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Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

A bit of a tangent, but many like the moneylines isn't because of gambling but because it tells you who's the favorite/underdog and by what margin. It's like in the equivalent of a chess game of knowing the player's ratings, which itself can directly lead to a nominal moneyline, but in most sports there's no formal predictive rating system.

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It’s the kind of thing that would suck all enjoyment out of watching sports for me personally. I may well be in a minority though, possibly an old person thing too

Fellow old here too. I enjoy it because there's a lot of sports I follow intermittently. For instance I enjoy watching UFC on occasion, but often find by the time I catch another fight I often have no clue who the guys in the main event are!

I think I enjoy the odds because it adds a sort of unspoken storyline to a fight, because those fighters themselves also know who's the underdog and it adds a bit of a psychological edge to the contest.

It's a lot like watching a chess game where the same stuff unfolds where you expect the favorite to push. Will the underdog look to survive, try to come and prove he's not to be taken lightly, and so on. Good times.

I feel the same way, the odds are part of the story. The UFC has removed them now, I guess as part of the Paramount deal. This actually makes the events less interesting.

By the way, the UFC chews through athletes so fast (part of their somewhat exploitative business model), it's no wonder it's hard to keep up with the latest names.

There could easily be. There's no reason you couldn't publish some Elo-like thing on teams or players, if that was your interest - you don't need gambling to get a good idea of who the favorite is. But the interest is in gambling, so most people inclined to publish such a thing probably bet themselves/sell it as a product to gamblers.

But this is where stuff like prediction markets shine. In chess, for instance, the prediction market odds are going to be way closer to the outcome than might be expected because of the players' ratings. This is because skilled bettors are capable of considering things like exact matchups, history, short-term performance/form, and many other factors that a static rating can't really account for.

Incidentally this is also what makes chess games relatively profitable. Moderate-info bettors will do things like flip on their chess engine, look at the eval, and then bet on that. But a computer might say a position is a dead-draw when a stronger player can tell you 'white has big practical winning chances'.

You can build a model accounting for all the things you like, you don't have to limit yourself to Elo (its main selling point is that it's easy enough that players can easily calculate how many rating points they stand to lose/gain) or Glicko (almost as easy).

Even in the most optimistic case, betting market accuracy will be limited by the commission (if you have a better estimate than the market, but not sufficiently better that you'll make money on it, you don't bet), and I think even a not-terribly-smart model can get you there for chess games. We don't need betting markets for the prediction's sake.

Polymarket not only doesn't charge a commission for market makers (the people who put out offers), but actually gives them a percent of all fees collected from market takers to help ensure and incentivize market liquidity. So if you could create a model that offered even slightly worse than market accuracy, you'd have an infinite money machine. It does not seem to exist.

And I think the reason for that is because a lot of these factors are unquantifiable, subjective, and non-fixed. For instance determining the winning chances for a human in a chess position is surprisingly complex. There's even a huge chunk of profit to be made for somebody that could create such a model outside of printing money in prediction markets - it'd be an invaluable tool for players to use during opening preparation since positions where winning chances don't correlate with computer eval are sort of the money-shot in human prep that's often motivated by a desire to avoid computer prep. And that factor is just 1 amongst many that can weigh in on an expert bettor's opinion.

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