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Twitter Watch: Arbers are they value or not?

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A bit of discussion on twitter about arbers.  Not sure I was able to express myself properly in a tweet.  I can understand that an arber or even a pro bettor (or originator) can *sometimes* be giving you actionable or profitable information. I keep getting hit on such and such team, maybe I should adjust my ratings/odds.  Thanks for the info .  Going forward I will now be more confident in my prices take bigger bets and make more money. Or I have a huge liability on the local home team favourite.  I might be prepared to take a negative EV hedge to balance the book a bit.  Now I can offer the arbers an arbable and value price for them.  They take some.  Great, thanks , I've hedged my risk a little which will allow me more stable and constant profits. But sometimes they are not giving you anything useful.  The example I used was that of setting prices for overs/unders.  To take advantage of bettors bias you want to set a short price on the over.  You pay out less money on the most b

The Time Travelling Gambler

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<< You see, while we were in the future, Biff got the sports book, stole the time machine, went back in time and gave the book to himself somewhere in the past. Look, it says right here that Biff made his first million betting on a horse race in 1958. He wasn't just lucky, he knew, because he had all the race results in the sports almanac! That's how he made his entire fortune! Take a look at this with a magnifying glass. >> -- Doc Brown So here is the premise (a little different from the Movie).  You travel back in time to when you are 18 years old.  How do you plot a path to becoming the "Luckiest Man On Earth"? For me it is January 1996. Now I know all the results from last weekend,  I know Man Utd won 1-0, I know Chelsea drew with Liverpool, I know City beat Burnley.  But I am not going to wait 27 years to make my move. At the same time, I am going to wait some time.  My belief system has just been rocked with the discovery that I travelled through ti

The Ratings: MLS

Market Watch: Premier League Outright

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There are some markets appearing now for Premier League 2023/24 Outrights so we decided to take a look. Often the most accurate prediction is the exchange, but at this early stage and with only a small amount of money matched ( Matched: EUR 19,816 ) there could be some inconsistencies.  As a comparison I also had developed a market implied rating from the closing line match day odds here . So my approach was: 1. Assume the outright exchange odds represent a probability of winning a 38 match league. 2. According to the exchange ranking assign all teams from the favourite to the underdog a rating 1190 down to 810 in steps of 20.  The standard "average" elo rating is 1000 so its centred on this but we already know the top teams in the market are better so hopefully initialising the ratings this way will speed up convergence. 3. Run a full season sim based on these assigned elo ratings.  4. Compare to the exchange outright odds and adjust the teams elo rating up or down according

Market Watch: Rams/Lions

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  Rams played Seahawks in the evening match, and Lions and Packers met later on Sunday.  If Rams won their match then Lions needed to win to make the play off, if Rams lost then Lions had less motivation.  In other words the matches were related - and so combining the odds by multiplying as bookies do to create a double will be just plainly wrong.  Some books still allowed this however.  Although the double lost, was it still value? I tracked the movements of odds during the Rams/Seahawks match and noted the before and after odds.  I wanted to answer two questions. Was brodders bet value?  How does motivation affect a team? You can see below, that just at the end of the match the Lions drifted out a bit, this made sense, with the Rams losing they had less motivation to win their game.  They are pros, they still have motivation to win (for the sake of winning, to eliminate the Packers).  However when it comes to the crunch does the coach/players really put their bodies on the line as th