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Data Science Meets Sports Gambling: How Researchers Beat the Bookies (newscientist.com)
"A trio of data scientists developed a betting strategy to beat bookmakers at football games," writes austro. [The game Americans call soccer.] New Scientist reports:
The team studied 10 years' worth of data on nearly half a million football matches and the associated odds offered by 32 bookmakers between January 2005 and June 2015. When they applied their strategy in a simulation, they made a return of 3.5 per cent. Making bets randomly resulted in a loss of 3.32 per cent. Then the team decided to try betting for real. They developed an online tool that would apply their odds-averaging formula to upcoming football matches. When a favorable opportunity arose, a member of the team would email Kaunitz and his wife, one of whom then placed a bet.
They kept this up for five months, placing $50 bets around 30 times a week. And they were winning. After five months the team had made a profit of $957.50 -- a return of 8.5 per cent. But their streak was cut short. Following a series of several small wins, the trio were surprised to find that their accounts had been limited, restricting how much they could bet to as little as $1.25. The gambling industry has long restricted players who appear to show an edge over the house, says Mark Griffiths at Nottingham Trent University, UK.
The paper "illustrates how the sports gambling industry compensates market inefficiencies with discriminatory practices against successful clients," adds austro, noting that the researchers posted a paper explaining their methodology on arxiv last week. "They also made the dataset and source code available on github. And best of all, they made an online publicly available dashboard that shows a live list of bet recommendations on football matches based on their strategy here or here for anyone to try."
They kept this up for five months, placing $50 bets around 30 times a week. And they were winning. After five months the team had made a profit of $957.50 -- a return of 8.5 per cent. But their streak was cut short. Following a series of several small wins, the trio were surprised to find that their accounts had been limited, restricting how much they could bet to as little as $1.25. The gambling industry has long restricted players who appear to show an edge over the house, says Mark Griffiths at Nottingham Trent University, UK.
The paper "illustrates how the sports gambling industry compensates market inefficiencies with discriminatory practices against successful clients," adds austro, noting that the researchers posted a paper explaining their methodology on arxiv last week. "They also made the dataset and source code available on github. And best of all, they made an online publicly available dashboard that shows a live list of bet recommendations on football matches based on their strategy here or here for anyone to try."
They're not beating the bookies just other betters, bookies adjust the odds based on who's betting for what.
Yet another reason not to gamble: the house cheats. Always. Win consistently against the house anywhere, and you will be asked to leave. Win too much off a slot machine, and it was "out of order".
The betting houses and casinos exist to take people's money. One should not forget this.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Concerned citizens must apply elementary school playground standards.
One should not be shown the exit when you play better using public and fair rules.
It's worse than I'll go home with the ball; it's I will bully you to leave the Playground because you don't lose.
What do you expect from an industry that lives off gambling?
That they play fair, and thus are likely not to be the only consistent winner amongst the thousands of gamblers they call "customers"?
So the bookies are taking some responsibility for keeping the market 'fair'. If they identify a player who has some unexplained statistical advantage, they move to protect their broader customer base. The bookies have no way of knowing whether these bets are being placed by highly skilled bettors, AI, or bag men for the mob, spreading bets around on fixed games.
Have gnu, will travel.
They should tell everyone about favorable odds via social media, and make the bookies lose millions and/or suspend everyones' accounts.
Q: Is this a game of chance?
A: Not the way I play it.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It isn't the gambling industry that is the problem, it is the government regulations allowing it, and the lack of public outcry to force scrutiny on practices like this.
Just like industrial pollution, sub-prime mortgages, and hundreds of other socially negative aspects of American Industry, the gambling issues are entirely blamable on government and citizens. You should always assume people will do the maximum they can get away with, which is why regulations have to be designed to elicit the exact behaviors you want, or should not be regulated at all. Either the regulations keep people in line, or the lack of regulations force them to compete against others who can 'seem' more fair. Neither helps in the case where a few players have inordinate amounts of cash and the ability to buy off government or enforcement arms however, which is part of where the current situation leaves us.
I've met two people in different cities, both had systems to beat different sports, 1st guy made money off of horses and managed to fly under the radar, the other guy beat them on football (soccer), but he was a bit too good and got banned everywhere.
I managed to take the online casinos for a couple of hundred via their introductory offer... but my 'system' was weak, might just have been luck. And I discovered how addictive online gambling can be and stayed away ever since, I recognised some dangerous emotions.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
"If you could beat the ponies, they wouldn't be running them."
How about we just block these barbarian filth from out internet?
To refuse to bake a cake for a gay wedding then these bookies shouldn't be able to refuse bets. Discrimination is discrimination.
