to appeal to the whims of the multifaceted consumer which aren't nearly as concrete.
The only issue is that you can't scale well but this only becomes an issue when you need to put down tens of million a week (i.e. when you have $50m+).
The barriers to entry are also getting higher as competition is increasing in the space (although limits are probably going up too). One big issue right now is data. If you bet on soccer (the sport with the highest limits), you need to spend at least $100-200k/year (before hiring programmers) on data to become competitive.
then after 2 years you would have billions of dollars. yeah right
The issue, as I said initially, is that you aren't scalable past $100m or so (without connections to the Asian books, which some people above have...apparently, some of the guys are able to put down multiple millions on most European soccer leagues...which isn't available to most). But yes, most of the funds run by the above people have been making 100%+ for years.
(I cant recall the name of the company that makes these super highend net cards, which hedgefunds prefer)
I can count on one hand the number of funded companies over the past six or seven years, and I can think of only one that has exited. Might have something to do with vice provisions dictated by LPs, but it certainly seems like a ripe growth area.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-30/sports-ga...
And where N was differing ranges such that you ccould gamble in the pick a number between 1-10
Or go to a diff room when N was between 1-100, and others like 1-1000 etc
And the anti was diff for each and the payoff diff based on paying out from the antis (i dont. Know how to spell anti)
Do "social" casinos count? Zynga is all over that and went public in 2011, Big Fish was acquired by Aristocrat in 2017, and I'm sure there are others.
If you throw ethics to the wind, there's no reason to make a real gambling app/service when you can give gamblers the same dopamine feedback loop without ever needing to pay them real money.
Personally I think there's only so much time left for gambling (in lootboxes, social casinos, or even sports betting) before it gets shutdown by regulation. There's very little pragmatic argument for allowing it to exist in the first place, other than classic prohibition arguments like "personal freedom" and "black markets still exist." Valid, but I think the harm of industrialized gambling through digital platforms outweighs the benefit of taxing it and allowing a black market to exist, but that's just me.
For example, even in a fair game the house will eventually take a gambler's bankroll provided the house's bankroll is practically infinite [1]. That's a thought experiment, but it works in practice when you are dealing with gambling addicts that won't walk away from the table.
Secondly, those gambling addicts, or "whales" as they call them represent something like 0.15% of players bring in 50% of the revenue [2].
And lastly, I would have agreed with you a few months ago, before I heard this story [3] on NPR about how Big Fish was targeting people and using predatory practices to keep them on the game. It reminded me of a twisted version of AOL's customer retention practices that they were sued for a decade ago.
There's also the whole notion of casinos/gambling disproportionately impacting low income communities and how you can't start a gambling business without tons of capital, so it serves as an efficient funnel of money from the poor to the rich. And it's really naive to think that someone going broke affects that person alone. God help them if they have a family.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_ruin
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2014/03/01/why-its-s...
[3] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-social-casinos-leverag...
Which just struck me as a perfect point for your argument. So I guess I'm smelling what you're cooking.
Or, to put it another way: any time you win a bet, you (and the bookie) are helping gambling addicts to take one step closer to "hitting bottom" and thus getting on to the first phase of recovery—acknowledging that you have a problem.
(This is the complement to the argument that charity for drug addicts is a bad thing, insofar as it delays the addict longer in the self-harming, not-prioritizing-getting-well phase of addiction. In the gambling addict case, charity would be, in effect, "giving them another pile of chips"—obviously a bad idea, no?)
Gamblers are making a personal choice to bet their money, other gamblers should not be made to bear responsibility if that gambler’s choice turns out to be a poor one. Gambling addicts obviously exist, but they are playing the same game everyone else is. If you want to protect addicts from harming their finances, change the rules to accommodate that goal (betting limits, credit/finance checks, outright banning of gambling) rather than expect other gamblers to follow undefined rules that may or may not protect other gamblers from themselves.
Hell, I’ll bite here and assert the same as my parent comment: the folks who dumped their life savings into crypto made a personal choice. I fail to see how the rest of the market bears responsibility to those who lost their “investment”. So long as everyone is playing by the same rules, there’s no way you should be ethically responsible from benefiting from other’s losses.
