Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Dear tens of readers,

I would like to encourage you all to go read the blog of someone who ISN'T completely preoccupied with really boring software programs.

Love,
Mike


How many times does something have to happen before you believe it's not just blind luck?

With presidential elections that number is pretty low. People in this nation elected George Bush TWICE. That's not just luck. That's a nation of people who are completely incomprehensible to me.

What about making baseball bets? How many bets would you have to make before you believed your results weren't due to good or bad luck? Two probably isn't enough. I arbitrarily decided that 100 was probably a pretty good number.

As you may recall, I've been spending much of my free time over the last couple months writing a computer program that would allow me to beat the casino. At this point it's a fairly complicated program, utilizing my favorite baseball statistics, some widely-accepted baseball principles, and a few numbers that I pulled straight out of my sphincter. The bits from the latter are unarguably the smelliest bits.

The program is by no means done. The data that it uses for it's decision making could use some cleaning, and the sphinter parts need a little.... uh.... tightening up. Regardless, the program is probably about 95% as accurate as it's ever going to get with my limited brain power behind it.

I've been running this program for a couple weeks now, and I've been making virtual bets with it against internet casino odds that I've found posted online. I've "placed" 121 of these imaginary bets and I've been tracking my results to see whether I would have won or lost money had these been real bets. 121 bets doesn't represent a huge amount of data, but it's a reasonable sample size.

So, what are my results? So far it looks like for every bet I place, I can expect to win about 9%.

9%! That's huge!

If your stocks went up 9% every year, you'd consider that to be a decent investment. What if they went up 9% EVERY DAY? That's what has happened so far with my imaginary bets.

Of course, I realize that there's a lot of luck involved here, and my results over the last couple weeks don't guarantee anything about future results, but I'm positively giddy over what I see here so far. Although it's entirely possible that a few days of bad luck could wipe out my virtual winnings, similarly a few good days could significantly increase them. Really, there's only one teensy-tiny little eensy-weensy problem.

Sports gambling is sort of, kind of, not entirely legal in California. :(

So now I just need to figure out how to make money off this software. Would anyone out there like to pay me, say $1,000,000 for this? I'll throw in the damn Ginsu knives.

6 comments:

patsy said...

gambling is not legal in arkansas on anything. i am going out and paint the town RED you commented on my blog. maybe pete rose would buy your program. he says he is sorry he gambled on sports but probably he is just sorry he got caught.

dolface said...

move the server to reno, visit it periodically to 'tune' it, and you're all set.

also, sell shares on bets, i'll buy some (and take 10% off the top for my BRILLIANT idea).

or is that illegal?

Siôn said...

Sports betting is illegal? Really? You learn something every day. However, as it is legal - almost encouraged - on this fair Isle, I'm sure we could come to some sort of agreement with money transfers and stuff.
Did I ever tell you about my millionaire uncle from Nigeria by the way?

Anonymous said...

Oh, speaking of sports, well, I don't speak of sports since I know nothing about any ball, but my grandson, my son so proudly boasts, intercepted a pass and ran a lot of yards touchdown and he is only 8 and is playing on a team of 10-12 year olds. I hate it, that he is playing ball and not playing the piano, but I don't get to choose those things, I also hate that he is playing with older boys, because he might be tall for his age, but he is still only 8, now, what does that have to do with your software program? Nothing, well, it is about ball. I hope it sells. Oh, if it is illegal to bet on ball in California, then it should be illegal to buy betting tools, don't you think. Or not?
zelda and when are you going to fix that thing, the thing that will let me in the regular way?

carey said...

Ok, I'm no mathmetician, but: are you saying that if you bet on the outcome of 100 games, that you'd be right for 9 of them? Given that, theoretically, any team could win, wouldn't your odds, even without betting, be similar to flipping a coin? So you could theoretically be correct 50% of the time?

Sorry. Damn English major.

Mike said...

Patsy, actually although it's illegal to run a casino in Arkansas, I believe it's perfectly legal for you to make online bets from Arkansas.

Dolface, I think that idea is close, but no Nevada casino is going to accept electronic bets from my computer. Perhaps a similar idea though...

Josh, I saw that article too! But what kind of self-respecting sports gambler BUYS their information? I've heard odds "geniuses" advertise their wares on radio and it's always cheesy.

Siôn, if I had any way whatsoever to verify that you weren't cheating me at every turn, I'd consider your offer. And I've also been in email contact with your uncle.

Zelda, don't expect laws to be consistent or make sense. And, it's not really in my control to fix this Beta Blogger commenting issue. The geniuses as Google will have to do that for us.

Carey, no I'm not saying that I'm winning 9% of my bets, I'm saying that I'm making 9% profit on average on each bet. I win a good majority of the bets, but because of the odds on the bets, many of them don't pay out very well.

If you're curious, and you shouldn't be, I can send you an email explaining what that 9% means.