In any market, bet big, make your windfall, then get out: Soon, the entrenched players will recognize the change in money flow and act against it. In a monopolistic market like a bookie or casino, that means taking your cash and kicking you out.
The house always tips the odds in their favor. But in general that is also true of any business. Barriers, marketing, a good job at selling, exploiting emotions, an addictive product, etc. are all used to ensure there is no level playing field. Any business that wants a level playing field is insane, the want an advantageous position and captured markets.
The only way to actually have anything resembling a Free Market is through careful regulation and government intervention.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Insurance? Oh, wait... (Yes, insurance is gambling - involving betting that something bad will happen.)
From TFA:
Online bookmakers have very tight profit margins, so some offer generous odds for very short periods of time on certain matches to lure automated or expert betting systems out into the open, says economist David Forrest at the University of Liverpool, UK. “They will try to trap the robots,” he says. “Anyone who responds has their account closed.”
Some of the researchers’ accounts may have fallen foul of this system. In some cases they found they could not bet at all after signing up with certain bookies. If so, then this suggests their technique really was finding the best odds out there. But the house still always wins in the end.
By that idiotic definition, not having insurance is gambling (betting nothing bad will happen)
It's as if people forget that someone has to pay for all those people walking around in fancy suits and pay for the massive electrical bill a casino must generate.
I tend to rant.
"The gambling industry has long restricted players who appear to show an edge over the house, says Mark Griffiths at Nottingham Trent University, UK"
So since it is NOT a gamble from the company's point of view, I am also not gambling since I am guaranteed to lose. Hence I don't bother at all with them and wouldn't use them even if someone gave me some free cash to do so. It would be better to burn that money of someone else than hand it off to the bookies. At least if it's burned nobody benefits from the crimes.
And block the ability of gambling places to block people. Simples.
I expect that an industry offering a product called "gambling" offers a product that resembles gambling, which this does not. This is heads I win, tails you lose. The only uncertainty is the position of the minute hand on the wall clock marking your (rare) upticks in an otherwise constantly downward march.
You're in prison. Everyday, you get to pick a number from 1 to 3. If you guess right, you get fed a nice meal. If you guess wrong, you don't get fed, and you get a punch in the head.
Does this resemble gambling?
I've said this before, but the truth about the modern gambling industry is that it functions as a form of psychology money laundering in the war between the responsible and irresponsible mental systems.
Suppose a gambler found a house where the house take only covered keeping the lights on (a necessary overhead). He'll show up and lose a $100/week for many weeks, before his "lucky" night where he pots a $2500 windfall (which he immediately spends on a round of drinks for all his friends, some blow, and then a pair of Swedish bombshells, which he's already too bombed to fully enjoy).
The alternate plan is to invest $100/week into his retirement savings account. Guess which plan he'll choose? And he'll call it breaking even, more or less. Without the casino, he deposits $100/week in his debauchery fund, which he then blows sky high every six months.
Few debauchers can tolerate having a slow-and-steady fund so named (in an ever-fragile piggy bank), and so they willingly pay a giant house fee for a socially acceptable cover story, and for never having access to equity they can call their own, or available on a schedule anyone prone to busting their balls can predict in advance.
There is arguably a difference between a 'fair' game with lousy odds and straight up fraud:
Casinos obviously don't tend to bother with games that lack a house edge(either games played against the house that have a less than 100% return rate or games between players with a house rake); but if the device operates precisely as the payout schedule says it will it isn't a fraudulent losing proposition.
In the glorious world of online gambling, the combination of technical opacity and operators generally working out of assorted regulatory loopholes means that you may or may not even be able to see the payment schedule; much less have any assurance that the system is operating in accordance with it. If the game is against other players; you have no way to know how many of them are collaborating with one another, or with the house, or are house bots throwing around imaginary money to keep the stakes up.
The fact that irrational actors make the best customers tends to mean that gambling establishments do everything they can to give you the wrong impression about their product, even when legally required to not technically be lying, and that can be a real problem; but it's a bigger problem still when outright lying is also an option.
It is true that bookies do not gamble more than other businessmen. If they are competent they set the odd so that there is close-to-even exposure on both sides, so that it does not matter who wins in the long run, their pay-out is the same and they make their safely money on the vigorish. Averaging over time allows adjustment of imperfections in the odds setting. Its all about making the most money possible in a predictable way.
But book making is not an instantaneous frictionless process. Bookies make mistakes, which will cost them. They will pay-out too much and thus not make what they expect on the vig. They will make it up in time, but a loss is a loss.
These researchers developed not a technique to predict who would win, but bookies with mispriced odds, which allows you to get in on the unexpected large payouts, thus costing the bookie more when this happens. They don't like this, and will stop it if they can detect it - as the paper shows.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
I would give you my mod points if I had any.