You signed up for the risk when you chose to play. Do you believe that if I dump my money in a stock and it tanks, investors who benefit from that are now responsible for the money I’ve lost?
But you're right in that the vast majority of players in gambling (including the house) are either (a) being fleeced, or (b) fleecing others. When the majority of users/members of a particular system are either victims (in some sense), or profiting off victims, I question the amorality of that system. So traditional morality called gambling "immoral" for good reason, I think -- if only because of this emergent, victimizational behavior it encourages.
It seems to me that economic regulation exists primarily to--and functions ideally when it successfully does--protect the vulnerable and prevent victimization. So it seems right and good to me that gambling is outlawed in most of the US.
In fact, if you're winning more than you're losing, you're decreasing the profit of the bookie. You are therefore making it a less worthy venture for them to hold these ethically-negative gambling events. If you were to win enough, the bookie would lose money from the venture, eventually resulting in them no longer hosting gambling events.
So actually, winning money off of bookies is an ethically good behavior, since it's negative feedback for them enabling other gamblers with "uncontrollable behavior" to lose their money.
Not if it's a parimutuel betting [1] system, as described in the story. The Hong Kong Jockey Club takes a flat 17% cut. The rest is exchanged between winners and losers. This is no different from playing poker at a casino, where the house collects a rake but otherwise the players only win money off one another.
Note how in the story, the Jockey Club contacts Benter and offers assistance rather than blacklisting him. If he were decreasing the profit margin of the bookie, as you call it, they would have ample reason to cut him off. In actuality, he was increasing their profits (but not their margin, which remained a flat 17%) simply by increasing betting activity. This is something poker sites have also hit upon, and as a result they've developed sophisticated rewards programs for their top players.
I would assume that people who post to Hacker News, as a rule, are less risk averse than the general populace due to Hacker News being more focused, in my mind, in the entrepreneurial side of technology.
I know - it would change the games entirely. So? The games are arbitrary. They would be new games, and it would defeat many modes of cheating.
This is different to a slot machine, where clearly it's just a game of chance.
In reality casino card games are 99.9% chance, but I think the infinite deck idea would remove the skill feeling and hence the attraction for many players.
If there's an infinite deck, there's now no way of knowing if I'm tied for the best hand or not. How the hell can you read a player if you have no way to possibly peg him to a hand? The game would be unplayable with an infinite deck
Adding five of a kind also seems like a pretty easy adjustment.
The most obvious difference is the possibility of cards matching both suit and rank. So if you have HA HK and the flop is HA HJ S2 you have both top pair and also a very strong flush draw (although HA HA would be better), a combo which is impossible on that board with a single deck.
The issue is that this is a completely different game. It might be a fine game. People might like it (maybe even more than Texas Hold 'em). But this isn't the same game anymore. They're both played with the same 52 data points, but the frequency of those 52 data points makes these games and the skills needed to be good at them very different.
My previous comment of the game being "unplayable" might have been hyperbolic. The point I was trying to make is that it's not the same game when you change one of the rules so dramatically.
Small nitpick: I'd argue that Blackjack is closer to 80% skill, and 20% chance, just based on the fact that if you don't play every Blackjack hand with the same statistically "correct" strategy [1], you will end up bleeding money well in excess of the house advantage.
I'd venture a guess that casinos make 80%+ of their profits from players that aren't playing with perfect Blackjack strategy (for example, not double down on an 11, or not splitting aces, or not remembering whether to hit or stand a 16, etc). When players aren't playing with perfect Blackjack strategy, the house edge isn't all that relevant.
The amount of money a player loses can be attributed to the "mistakes" an average player will make (that can be avoided by memorizing perfect blackjack strategy), rather than being attributed as much to chance. Someone playing perfect blackjack strategy will on average break pretty close to even, since the house edge for Blackjack is incredibly small.
