Q: How much / what percentage of sports betting is based on skill as opposed to luck? Can this be quantified into the form of a mathematical equation?
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Q: How much / what percentage of sports betting is based on skill as opposed to luck? Can this be quantified into the form of a mathematical equation?
I don't know the next time I will be in Vegas, it won't be any time soon, it could be 6+ months unless something unusual comes up.
Hopefully, the show will happen soon because as soon as I start building and whatnot, I won't have much time for jacking around, especially then the fishing season starts up and the weather starts getting better.
Yay. A reasonable question, and not from an "AP!"
When you put aside arbitraging, bonus exploitation, and middles shooting, the actual handicapping results of individual games can be quite "luck dependent." Now I can only speak to college football, at which I'm expert, but in college football, I have certain formulas that determine who should have or which team deserved to cover a particular game. These formulas are dependent, in part, on what style of offense is being employed and what style of defense as to how likely representative a particular subset of plays (in other words, a game) is to being representative of a limitless number of games.
My personal history, after 50 years of applying these formulas, is that about 70% of college football teams that "deserve" to cover actually do. What that means, in essence, is that if you are correct in profiling the statistics of a game within parameters that should yield a win, you will win about 70% of the time. This means, if you profiled every game correctly (which of course no one does and no one comes close), you would win 70% of the ATS wagers, more or less. Now a handicapper who really, really knows his teams is likely to be right about his profiling of the game maybe 70% of the time, so he'll win ATS 70% of that 70%, which would yield 49% or thereabouts. A loser, in other words, However, since he will win 30% of the 30% of games he profiles incorrectly, that will yield 9% additional winners, which adds up to roughly 58%, which is about the ceiling for what an astute, in-touch handicapper could achieve long-term in a particular sport.
The interesting aspect of this is that I'm sure poker players reading this feel the correlative vibes. When poker players in hold 'em games have a higher pair versus a lower pair, they win 80% of the time (although they did everything right if they get the other player all-in, they do not win 100% of the time). An AK versus an AQ, considered a dominant hand, wins roughly two-thirds of the time. So the "luck" factor in poker unfolds over the course of a hand in similar ratios to the "luck" component of handicapping unfolding over the course of a three-hour football game. Just an interesting aside, but it helps non-handicappers get a feel for the limits of handicapping.
This statement is just golden. 50 years now of this expertise. Aren't you still shy of 70 Redietz? That would put you beginning to apply these formulas at just about the time you were starting over at the Pennsylvania Farmers high school college with your perfect SAT scores and genius IQ. Amazing.
But it is the "about 70% of college football teams that "deserve" to cover actually do" comment that is even more amazing. To put it in Farmers terms for ya....what manure. :rolleyes:
You know how I always say "it doesn't take that much to figure out who knows what they are talking about and who is just talking?" I have to admit Red, you fooled me for a long time. For a long time I really thought you know what you were talking about. I no longer do. And that "fooling me" was on me 100%. It was a subject matter, sports betting, that I didn't have a lot of knowledge about. My bad.
I now believe you have made money as a tout. Marketing sports picks. I don't consider that a professional sports bettor. Take away the touting side of it and you are under water lifetime, just like the rest of us, aren't you? Yeah you have won a couple contests along the way and finished top 5 or 10 in others, but none of that made you a lifelong winner financially did it. It just became a tool, to use in selling a service.
Disappointing.
As you can see the Ditz just keeps on with the bullshit. You have to ask yourself why does the Ditz waste his time here when he could be flying high with "his peers." You know, professional sports bettors. Have you ever seen a debate between Ditz and a real professional sports bettor? It looks to me he avoids them like the plague.
No matter all this stuff he talks about "opinion" he can't get around the fact that Billy Walters published a handicapping system that is purely mathematical.
Opinion is just another word for hunch. As Amarillo Slim said, hunches are for two dogs fucking.
Another question for radio show, if it ever happens:
Is Billy Walters mathematical system for sports betting bullshit or not? Was Walters misleading the public?
I feel like being in Vegas does make the interview better and there isn't a reason to be so critical. I'm not going to read a month of nonsense to say this.
LOL. Do you have idea what you're talking about?
I'm going to print and frame your post.
