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Comment by gomox | Hacker News Reader

Great stuff. Very entertaining read.

This said, I am a bit skeptical about the asessment of "game hotness". Of course games that are tied or close near the end exhibit significant agitation at that stage (and "boring 1st halves") from a betting standpoint.

This might sound obvious, but great games are not just about the outcome. Think of something like soccer, where few points are scored in a given match. It would be very interesting to see what the data looks like for those, as there are fewer data points.

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He computes "hotness" for soccer (football, to me) matches too: http://www.gambletron2000.com/?sport=epl%2Cchampions

As you'd imagine, each goal brings about a massive spike in implied win/loss probability.

Wow, very cool. The jumps in the odds are so clear you could probably cross that with a live video feed (or a Twitter stream) to automatically summarize the milestones in a game (goals, penalty kicks, injuries).

PS: Football in Argentina as well :)

The hotness factor is only based on the outcome of the ongoing game. It should also consider the live impact on classification/awards.

Have a look at yesterday's CL game between Paris & Leverkusen : http://www.gambletron2000.com/events/2276/paris-st-g-v-lever..., which was the second of a 2-legs opposition, Paris having won 4-0 on the first one. Which means 99.9% chances of qualifying It has a _mildly hot_ 762 score, where it should have been between 0 and 10. As the game was almost meaningless, the fact that Leverkusen scored first before finally losing the game didn't bring any excitation.

Yeah, but that score is based on in match betting, rather than "to qualify", no? So what I find most interesting there is that the odds continued to rise for PSG after the goal, even though people (like me) put money on when they went behind -better odds, and cheers for the £20. The crucial thing that's at issue with this system is that it's not just the weight of money that's at work here, but also the bookies adjusting the odds to ensure their book is still green, and to encourage/discourAge people putting further weight on particular outcomes.

Tl;dr - the method is really interesting, but imperfect because it's not a pure market, I think. Bet fair odds or similar would be interesting, but their API is horrendous.

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