> It feels like if you played enough you'd get better
From the perspective of a player learning perfect blackjack strategy, the truth is you do get better with practice :)
[1] Playing a perfect game of Blackjack requires memorizing charts like this: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/816DFf5i0EL...
[0] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/how-casinos-know-that-you_b_6...?
There's an interesting article on how security detect card counting[0]. My take is that it's not a science, instead the security/ pit boss' who spend significant time watching players would develop a 'feeling'.
[0] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/how-casinos-know-that-you_b_6...?
They don't to justify anything. Casino bans are not subject to judicial review.
[1]http://m.startribune.com/gambling-problem-states-let-you-ban...
Huge fines, potentially followed by loss of license.
You do not want to go there. With the elevated scrutiny on gambling operators (triggered in part by the US opening up, in part by the increased competition, and in part by the receding margins) all the regulators are itching to make examples out of suitable villains.
Disclosure: I work for a [UK] gambling company and deal with compliance matters on an almost daily basis.
An interesting question to be honest. I'd somehow expect any prosecution to be far too complex for the parties to enjoy court.
Sure, you excluded yourself but then went to the casino after all. Did you do that because addiction caused you to misjudge the risks? Did you go there with the intention of defrauding the casino when you lost money? (Gambling establishments that fail to prevent self-excluded customers will have to refund their losses. And if they do that only after regulators get involved, there will be fines on top.)
Proving the nature of intent for that kind of violation could be very messy indeed.
Casinos will use continuous shufflers which kill counting 100% or will cut off multiple decks at the end of the shoe so one cannot get a very positive count and more certainty that the deck is in their favor. In addition, as stated earlier, the type of counting these people did in the early days which was most lucrative is easily spotted. So now modern counters have to apply "camouflage" which includes placing higher bets when the deck is not in their favor to make it appear they are betting randomly, and also reducing their bet spreads. All of these eat into the theoretical return, and make it much less lucrative if not entirely not worth it. So modern advantage players look for casinos that don't watch as carefully or dealers that are not cutting off enough cards.
http://physics.ucsc.edu/people/eudaemons/eudaemons.html
Or see the 1985 book, The Eudaemonic Pie
Blackjack is an incredibly boring game, remove the ability to count and beat the odds and no one would play it.
They don't reshuffle every time because your last statement is very wrong. The money card counters can take before being caught is a rounding error in the face of the masses of people who are happy to play with no edge.
But yeah, it's really easy for casinos to keep a track of your betting pattern and kick you out if you're playing the game too well. That's why the really successful card counters play as groups with personas. They'll station a bunch of low key guys around the casino and have them maintain a steady stream of cheap wagers while they count. When a table gets hot they'll signal a flamboyant high stakes looking guy to sit down and play a few rounds.
The Casinos will eventually catch those guys too, simply by correlating who is sitting at what tables when the high stakes guy comes to play, but it takes a lot more work and they make out with a bunch more cash. Worse, because what they're doing isn't illegal the casio can't even deny them the winnings, only kick them out and plaster their faces all over the blacklists the casinos use.
However, casinos now know of and how to foil this strategy. The countermove is to prohibit entering a table while a shoe is in progress. Either the new player must wait until the deck reaches its established end point at the cut card, or the deck gets reshuffled immmediately upon the new player entering. Either way, an incoming player can't take advantage of any count.
They sucked most of the fun out of video games to turn them into gambling machines for kids. Now imagine if they sucked the remainder of the fun out, and the only thing left was the gambling. Now you can only have fun if you think playing a game where you are statistically guaranteed to lose everything in the long run is fun.
They may have more glamour in the gambling-centric cities, but the few casinos I have been in have all been sad, dingy, smoky places filled mainly with old women staring at their slot machine with dead eyes and cups full of their pension funds.
Even if you temporarily win at gambling, you're still part of a machine that sucks life out of people and leaves them drained husks.
If you don't have an expert system mathematically guaranteed to give you an advantage over the house, you're better off gambling on the stock markets, because at least if you lose there, it might have at least paid for someone else to have a decent non-bullshit job for a little while, and there's also a possibility that everybody wins, even those who didn't play.
