Hacker News Reader

Comment by AnotherGoodName | Hacker News Reader

One thing that i don't see in automated horse betting is the work to look at the horses before the race.

You can get a sense of a horses energy and condition on the day (it can be different on different days). Horse racing even has a parade ring before the race for this reason. I don't gamble but i'm absolutely sure there's signal there in visually looking at the horse on the day that these systems don't take into account.

I wouldn't at all be surprised if a system could be far more successful by using vision of the parade ring (whether machine vision or expert human) as additional signal.

In fact given my experience with horses (grew up on a farm) and knowing the day to day differences i'd be surprised if any pure algorithmic system could beat the marker without the above since those who do bet on horses absolutely use this signal.

View on HN

This is used by a number of betting syndicates. Notable by David Walsh[0] and Zjelko [1]. They knew of and worked with Benter in HK and adapted his system. One of the things that they did was pay large numbers of experts to watch and evaluate each horse and give it a standardised rating which they then used as an extra parameter along with the public odds. Another gambler who also extended that system out was Alan Woods [2], but I don't think he did anything as sophisticated in terms of modeling, concentrating more on the execution side. Regarding the yearly turnover, I have no idea, but billions would be on the low end. From the ATO filings we David Walsh alone was generating 100's of millions of dollars a year in profits, let alone turnover.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Walsh_(art_collector) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeljko_Ranogajec [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Woods_(gambler)

Anecdote from the trading floor.

I used to sit on a trading desk, the kind with loads of guys sitting next to each other and about 8 screens each. Lots of noise, except when it got quiet. When it did get quiet, someone would shout down the squawk box that they had "heard from the stable boys" about some horse that was on form.

You couldn't not bet on this horse. Everyone did it, and everyone got fleeced, every time.

One day, my boss decides he's had enough of this crap, and he goes "no, I ain't doing it, I lose my lunch money every fkn time, screw this".

Horse comes in at 30-1, everyone is paying him a visit asking about what champagne to buy that day.

I think that that is likely a low confidence indicator, extremely subjective and hard to measure.

If you fed archive video of many parade rings, together with the results of that race, then you could use deep learning to develop a neural net program that could (maybe) beat the odds by interpreting a live video feed of a parade ring to predict the likely winner.

So what do you think, could this work? Presumably the technology to build this system is reasonably accessible these days.

The point is that it doesn’t matter.

Benter allegedly did use something like this in his later models so it probably does matter.

You should go look at Nikola Jokic and Russell Westbrook before a game and see if you can guess which player has won 2/3 of the most recent MVP awards, both in pregame energy and physiognomy.

Winners in almost all sports mostly dont present the same.

My bro was (is?) a gambler. As kids, I'd tag along for giggles. We definitely spied the parade ring. Which horse was most like a wound up spring? Which horses defecated/urinate immediately prior?

It was fun pretending we had insight.

My farm-boy father never bet on the horses, certain it was all rigged.

how do you quantify that?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com