My journey applying AI to horse racing
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My journey applying AI to horse racing
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Re: My journey applying AI to horse racing
#2All in! You can't lose. Bet your house!
Re: My journey applying AI to horse racing
#3> The last results, after remodeling the problem, came to be on par with the odds themselves. Around 37%. This time my AI was as good as consensus at betting harness racing.
using the same dataset as betters with a NN is not really better than running a regression on it, so this doesn't really surprise me.
nn are able to find patterns with things others than historical series. taking this forward would need to combine historical race sets external sources that could have correlated information available that's not easy to extract by simple regression, like news and articles whenever available or meteorological data or whatever, just feed it everything and let the nn sort itself the useless data out
Re: My journey applying AI to horse racing
#4> The last results, after remodeling the problem, came to be on par with the odds themselves. Around 37%. This time my AI was as good as consensus at betting harness racing. using the same dataset as betters with a NN is not really better than running a regression on it, so this doesn't really surprise me. nn are able to find patterns with things others than historical series. taking this forward would need to combin…
That’s in fact what was done. Facts about the races (everything except for the actual odds for the horses) combined with Google Maps API. It basically predicted the odds of the horses (more or less).
Re: My journey applying AI to horse racing
#5He has this completely wrong. The idea in pare-mutuel betting is not to pick the winner. The favorite usually wins, but the house cut makes betting the favorite a net lose.
The goal is to find underpriced bets, where the collective estimate of the odds is far from the prediction systems's estimate.
Re: My journey applying AI to horse racing
#6He has this completely wrong. The idea in pare-mutuel betting is not to pick the winner. The favorite usually wins, but the house cut makes betting the favorite a net lose. The goal is to find underpriced bets, where the collective estimate of the odds is far from the prediction systems's estimate.
That’s all good. If an algorithm can predict the odds then you can compare the odds of the algorithm to those give by the bookies and voila, there you’ll find you under priced bets.
Picking the favourite to win is a measure of how well the algorithm is at predicting the odds.
Re: My journey applying AI to horse racing
#7He has this completely wrong. The idea in pare-mutuel betting is not to pick the winner. The favorite usually wins, but the house cut makes betting the favorite a net lose. The goal is to find underpriced bets, where the collective estimate of the odds is far from the prediction systems's estimate.
In this case there is no house. For this to work a player needs to be able to back or lay an outcome.
"In harness racing, you are playing against all the other players. You are not playing the house. The odds of any given horse winning is directly related to the amount of money on it."
Re: My journey applying AI to horse racing
#8This is another case where being rich lets you get richer. :)
I had a friend who had a private box at a horse track. One of the benefits of this box was that you had a personal betting machine. This let you bet on the best odds just seconds before the race every time. I made a lot of money doing that.
You can kind of do it in Vegas too because the sports books aren't usually that busy.
In fact, that hardest part of this strategy is actually figuring out who the favorite is! The odds are usually listed as fractions, but they have different denominators, so you quickly have to convert them all the the LCD and then order them.
But yes, the closer you bet to post time, the better your outcome with this strategy will be.
Re: My journey applying AI to horse racing
#9Interesting comparison to the old fashioned way: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-03/the-gambl...
Re: My journey applying AI to horse racing
#10I found this nugget to be the most valuable:
Simulated flat betting 1$ on 26 000 races over 15 years shows a hefty return on investment
If this is true, why don’t we all just go and hire people in Sweden to put in bets for us at the last minute, based on the favorite horse, and pay them out of the profits? We pay them to do it and we collect the winnings.
If this strategy works it may work elsewhere too. Why not just do that all day long with an army of people? And you aren’t hurting who is the favorite either.