In Quebec all the lottery games and the casinos are owned by the government, thus every gain there goes to the public sector. Everyone win (except the one with gambling addiction, which are sadly the vast majority of the customers).
If you bet 10$ every hand, then suddenly 100$ when you think the count is good, and are winning, then back to 10$, you're done.
Good card counter will level their perceived variance by dumping money back, just like a poker player will sometimes call with a wider hand range than they consider their play style to be profitable in.
One of the ways casinos combat card counters is to lock their betting. So, they'll see someone with variant betting, between 1 and 100, and tell them they can keep playing, but only if they bet 20$ per hand.
That's an easier thing to kill card counting than outright banning players, as they still may be losing players at slots or some other table game.
Of course, kicking you out is the only thing they can do. They can't take your earnings, prosecute you, detain you, or use force unless you resist. Usually the player will be kindly asked to cash-in and leave.
Security can track your play patterns, your gains and losses. Card counting result in very characteristic patterns, and if your gains are too consistent to be explained by chance alone, they are going to watch closely. If you are just lucky, they will offer you free drinks, if you are an advantage player, you will be asked to leave, if you are a cheater, you are going to have problems.
Edit: I think there are some places where casinos can't just kick people out for no reasons. But anyways, there are ways of making card counting impractical. The use of continuous shuffling machines is one of them.
Counting cards isn't considered cheating because you're manipulating numbers in your head and in NJ, where the case happened, you can't be asked to leave a casino just for counting cards. Edge sorting is considered cheating as it's basically a form of marking cards. (This is an oversimplification of the rulings in the US
I find this surprising. Aren't there any rules about having to serve everyone equally? Like non-discriminatory rules? A Casino could unilaterally bar entry to all people from a certain ethnicity and they wouldn't have to justify themselves? Is this true for all businesses?
It's really fishy that Casinos can say you can come play here unless you win.
Ethnicity is a protected class, so no, you can't just ban people based on that. "Being really good at gambling" is not a protected class.
It’s pretty simple. Surveillance and the pit bosses also know how to count cards. All mathematically correct counting systems will tell you to raise or lower your bet at almost exactly the same, because a counting system is simply a way of quantifying your positive or negative edge at a given time. So if you modify your bet in correlation with the count even 4 or 5 times, the odds that you did that on a hunch become very small. Do it 10 times in a row, and the odds are nearly 100% that you are counting.
It isn’t counting that casinos hate, per se. They hate anyone that can consistently beat their games - “advantage players”. Counting just happens to be the most easily detectable form of advantage play, so the people that still do it are cannon fodder for surveillance. Most professional advantage players today don’t count cards. They use a variety of other techniques, such as hole carding and taking advantage of promotions created by mathematically challenged casino marketing departments, that are both more profitable and far harder to detect than counting.
Even with counting (at the individual level) you are really only giving yourself a very slight edge and this assumes that all other advantages are being taken (playing a perfect game, playing favorable rules... unfavorable rules are everywhere these days... managing your bets to take advantage of the count without getting caught, having a properly sized bank roll, etc.). Sadly, after all of that you can still get your butt handed to you on a bad night. On the aggregate you can beat the house with counting and all of the above but only just.
The amount of successful people in finance and other fields that mention him as an influence is not insignificant.
Amusing in a grim way - he had a trading firm, two offices.
His own in Orange County California.
East Coast office went rogue, was raided by Feds. Thorpe shut down his side right afterward.
He published some of his trading methods in "Beat The Market", about trading warrants, which were more or less options issued by the companies themselves, instead of written by third parties.
Well worth reading.
The latter would of course publish their work and go on to win the Nobel Prize in economics. So, Ed Thorpe basically gave up the Nobel Prize to make a shitton of money instead.
I'm surprised he is openly talking about everything, but I suppose many others have caught up and there's not much to lose ...
https://www.espn.com/blog/playbook/dollars/post/_/id/2935/me...
[1] http://www.puntingform.com.au/account/systems-dashboard/#top...
