I'm conducting an interview with a very sharp numbers guy

[GameBred]

 

Thanks GameBred. So an Average Capper has a 1 in 300 chance of winning. Since this is a one-participant monthly contest, a winner will occur once in every 25 years!!!

 

You're welcome.

 

LOL... a winner once every 25 years; like the thought process. I think of it as if we had 300 fifty-percent cappers do this in a month, only 1 would be expected to hit 64 picks. Not sure how that seems to me, I guess that sounds about right.

[pokerjoe]

 

Great question. Interesting caveat with the "no public news" from open to close and I am assuming no market manipulation is taking place so I will go with:

 

I'd take the free point off the close and as for my rankings, they would be from the bottom to the top of your list.... meaning I would rank the close as the having the lowest prediction error, then the # 30 minutes before the game, etc.. down to the raw opener having the largest prediction error. This is probably the cliche answer but it is the best I can do :)

 

As for the change in rankings, perhaps I would make some adjustments for all three scenario's by not exactly sure how I would rearrange the rankings; sorry for the non-committal response.

 

 

If I was in SB heaven and granted a free point off either the opener or the close, I'd definitely take the opener. It's a bit softer number. If you typically have CLV, you should certainly fade the opener over the close.

 

But if you're not handicapping--if you're just going to randomly vary by a point from any given line--would it matter which line that was, open, close, or somewhere in between? (I say "vary randomly" but obviously if you're getting a free point you're going to take the greatest push-frequency; if it's an NFL game and the line is 3', you'll take your free point and go south, not north).

 

I suppose there might be this slight advantage to the close: it, presumably being closer to the mid-point of the distribution of final scores, should be surrounded by numbers a slight bit more likely to land.

 

For the record I think the number 30 minutes to close may be more accurate than the close. But I have no DB on the issue, so I don't know.

 

I do have a DB on my late bets (into the close) and they're fine. One of my beefs with BTCL worshiping is that it prohibits betting (from handicapping, not bet grinding) into the close, which is really sad and wasteful, considering how often value accrues there. I can't be the only one watching football lines move and then fading them just pre-game because the market was softening the number.

 

As a generalization, closers are more accurate than openers, but often in a trivial way (news release, as I said before, basically creates a new opener, and movement should be judged from that) and only as a generalization.

 

Where the market is filled with dumb money--as if often is on big public games, and very periodic markets, such as the World Cup--the close may be less accurate. Before this WC I was saying (at BT, IIRC), and taking heat for saying (as I always do on the forums, CLV being so worshiped), that the lines would soften as the games approached, especially after the opening round. By memory (not record) I believe the line moves got crushed this summer. I do know I made money doing nothing more than mildly adjusting the pre-cup lines for obvious handicapping reasons, then fading the closing lines varying from that (except freaking England against CR, lol). This is the fourth WC in a row I've earned doing that (though admittedly I will not, in my lifetime, have much of a sample).

 

When a market goes from 10 sharps and 100 squares to 10 sharps and 10,000 squares, the market loses efficiency for a while. If the market is periodic and short, that "while" may be for it's duration, as I believe it is for the WC.

 

 

[TommyL]

 

I started out with the "216 separate trials" approach and got off to a flying start when I did 1/216 * 5 = $2.31 (payoff for all 3 #'s coming up) then got caught up when trying to complete the rest. Adding the other possibilities together just didn't come easy for me.

 

That was fun as I love exercising the brain so if you have anymore, send them our way please.

 

With this approach, I didn't break it down and multiply by 1/216 so that I had to round. I just took the full value and added them all together...

 

in 216 trials...

 

0 "hits" - 125 times at -1 each, so -125

1 hit - 75 times at +1 each, so +75

2 hits - 15 times at +3, so +45

3 hits - 1 time at 5, so +5

 

5+45+75-125 = Zero

 

I'll post some other ones now and then when I have time. 15 years ago, I would have had loads of them since I took a game theory class in college and we did this kind of stuff (or much more complex versions of it) every class. But that was a LONG time ago. :)

[TommyL]

I do have a DB on my late bets (into the close) and they're fine. One of my beefs with BTCL worshiping is that it prohibits betting (from handicapping, not bet grinding) into the close, which is really sad and wasteful, considering how often value accrues there.

 

...

 

Where the market is filled with dumb money--as if often is on big public games, and very periodic markets, such as the World Cup--the close may be less accurate. Before this WC I was saying (at BT, IIRC), and taking heat for saying (as I always do on the forums, CLV being so worshiped), that the lines would soften as the games approached, especially after the opening round. By memory (not record) I believe the line moves got crushed this summer. I do know I made money doing nothing more than mildly adjusting the pre-cup lines for obvious handicapping reasons, then fading the closing lines varying from that (except freaking England against CR, lol). This is the fourth WC in a row I've earned doing that (though admittedly I will not, in my lifetime, have much of a sample).