For anyone not familiar with sports betting, monitors recorded every selection of mine for decades. Those monitors included former Seattle Times reporter Mike McCusker's "Tipsters or Gypsters?" published annually in Las Vegas. Also The Absolute Truth, published in conjunction with The Satellite Cable handicap weekly out of Buffalo. Also The Sports Monitor out of Oklahoma City, also weekly. Also Handicapper's Report Card, again weekly. Also Playbook newsletter published my plays every week on newsstands for decades nationally.
It's hard to be underwater and claim otherwise when your plays are published every week for thousands of people to see.
I appreciate the KewlJ(s) lying in almost every post, but this post was special. I know others have said this a long time ago, but something is wrong with KewlJ. It's not that he lies about this and that all the time. It's that he thinks anyone would believe him that's the weird part. Like he's the hero of his own story, which is a hard thing to pull off when you're anonymous and what you're posting makes no sense.
And MDawg, feel free to quote me. I know, I know, I hate to give Argentino credit with his "wires loose" comments, but there is something really wrong with the this KewlJ guy. Not that he lies, but that his lies don't even make any sense in the real world. I mean, think about the weirdness of it. A guy who posts on forums for years is completely anonymous, has made up provably fictional stories, and provides zero corroboration of anything ever. And he decides a real person, posting under an actual name, who has been documented by third parties in print for decades, must have somehow what? Rigged all the documentation? By half a dozen different professional publications for decades?
As I said, I'll frame this post. If anything sums up KewlJ's problems, it was this post.
Show us proof of your results in these contests. And please, don't give us the "contact so and so and ask them" treatment or "look up this, look up that." Don't give us any shit about copyright law. As a journalist you know you don't have to use the same format. Post up the results of these contests you supposedly won.
You have challenged others to "post up proof" many times. It's your turn in the barrel.
Mickey, you are out of your depth. Seriously, as in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (a fine book). You're not even framing your own question properly.
And I'll take you to task for misleading anyone reading your post. Walters doesn't posit "a mathematical system for sports betting." He goes into specifics for the NFL, which is not "sports betting." The specifics he discusses have elements that are no longer valid because, guess what, the stats are (1) dated and (2) don't adjust for the effects of rule changes, which are actually a big deal. I'm not saying that Mr. Walters didn't incorporate the effects of rule changes in his own betting (of course he did); I'm saying that the info you're getting in the book doesn't come close to comprehensively reviewing the history of the data.
Do you really, stupidly think Mr. Walters gave you some fabulously useful tips on how to win at "sports betting" in the book? C'mon, man, as they say on ESPN. He gave you some dated tips on how to win at the NFL, which is not really how he made his money, because the NFL is actually one of, if not the, most difficult sports at which to win. You'll see quotes about large NFL bets in the book, but no long term breakdown of which sports provided how much income compared to each other. The absence of these kinds of comparisons or summaries is obvious and startling.
The power rating stuff you get a taste of in the book is barely one step above GamePlan Magazine's power ratings, which I followed and adjusted since I was 13 or 14.
Mickey has very little idea what he's talking about, which is fine. Can you imagine, however, if I decided I was a master of advantage slots and mickey needed to listen to me? Fortunately, I'm not stupid or arrogant enough to be a Leonardo Da AP.
How so?
If it were a studio type radio show interview...sure. But it is not. It is a call in show. Druff from Southern California or where ever he happens to be and Red wherever he happens to be. Even if we were to see a video of the interview, if Druff is in SoCal and Red in a hotel at say Golden Nugget, how does that make it "better"? If he opens the curtains, you can see the Fremont experience canopy? ;)
On the contrary, it seems absolutely bizarre to me that Redietz would fly to Las Vegas to do a call-in interview from a hotel room in Vegas.
Ok, so give us a figure then. What kind of money have you made in your 50 years <-:D, of being a professional sports bettor. Money from wagering on sports and contests. Not money from marketing a service.
These third party monitors that you talk about.....that is only important so you can then use that information to solicit new suckers....I mean clients. It really changes nothing about your ability to pick winners. You only keep copies of all that shit, some from 40 years ago, so you can pull it out to try to recruit new clients. "Look I finished in second place in the 1984 pixadaisy contest."
Your business and money you have made from sports betting has come from marketing and soliciting, not from picking winners, as near as I can tell. That is NOT a professional sports bettor. That is a marketing sports picker, marketing a service.
You are free to prove me wrong. I am trying to keep an open mind, but it is becoming harder and harder. (that's what she said -- Michael Scott)