Btw, these websites already exist but no-one on there makes any money. You don't need a lot of capital to make money in sports betting (because you turn your capital over so many times a year), there is no reason for a good sports bettor to use those sites to publicise themselves.
Then he'd go to Belmont in the Spring and basically live at Saratoga in the Summer. He'd watch workouts, assess the horses, watch the trainers and jockeys and gather various datapoints. I was skeptical at first, but he at a minimum made enough to live in Saratoga for the meet, which is not cheap, and funded alot of his toy purchases from his winnings. He'd call out of the blue give me picks that were good winners about 50% of the time.
Basically, there were two ways he made money -- he followed his dozen horses for the high quality stakes races, and was able to eliminate shitty horses for the lower quality races based on trainer or workout performance. For the low quality races, he would hit a few wins/exactas a week (exacta = bet on 1st and 2nd place), and for the higher quality races he would do more exotic bets (Pick 6, trifecta, exacta)
This guy loved horses, the track, and the people around it. He was a widower and had lots of time on his hands. Definitely a labor of love that kept him sharp for a long time.
The big syndicates also aren't that secretive anymore. The founders and employees have got too rich (some are billionaires), and they have had to build a profile to hire (if you attended an elite uni in the UK, they recruit there...the largest syndicate in the UK has hundreds of programmers now).
And Bill has been talking about this for years. I don't understand why but he was publishing papers and giving talks in the 1990s. The impression I get is that he wants other people to know he is smart, and already has more money than he needs (this was true even in the 1990s).
Something that most people here won't get though: the models don't matter. The largest syndicates hire clever people but the real money is made in finding liquidity and people to take the other side. The big UK syndicates got large because they worked with bookies in Asia (the largest syndicate is run by someone who ran an Asian book) who needed people to take risk.
Other jurisdictions not so much. There are various scrapers available to obtain generic race card information[2] and APIs from some bookmakers/exchanges.[3]
A couple of years ago I read an article lamenting the lack of open data in horse racing, which still largely holds true today. Unfortunately, I can't find the article now (it was either on the Paulick Report or Bloodhorse website), but here's a more recent one from May this year calling for more open data.[4]
In fact, a question was asked on HN a couple of years ago about an open horse racing database and as far as I know the answers there are still valid.[5]
In general, there is data available for US, UK, IRE, Australian racing (the main jurisdictions) but they have to be paid for.[6][7][8][9]
[1] https://racing.hkjc.com/racing/english/index.aspx
[2] https://github.com/4A47/rpscrape
[3] https://docs.developer.betfair.com/display/1smk3cen4v3lu3yom...
[4] https://www.bloodhorse.com/horse-racing/articles/232487/thor...
[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7779117
[6] https://www.betwise.co.uk/smartform
[7] https://www.proformracing.com/
Several orgs, including Equibase (US-based, the gate keeper of a good portion of handicapping data) will regularly send cease and desist orders to people who attempt to automate aggregation of data even with free, publicly available content. That's at least half the reason PDFs are used when customers purchase data access, to make aggregation harder (you should see some of the white space, character encoding fuckery they use to throw off aggregators).
I suppose some of this often depends the quality of the data as well. Most data entry happens at the track during the race by a human, none of the data collection about races or the horse stats are collected by a computer, it's 95% hand entered. That also goes for pedigree information and other statistics including medications, weights, etc. And 100% of that is usually self-reported.
Much of the current handicapping in the industry is everyone trying to protect their personal mountains of data. Tech-minded people would love to provide open, controlled, API services so that people can do what they will with our mountains of data. But "giving it away for free" is a non-starter for the good ole boys at the top..
I was involved for a number of years with a UK based horse racing ratings service (handicapping if in the US). This service used to license their base data from the Press Association[1] and then run algorithms on top to produce the ratings.
There's certain things I can't say due to NDAs which are probably still in effect, but the cost of licensing this basic data was in excess of £10k per annum. So, unless you were a serious bettor or were looking to operate a service of some kind, it's beyond the pocket of most individuals.