 

When a market goes from 10 sharps and 100 squares to 10 sharps and 10,000 squares, the market loses efficiency for a while. If the market is periodic and short, that "while" may be for it's duration, as I believe it is for the WC.

 

 

I'm a pretty big "BTCL guy", but I agree with you on the late plays. I'll play stuff right before a game if it's moved enough away from my ratings, knowing full well that I'll have zero CLV. But I look at the BTCL at much more of a macro level; if I'm going to win over the long haul, I'd better be beating the close much more often than not.

 

As for your second point, you did post about it on BT before the World Cup and I still think it's a very interesting concept/belief/etc (and wish that we had some more discussion about it over there). It's really such an interesting situation, as I have a hard time seeing Pinny taking 200k bets on a market that's inefficient. But at the same time, there is such an incredible amount of square $ involved that it makes sense (just like the Super Bowl). I had a moderately successful tourney, but would have expected more based upon how much I crushed some of the closers (and strangely enough, I probably had more success in games where the line moved against me). I still have to assume that it's a sample size issue, but it's really tough to know for sure when it only happens once every 4 years.

 

 

[pokerjoe]

We're on the same page, Tommy.

 

I do pay close attention to post-bet line moves. If the market is arguing with me, I want to have an idea of why, and I'm going to think most about those bets. -CLV is like getting 3-bet pre: it's going to get my attention. If it keeps happening from the same guy/when fading the same team, I'm really going to focus there.

 

Sometimes I'm okay with it -CLV. Post-bet news is beyond my control, so if the Spurs up and sit their starters in Miami after I bet on them, peace.

 

Sometimes I'm thinking, "Market, you be wrong!" IIRC, last year when Kobe came back after a long absence (or was it Nash? Doesn't matter, it's the idea) I was LOL at the market's reaction. I ended up a bit -CLV on that game, but that was only because I lacked patience before pulling the trigger. And to the extent that post-bet line moves vary almost randomly, there's not much point in losing sleep over them. To say such movements aren't random is to say they're predictable, and if they're predictable, congrats, you won the lottery.

 

I handicap; if I see a number far enough off mine, I bet when I see it, at the best number I can find.

 

After that, I chill. In the long run, I BTCL, but in the long run, it's only winning or losing that matters, not CLV anyway, so in the long run, I don't worry about it. CLV can be a useful indicator on a bet-by-bet basis, but you absolutely can have long-term CLV and not have an edge (it you're nothing more than an early betting super square, or if sharps generally have been passed up by a smaller, sharper syndicate--as was probably the case with the NBA last season), and you can have edge without CLV (if you're really ahead of the handicapping/modeling curve, such that the market thinks you're wrong because you're so outside the box). If you ever stumble upon the holy grail of sports betting, the market might spend a long time giggling at your stupid bets as you're taking them to the cleaners.

 

Here's the real value to paying attention to CLV, to me: if, say, an NBA total sucks a bet out of me, and I end up with -CLV, and I was wrong as the game plays out (it's a bit more than just not covering, obv), then I'm going to flag the teams involved and really re-evaluate my position. And if I'm off on one of those teams in their next game, too, then I'm on high alert, and probably passing where my numbers call for a bet.

 

 

 

About Pinny taking 200k bets: I think the only thing they're thinking about is their ability to balance the action.

 

And a question, to you or anyone else: did you track line moves this WC? I remember them doing poorly, but I didn't keep score.

[TommyL]

And a question, to you or anyone else: did you track line moves this WC? I remember them doing poorly, but I didn't keep score.

 

I only kept track of it for stuff that I actually played, and not for the tournament as a whole. I just know that the plays that I made in December/January did extremely well as a whole against the close, but those seemed to perform much worse than my later plays. I know that Groovin was fading a bunch of steam in his thread at RTP and had some pretty good success, but as always with a 64 game tourney, we run into the whole sample size issue. In hindsight, I wouldn't change too much that I did with the World Cup this summer (wish I could say the same about college hoops).

 

[D-Hustle]

what's the best way to win 5 spot keno?

 

I need an answer for this.

[RealSlimShady]

I need an answer for this.

Simple- don't play

[ronald]

Curious to see who this is. Shackleford? James Grosjean?

 

Do I win a prize?

[FISHHEAD]

WADE....try the 40 cent SPECIAL 5-spots on The D.

 

 

 

[Mofome]

Any chance we can get him back