Quote:
Originally Posted by
Kim Lee
Quote:
Originally Posted by
AxelWolf
It does not matter if it's a random or non-random event; if you are achieving a 56% ATS on average, you can use Kelly.
Yikes, Redietz does not understand the math of Kelly betting. He calls it "blackjack math" because he has not even read the original papers of Kelly and Breiman that have no content about blackjack. FWIW, Ed Thorp told me that his colleague Claude Shannon was the referee for Kelly's paper. Then Thorp popularized it in
Beat The Dealer.
If you don't understand the basic math of gambling then you probably won't succeed in getting an advantage. If you don't understand Kelly math after 40 years then you are not inquisitive enough to win.
You shouldn't apply the math of random events to non-random events as a strategy for investment. Just as you shouldn't apply the math of sealed systems to permeable systems. At best, you are being imprecise and ballparking something that can be heuristically ballparked anyway. At worst, you are wading into quicksand.
This is the part where I say I wasn't a math guy; I just played hoops with the Penn State grad/faculty math squad, where we debated such things for years, including shot distribution formulas that were adopted by the NBA 20 years later.
A simple change in rules for a sport like basketball can potentially eliminate whatever gambling edge you think you have immediately, and you're not going to know that until you accumulate enough events (and of course the annihilation comes well before that ever happens). In addition, when officiating bulletins are sent out, you are now dealing with what amounts to a novel environment. And if you don't know the officiating bulletin has been distributed, well, it's possible that could work to your favor, but it's more likely it does not.
Betting sports has very little to do with the application of formulas to random events because there are no random events.
One of my favorite deconstructions was of a paper that appeared in The Skeptic criticizing the idea of a "hot hand" in basketball. An Ivy League prof who had actually played college hoops "proved" there was no such thing as a "hot hand." One of the problems with the paper was that basketball courts are not closed systems with random events. Like the see-saw, adjustments are made on the fly with no loudspeakers announcing the adjustments. The fact there was no purely statistical "hot hand" (A) hid the reality of what was actually happening on the court and (B) could have also been interpreted as evidence that there was indeed a "hot hand," but one not evident from the statistics available. So the stats-as-available could conceivably (A) be viewed as one "reality," but not a useful one from which strategic decisions could be made going forward.