Timeform in the UK also license some of their own proprietory data, via an API[2]. They've published some pricing on their website and you're looking at between £6k - £12k per year. This is just to access data which is available via their website for a subscription fee of £75 per month, but via their API.
There's even a specific UK organisation which apparently has the permission from the British Horse Racing Authority to officially licence key racing data. This is who sells the data to bookmakers, form guides, racing newspapers etc. They have a rate card published on their website.[3] Private, pro-punter? £8.5k per year please.
It's a bit of a rort really. Most of the data is "freely" available online or in the racing press, but if you want to access it any useable format, either build a scraper (good luck with staying on top of the website changes) or pay a stack to access things programmatically.
[1] https://pa.media/racing-betting/horseracing/
Almost all tracks publish result charts online for free along with race videos. If you want free, why not compile the data yourself? How long would DRF or Equibase exist if people could access their data for free?
I really do not care about the likes of DRF or Equibase and how long they will or won't exist. I think it is upon the industry itself to ensure this data is available free and easily accessible. Look at Hong Kong as the alpha example. Loads of free data, huge betting turnover, well funded industry.
DRF makes racing data easily accessible. If it was left to the tracks, which are independent entities (unlike NFL/NBA/MLB), an horseplayer would have to compile past performances from dozens of sources. The fields of a single day's race card may have run at 30 or more individual venues, in aggregate. Even if that data were free (well, the result charts and replay videos are already free, so technically this is already possible) if would take a ton of work to assemble it all in a digestible format -- which the DRF does for 6 bucks.
I don't believe HK offers free data that is not available from American tracks. There is no API, the result charts are less detailed than American tracks. If info was so freely available to everyone, how would someone like Bill Benter gain such a huge advantage? Why wouldn't he replicate his methods in the US? Probably because the US makes MORE data available.
Also, it's important to make the distinction between editorial content (analysis, predictions, subjective descriptions of a horse or jockey performance) and empirical information (horse weights, medication, surface conditions, weather, placements, jockey-horse combo win-rates, etc).
The DRF sells its speed ratings as well as analysis of pedigree and past performances. There's value in that and it definitely justifies the cost of their publication and the other publications that perform similar work.
The critical issue with your stance is that users have no options to aggregate their own data easily. The free PPs Equibase offers have been scrapped before and I know of several specific instances where the creators of those scrappers were sent cease and desist for collecting the information Equibase otherwise provides for free. Even to Github to remove the repository that contains the code.
I'm not advocating scrapping (please don't scrape sites like that) but there isn't any industry interest in providing modern consumable data. Wouldn't it be in Equibases best interest to put that information behind an API and sell access to the public? The industry actively discourages using publicly available data.
Benter used this himself, as detailed in his paper 'Computer Based Horse Race Handicapping and Wagering Systems: A Report' - https://www.gwern.net/docs/statistics/decision/1994-benter.p...
Interestingly, a frequentist approach (i.e. just looking at what happened in the past, producing a rough regression, and then assembling ensembles of such models), is likely to get you +EV in markets that don't get frequented by big hitters. It'll help you in your high school football league, for example, but it won't help you make money in the NFL markets.
Benter has written about his approaches, and has hinted at various ways of working he used.
The frequentist approach he took most likely still stands up in Hong Kong because there are only two tracks, variance is limited, the horse population is limited etc.
That doesn't apply anywhere else in the World, or for almost any other sport.
There is a whole World out there that you are yet to discover, but it's unlikely the syndicates will welcome you. More money in the market on the other side of the table is always welcome (that's liquidity, always helpful for the market to be bigger), but more money on your/their side makes the job harder.
Always remember to only bet what you can afford to lose, and good luck!
The bayesian approach says the data is fixed, and the probabilities might change.
If I look at the stats for the NE Patriots, for example (http://www.nfl.com/teams/newenglandpatriots/statistics?team=...) I see that their first down conversion rate is 30/56 so 53%.
Imagine I am watching a game and I am betting in play. I am offered odds of 1.9 (decimal odds) that they will convert the third down they are about to try and convert into a first down.