Blah Blah Blah.
I have frequently seen things like driving without insurance called a 'gamble'.
If everyone starts using the list of live recommendations, does this mean that the gambling industry won't want to let anyone 'gamble'? Sounds like a win for me :D
Requiem for the American Dream
The question is how much is too much. Most people who think for a minute or two will understand the concept of the vig. It's also understood that the possibility that you might occasionally beat the vig is part of the attraction. The house sees that as part of the cost of doing business. They don't win on every customer every time.
The question is really how far is too far to go in making sure they do win. Even in a game of chance, some people will beat the vig more often than others. How far is too far to go in beating the vig? In casino games, it's fairly well defined where the line is. There are a few bright lines in sports betting, such as not threatening or paying off players, but there's not really anything about using computers and superior analysis.
They could easily and trivially play fair in this case.
The algorithm used for winning is published. So, bookies can run it themselves. When it predicts betters winning on the odds they have planned, they can lower the odds so the algorithm no longer predict that outcome.
This way, bookies rake in as usual. And people using this algorithm no longer see "guaranteed payouts" predicted.Nobody needs to be banned,
Now the gambling industry is going to thank the professor for helping them improve their odds setting strategy. The code is public domain, the house will use this, instead of guess work. In the end the house margin will improve from 3.3% to may be 6%
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
"We scraped all the gambling sites, averaged their predictions to arrive at a consensus, and then bet when we found a site that diverged significantly from the consensus." Text could be even shorter if they just used the term everyone else uses - "arbitrage".
They're taking the average of a bunch of lines and taking the outliers. I did this crap for fun, betting 1/2 kelly. The fact that someone wrote 30 pages of a paper on this is pretty LOL. You don't need averages if you can find a book that takes big wagers and never kicks people off. (PInnacle) If they can do that and survive, then their line should be better than the average. (In fact, many of the books would likely just be mirroring Pinnacle at the time) Certain books are known for giving really weak lines, or 2 sets of lines etc. There are many different angles the sportsbooks could take.
as far as i understand this algoritm is based on assumption that the odds bookmakers reveal are more or less trustworthy(which presumably is a request from regulators).
to render this method ineffective it would require for them to change their strategy how these odds are assigned. it would take a reasonable amount of time and funds to adjust the odds in their favor. and even if they do, the basics of this paper still would be valid.
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You are ignoring the highly competitive nature of book making, and the need to offer competitive prices.
You are also ignoring human nature.
Yes, it is true that bookies will start by aiming to maintain a margin (say 8%) by trying to keep both sides of the book balanced...
But there are two things that make this difficult:
Short of suspending trade on one side of the book, there is no real way to keep the books balanced. You can just offer more and more lucrative prices on the other side, and hope people take up your offer. But it is not guaranteed... and if you play it too safe and just keep suspending one side of the book whenever it gets ahead, you will lose reputation and customers faster than you can hit "suspend".
You are also competing against dozens of other book makers and while you may want to lower prices to better limit your risk, if you are constantly playing it safer than the market as a whole... you will lose customers.
And then, only then, do you start getting in to incorrect pricing.
Source: I work for one of the world's largest book makers.
I would give you my mod points if I had any.
I'd ask him what the fuck "vigorish" means first, but each to their own.
Yes they should "make it up over time", but that's not what the bookies want. They are trying to have their cake and eat it too. So when betting is going against the odds they are "scared" that the "wrong outcome" will occur rather than "bet their own odds". If they left well enough alone they'd win most of those "wrong wagers" and only pay out against the odds once in a while, and on average they'd still be well ahead.
But that's not what they want, so they adjust the odds based on how money is being bet. But that way implies the bettors know better than the odds makers but that makes no sense. The odds shouldn't adjust based on how money is bet but only on factors related to 1 team or the other winning. If they do their job properly they'd make more money in the long run from idiots trying to "beat the odds" or just because they "have to bet for their team", and they'd only pay out big once in awhile.
So because the bookies are trying to "game the system", that they leave "bread crumbs" around because of providing incorrect signals to the bettors is their own damb fault and someone smart enough to follow the bread crumbs shouldn't be punished for doing so. The proper fix is to leave the odds alone and let the chips fall where they may, and yes once in a while the coin will land on it's edge leading to a big payout, but that payout will come from money that other bettors bet on that possibility on the 9 milion times it didn't land on its edge.
I would give you my mod points if I had any.
I'd ask him what the fuck "vigorish" means first, but each to their own.
It is a term familiar to me as a UK reader from American crime books, though I've mostly seen it used to mean interest on a (dodgy) loan, but it can also mean the boookie's/house cut in gambling.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it