a collection of [gambling?] thoughts
We’re So Back.
33 days ago the Cartoon Horse officially resigned as a Substack writer.
33 days later & he’s back at it.
giving up/exiting the game/leaving the table is a powerful little trick in life. why? it helps you find the way. you quit & get quiet for a while and bam, you know where you are. and where you’re heading.
will never understand the ‘never give up’-crowd & their love for artificial ideas
one of the reasons behind the birth of this blog was to earn some ‘real’, non-gambling money that could enter a company sheet & perhaps, if lucky, help the author larp as an [insert entrepreneurial title] IRL & avoid having to live with the inevitable degenerate gambler limitations in everyday life. one thing led to another & even if the blog itself didn’t print [in fact, ‘twas closer to the inverse], it helped in opening paths to other, more lucrative biz options. today we’re gambling as never before & larping [‘data reseller’ & ‘software provider’] as never before. mission accomplished.
all previous posts have gone from paid → free by the way. happy reading to the poors.
presidential election thoughts
interesting betting market event last week [zero interest in politics, trump’s a chad though].
presidential election markets are beautiful in that they allow for incredibly deep dives for ‘tism bettors. loads of perspectives & data points to cover and understand, in particular if aiming to trade in-play markets. except for some extraordinary, truly rare events [do happen every now and then], everyday betting is mostly about clicking the same angles over and over again. one-off events such as this one provide an intriguing contrast.
a combination of the market & a well designed model is probably superior to either of the two alone. make sure you build this 'stacked' model yourself though and avoid having it fed to you by another gambler/modeller
the change in, & disconnect between, the EC & the popular vote markets, esp at betfair [go ahead and compare the last week of trading or so with the action at polymarket and kalshi], implied a lot of the probability should be put on the 'trump EC, kamala PV' outcomes. the closer to election day, the more the probability mass shifted towards these outcomes. reasonable? i don't think so. max likelihood explanation? bookies laying off trump-action.
throughout the 'election period' there was a lot of money coming for trump. to think all of it was retarded $'s is in itself kind of retarded. tbh clueless about who potential counterparties were but to think all of it was just degens, arbers & hedgooors is probably wrong. when you don’t know your counterparty you should definitely be scared on average.
with three large platforms you inevitably observe some interesting stuff by properly tracking them all in parallel.
an order at platform A is just an arbitrage away from accessing the liquidity at platform B. yes there can be costs involved, but there are not seven or eight different markets. there’s one market, and one only.
if i find myself laying a horse [trump] in repeated fashion & it ends up winning very, very comfortably, i never assume 'the degenerate counterparty was just lucky'. however, in case it's a runner with tons of predicted 'performance variance', i’m usually not as worried
in hindsight, everything looks brilliant. & sometimes it is. some conduct private polls in political markets while others [yard enjoyoors] study whether the set of selections they’re about to pick from are erect or not. in both cases it’s hard to quantify the ‘brilliance’ without seeing the full picture.
public modellers, such as silver, usually get tons of criticism from the gambling community. they’re running a complex & difficult modelling project [clever] but keep blending this piece of the puzzle with straight out retarded comments/statements → i kind of agree with the sentiment.
to succeed in betting markets you need two things. +EV [or well, +ROI] and volume. very simple.
don’t take bad bets [unless you’re doing it for the sole purpose of learning, then it’s okay]. profitability = running a set of [highly] profitable strategies. if any given bet doesn’t pass the filters of at least one of the strats, it’s not bet. very simple. yes, this means your volume will be terrible until you’ve constructed a set of such strategies.
+EV can be found literally everywhere. volume is more difficult. before you embark on a 6 month modelling journey, take a proper look at the relevant market & compute a couple of base estimates for what kind of volume it’d be possible to push through this market/strategy. unless it’s scalable, it’s useless. *scalability is king*.
in particular, if you’re new [& serious about, if you ‘just love modelling’ then go ahead, lol] to this there are good chances you’ll end up wasting tons of time before you notice: ‘ah I’ll never be able to make much out of this angle’.
dumb edges are good edges. not everything has to be built bill bettor-style.
modelling provides great assistance in identifying +EV. automation helps a ton in pushing volume. conclusion: learn how to use computers.
absolutely zero excuses in 2024 with chadgpt on your side. a lot of content on this blog re scraping, bet-botting & data analysis.
+EV, +ROI is neat, but -EV, +ROI is amazing.
if you’re 10 % of the volume, ask yourself: why aren’t you 11 % of the volume?
outsourcing bet placement is necessary to stack up volume. there are two ways to do this: either you work with a bot, or you work with a human. if possible, the robot route is in many cases the most efficient one. but life happens between humans. hence, combine. [work with people, but make sure both parties have something to offer. also, ensure that any sort of deal/partnership yield great returns for everyone involved. things become so much easier when everyone prints [$’s or knowledge]].
you think you can handle variance.
until you experience variance.
racing thoughts
it should come as no surprise for readers of this blog that we’re primarily [financially & emotionally] invested in horse racing markets around here.
the racing scene is made up of three types of ‘matching engines’ [except for citibet [keen on accessing: if you’ve got any recommendations for smooth ways to join the movement, feel free to get in touch] which seems to be built upon an interesting combo between the first two of them. the exchange model, the parimutuel model & fixed odds betting.
in easy-to-beat order:
fixed odds: the easiest design to beat. you’re essentially up against [especially if betting at open/early] a relatively uninformed market maker [bookmaker] who’s forced to price literally every horse in every race correctly [or well, within the range true price +- their ‘spread’]. sniping these counterparties shouldn’t be too hard if you know what you’re doing.
exchange markets [betfair]. difficult to beat as the ‘volume-weighted competition’ is very sophisticated, i.e. hard to get matched at good prices with decent size. to your advantage: if you find ways to match against & restrict your action to less informed participants you need not worry about outperforming the sharks. also there are situations where fills pretty much remove information [usually in betting it’s the other way around]. a large block trade occurring between two sharps at a given price doesn’t [mechanically] stop the market from jumping around with the same curiosity it did before the trade took place.
pools: always competing against the volume-weighted opinions of the rest of the market. fee structures [as in the exchange case] important, if your counterparty is on rebates and you’re not you’re playing a very difficult game. price is uncertain as odds aren’t finalized until the pool closes. certainly see how this both could and should be a huge issue for the recreational gambler, but if you’re trying to operate on a professional level it shouldn’t matter too much?
most likely the hardest *design* to beat, given a predetermined group of counterparties/competitors. in practice, whether you’ll be profitable or not will of course depend less on the design and more on how your numbers fare against the volume-weighted opinions of the rest of the market.
all for today,
until next time…
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