The frequentist approach says given the implied odds of past behaviour is 1.88 (we can convert percentages into decimal odds by dividing 100 by the percentage, so 100/53 = 1.88), and I am being offered 1.9, I should bet! Kelly says I should bet 0.78% of my bankroll, as I have an edge here.
Now, does that make sense to you? 30/56 is what happened in the past, and we're using that as an indicator as to what to do next. Would you take that bet?
The problem with this approach, I think, is that frequentist approaches whilst practical assume there is an underlying probability we can uncover by measuring it.
The Bayesian approach (in simple terms), says we can't be that precise, and the probabilities change over time based on the context. This makes more intuitive sense: the probabilities in poker are fixed and calculable, it seems to me they are much less so in NFL games.
In the Bayesian approach, we broadly need to think of a probability distribution and understand our confidence interval, and we use priors and observations to help us calculate both.
Doing some maths we might say the chance of the Patriots getting the third down conversion is with 95% confidence the chance of between 51.5% and 54.5%.
Well, now the 1.9 on offer isn't quite so sweet - it's within the confidence interval, albeit off to the edge.
Getting to that distribution and narrowing your confidence interval (it would be great if we could say it was 52.8% to 52.9%, for example), and then figuring out how to use Kelly accordingly, is relatively state of the art.
Doing this in the NFL might be tricky because the data sizes are relatively small - the confidence intervals might be too broad. Also, the frequentist approach is provenly useful in some situations: Bill Benter is richer than either of us, and I don't believe he ever used bayesian statistics.
People often think of gamblers as slightly grimy/shady characters with a gold chain and a wad of bills in their hand. That might happen, but all the ones I speak to spend their weekends reading PhD theses from maths and finance departments where people have been trying to figure out this stuff. I hope this answer gives you a flavour.
>After costs, the Jockey Club’s take goes to charity and the state, providing as much as a tenth of Hong Kong’s tax revenue.
and previously,
>Hong Kong’s population was then only about 5.5 million, but it bet more on horses than the entire U.S., reaching about $10 billion annually by the 1990s.
Isn't horse racing gambling a ripe area for the Hong Kong protesters to disrupt?
That is a very bad idea. The protestors are already against one powerful actor. If they are against a second powerful actor, and something sinister happens to protestors, it will be easy to cast doubts on who did the sinister act.
So, fuck you china.
I personally boycott anything from china for the rest of my life. Period.
I will hold to that statement.
Lets all marie kondo the fuck out of china: china does not spark joy.
So just minimalize the entire world.
If you don't think police forces around the world won't learn and copy this tactic, you're sorely mistaken.
Also, I applaud your vindictiveness, but good luck abstaining from any consumer electronic that doesn't include China in its supply chain.
I can do this.
The problem is i still need a small amount of things (which i already have, which were made in china (crock pot, etc), but ill have to work even harder to stick to my statement)
I'm not the above poster, but I think that was their point. Right now, when sinister things happen to the protestors, there is little confusion as to the source. But if the protestors were offending TWO powerful vested groups, then each can hint that the other is the source of the problems and observers will have a hard time knowing who to blame. Protest groups NEED observers to have clarity - the only way non-violent protests win is with the eyes of the world seeing the sinister acts and knowing who is responsible.
Btw, how do you wash off UV powder... asking for a friend....
https://www.kaggle.com/hrosebaby/horse-racing-dataset-for-ex...
Other big names from around that time include Alan Woods[1](mentioned in the article), Australian Paul Makin[2], Rod Dufficy (also Australian)[3], the Manuel brothers from Adelaide[4] and the Eddington brothers from the UK.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Woods_(gambler)
[2] http://www.thoroughbreddailynews.com/paul-makin-dies/
[3] https://www.wired.com/2002/03/betting/
[4] https://www.theage.com.au/sport/racing/big-names-take-a-punt...
The article suggests he came up with arbitrage vs. other bettors in 1990, a kind hedge fund for horse racing “without precedent”.
