appreciate the write up but is this even AI? It seems like he just did some analysis & stats on observed data, and came up with a simple model.
My journey applying AI to horse racing
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Re: My journey applying AI to horse racing
#12He 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.
Exactly this. You also need to ensure that the underpriced bet actually wins or, if your strategy allows for it, places in the top 3. The odds on a place are generally too low to make this worth it though.
Re: My journey applying AI to horse racing
#13appreciate the write up but is this even AI? It seems like he just did some analysis & stats on observed data, and came up with a simple model.
The article doesn’t really say, as this was a write up of a 20min talk at a conference for economists.
The main model where vanilla ANNs. Also SVMs and LSTMs where tested but unsuccessfully. As I had a lot prior experience writing Java, most models where implemented in the beginning in DeepLearning4J but was in the later stages moved over to the frameworks from Fast.ai.
I’d be happy to do a write up of the details at some point.
The majority of work was in fact the data pre-processing.
Re: My journey applying AI to horse racing
#14This 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 t…
The closer to the off the more accurate the price is (wisdom of the crowd) thus less value, you need to know something others don’t to win long term from taking the starting price!
I assume you are American as everyone in the UK has a personal betting machine and it’s in their pocket.
Re: My journey applying AI to horse racing
#15He 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."
Betfair / any exchange allows you to back/lay.
He seems to be ignoring the overround which is effectively the house and then commission when you are banned and have to resort to the exchanges.
Re: My journey applying AI to horse racing
#16He 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.
Exactly this. You also need to ensure that the underpriced bet actually wins or, if your strategy allows for it, places in the top 3. The odds on a place are generally too low to make this worth it though.
Value is value, doesn’t matter if it wins, its all a numbers game.
Re: My journey applying AI to horse racing
#17appreciate the write up but is this even AI? It seems like he just did some analysis & stats on observed data, and came up with a simple model.
The article doesn’t really say, as this was a write up of a 20min talk at a conference for economists. The main model where vanilla ANNs. Also SVMs and LSTMs where tested but unsuccessfully. As I had a lot prior experience writing Java, most models where implemented in the beginning in DeepLearning4J but was in the later stages moved over to the frameworks from Fast.ai. I’d be happy to do a write up of the details at…
Ah, no need to give me all the details good sir. Appreciate the post. Also yeah, sounds about right with the pre-processing. That is always the case!
Re: My journey applying AI to horse racing
#18He 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.
I agree. The degenerate gambler in me doesn't get much pleasure out of betting on the favorite and winning when they go off at 2/5. IMO it's much more satisfying to box an exacta or trifecta including the favorite and some less favored horses and hit that.
Re: My journey applying AI to horse racing
#19I 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…
well, for once, just because it works it doesn't mean it's worth it. a couple of years ago i read a story about a man who cracked a scratch-off lottery ticket code (the serial numbers were biased). he could have earned more than with his day job if he devoted his time fully to gaming the system, but ... it decided it wasn't good enough - a mindless, robotic task, ending in misery soon.
the take away of the story was that the method was probably known by crime syndicates and used for money laundering, as they have cheap pseudo-slave labour available. but if you're a well educated person with a fulfulling job, you'd go insane soon (and of course, job security - the second the company changes their system you're out).
so with betting, you'd have to invest a lot of time and energy for it to become profitable. as he wrote, you'd have to be at the race tracks and wait until the last possible moment, then driving to the next stadium. and if it was _that_ easy to create a real winning system that depended on local help, the swedes would do it themselves - so your hired goons might stay as long as they needed to understand your system and then continue on their own (lowering your margins in the process).
if the process could be completely automated, i.e. with online betting, the story might be different. but i'm sure there are already a lot of syndicates looking into that (even the analog version). for them it doesn't even have to be profitable. 80% return is good enough for money laundering and they can out-finance the legal competition.
Re: My journey applying AI to horse racing
#20This 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 t…
The closer to the off the more accurate the price is (wisdom of the crowd) thus less value, you need to know something others don’t to win long term from taking the starting price! I assume you are American as everyone in the UK has a personal betting machine and it’s in their pocket.
Jedberg is America. Americans typically don't understand the rule to gambling because they haven't grown up with them, it shows here.