Slashdot Mirror
EA Simulation Correctly Picked Super Bowl Champs in September
Just_Say_Duhhh writes "Before the NFL Season started, the guys at EA Sports simulated the entire season using Madden 2011. The sim told them the Packers would win the Super Bowl. If only we had listened. What's even more interesting is that according to the article, they've picked the winner 6 of the last 7 years. Make that 7 out of 8!"
.. accurate simulations are not news for nerds? I have no interest in American Football, or most other competitive sports, but I still think this is cool.
which is totally what she said
Because according to *this* article, it picked the Steelers... http://blog.games.yahoo.com/blog/355-steelers-will-win-super-bowl-xlv-predicts-madden-11/ wtf?
If you want to complete the play, you're going to have to hold on to the ball.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
But did it predict how bad the half-time show would be?
1. run enough independent simulations to predict each team as winning in one of them.
2. only report the right one
3. profit!
protip: replace "team" with "drug," and "winning" with "effective," for supermegaprofit!
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
So, do bookmakers use this for their odds calculations?
Where I grew up, their was an Italian delicatessen. They made great hoagies! It was also run by a couple of famlies, and they all drove Cadillacs. When you went in there, someone was always on the phone. Hmmm. When the racetrack nearby burned down and closed, they closed as well.
It was reopened by two guys who my parents knew. They said that the phone was constantly ringing from folks wanting to place bets.
But obviously, they made a tiny fortune on the betting business. So I have to wonder, how do bookies calculate their odds? Do they use IT technology? Or is it just a gut feeling? I'm not a betting man myself, but I don't mind other folks doing it.
And even if I did know that the delicatessen was a front for a bookmaker operation, I wouldn't have cared. As long as they kept making those hoagies. My tip: If you want to really experience a hoagie, find a mom and pop delicatessen in South Jersey.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Gut feelings and odds have little to do with it. Bookies try to get enough people to bet on both teams. If too many people were betting on the Packers, they would move the spread so more people bet on the Steelers, and vice versa. They have to balance the money on both sides so they have enough to pay out. Most bookies take a percentage of the bet, or a "vig", so they get paid no matter which side wins. I ran a small operation in high school like this. The house always wins. If a bookie runs into the situation where his cash flow isn't as good as it should be, he usually lets them carry over the bet into the next week. That gets kinda hard with the Super Bowl. just my $0.02 (plus my percentage)
Fast, cheap, correct. You get to pick two.
A Lot of what Bookies do to cover their odds isn't directly related to the event itself, but more to balance out their risk on what people are betting on. For example, If they took a bet on Team A vs Team B, and Team A was obviously much stronger, most people would want to bet on A, with very few betting on B. Based on that, they will adjust the contest either by giving the game a spread (For example, You only win the bet if Team A wins by at least 10 points) or giving higher odds to one team. (For example, Bet $1 and get back $5 if team B wins) These will both fluctuate before a game, as more people place their bets. The Bookie's goal isn't to correctly predict the game, but to end up in a situation where their risk is minimized, with roughly the same amount of money at to be paid out regardless of which team wins.
A huge number of analysts picked the Packers to win the superbowl before the season started. You have to wonder if EA purposely tweaked the game stats to make sure that the packers would come out on top in their simulation.......
Monstar L
Perhaps this just means that American Football is unusually predictable.
I play a lot of EA NFL Head Coach '09 (based off of Madden 08 engine and Madden 09 AI), and you will see significantly different results on multiple simulations, and you can see radically different results by changing just one or two variables.
"Any given Sunday" is still pretty much true for now. Accurately predicting an entire NFL season with it's hundreds of thousands (probably millions) of variables is probably only one small step below an accurate weather prediction model for the same time period.
Why laud EA Sports, engineers of a no-competition contract with the NFL, whereby nobody else can make an NFL game because they hold an exclusive license? For a community that hates all things closed and proprietary, EA is the MSFT of video games.
I mean, it would have been ok if they'd gotten rid of the 3x guys up there that couldn't sing and just had the chick on there that could (Fergie?)...
The lightshow, and Slash were fun...but ugh...those three tone deaf guys that can't even sound good through the vocoder type machines just hurt the halftime show.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........