On the contrary, my college roommate and I had Dr. Z’s Beat the Racetrack from 1987:
https://smile.amazon.com/Dr-Beat-Racetrack-William-Ziemba/dp...
> Benter had achieved something without known precedent: a kind of horse-racing hedge fund, and a quantitative one at that, using probabilistic modeling to beat the market and deliver returns to investors.
In fact the 1987 edition was even preceded by Beat the Racetrack by William Ziemba from 1983, a decade earlier than the innovation described in detail here:
http://www.betfairprotrader.co.uk/2012/05/beat-racetrack.htm...
From the book blurb:
William Ziemba and Donald Hausch explain the fundamentals of track racing and show how patterns of public inefficiency in betting pools can lead to you reaping big payoffs. Rather than focusing on the complicated details of thoroughbred handicapping, the groundbreaking “Dr. Z” system offers mathematical models based on stock-market analysis.
William T. Ziemba is professor of management science at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. He is an expert in operations research and portfolio management and has served as consultant to the Canadian government on lotteries and pari-mutuel betting systems. Donald B. Hausch has a doctorate in managerial economics and decision sciences from Northwestern University, and is currently teaching in the School of Business at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
(Actually I didn't remember the name of the book, but I remembered the author and the jai-alai player in the cover.)
Told me his average bet size was £100,000, and his edge was in the region of ~1% (EV of £1,000 per bet). Interesting guy but you have to have a huge amount of cash and real belief in your model to ride out the variance!
Pretty sure he wanted to bet bigger but there was an issue with available volume.
He'd actually make more money by betting less and looking to the smaller markets, I expect because the edge is likely multiples of 1% there. Strange that he hasn't.
1% is also a fairly decent ROI. What you are missing is that you compound at 1% weekly. And if you are putting down bets on other leagues with a higher ROI, you are likely making well over 50%/year.
Going through the Asian books has problems. You're basically dealing with money launderers. Would you be happy to trust that process and team on £100k+ sized bets?
And I did not "miss" the 1% compounding. I get it. I do it myself. At 1% per game, if they're doing EPL, Championship, 2-3 other European leagues and CL, they should be getting 300% or more per year return, which means the £4m-£5m capital they have today to work be able to make those bets (minimum), will make them £10m profit in the next year.
If they are actually hitting those numbers, the Asian books will shut them down. If they are not hitting those numbers, well, they're not getting 1% per game.
I would strongly advise you don't take the stories people tell you in this area as direct, god's honest truth.
And they are happy to do business with winning players because they aren't like UK books. UK books make markets on ML, that means they don't have a balanced book, and therefore need to take risk. Your only edge as a UK bookie is, therefore, marketing and finding enough mugs.
Asian books mainly make AH markets, this means a balanced book, and their only aim is to make the overlay as a commission. This means that they need sharp bettors to come in and move the line. They lose money on bets with sharps but their lines are now efficient so they make it all back and then some. All the biggest books (Pinny, SBOBet, etc.) do this. And some of them actually open lines privately for sharps to bet on before they go public (this is how StarLizard gets so much down, Tony Bloom used to work at an Asian book).
Btw, most of the large UK books trade in Asia too. It is the epicentre of betting in the world. They don't shut down accounts. It isn't money laundering.
Also, you appear to know nothing about Betfair too. Betfair white-labels through bet brokers to offer lower commissions to big bettors (I don't use Betfair but I know these deals START at 2%, no premium charge). No professional goes through Betfair directly.
Your maths for the ROI is also wildly inaccurate. Basic. I'll leave it to you to work out why.
Less conspiracy theories pls.
I was surprised to see this word.
It’s from French pari mutuel that can be translated « mutual bet »
The official horse racing agency in France is called PMU (for Pari Mutuel Urbain, or urban mutual bet)
It’s fun how words move from a language to another.
There is a big edge...if you have info about what polls will say before they come out, etc.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-12-21/for-farag...
Are you betting on US politics? You can apparently get x1.06-x1.12 your stake on Trump being the Repulbican nominee for example.