My football predictor scores 0.203 vs. the bookies' 0.198 – and loses | Hacker News Reader

My football predictor scores 0.203 vs. the bookies' 0.198 – and loses

kickoffreport.com

4 pointscmanoliu10 comments

20 years back, i've build a tennis prediction system that beat bookies hands down while placing bets on around 30% of all games - and actually made a modest profit (simulated, i never tried because it makes no sense) if i bet on every single game in both ATP and WTA. And then i ran out of drops and profit per drop before account was banned, dropped to ~$100 or so.

These days i heard, no one even tries. Not that it's impossible to make a profit - it's just that automated betting on a fresh line is impossible to conceal anymore and you are banned after 1-2 bets.

Comparison to bookies is really comparison to betters.

Bookies don't really care about winners and losers. They just try to balance the money being bet on each side.

Bookies make their money from the "vigorish" --- and a good bookie will win every time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigorish

I wonder if bookies share between them information about where people places the money.

What is happening with other bookies is not really relevant. All a bookie really cares about are the bets on his books.

As long as the bets are roughly the same on each side (money wise), the bookies work is done. All he has to do is take from the losers and give to the winners --- and take a nice cut for himself.

I never built this to bet, just for fun, always liked statistics and sports. In the end, better to invest your money in stock market and leave it there, than to think you can make a living out of betting.

than to think you can make a living out of betting.

The most sensible, surefire way to make money from betting is to become a bookie.

A good bookie doesn't care about picking winners and he knows precisely how much he will make before the game begins.

Just a tip: AI generated comments get auto flagged on HN, so if you want to write something in comments for people to reply to, write it yourself.

Fair, I wrote the draft myself and let an AI clean up the grammar and style, which clearly overcooked it into something that reads as bot-written. The ideas and the project are all mine though. Good tip, I'll keep the AI polish off comments from now on and just post them raw.

This comment was also auto flagged and deleted, I vouched it to specifically tell you: please write comments on HN yourself. Even this comment is LLM written.

Noted. No more passthrough LLM from now on.

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