Andrew Shindyapin's (andrew) Betting Strategy

Not being a big sports fan, I found WinTheTrophy to be interesting in a different way: I wanted to see if there was a simple set of rules one can follow to consistently win more than what was bet. After a week or two of trying different strategies, I realized the following observations:

  • On average, no one knows the future. That is, if you were to randomly bet on all the teams, your winning percentage will be close to 50%.
  • If the above point is true, you should bet more on the team in a given game with the largest payout.
  • However, you must make sure you gain the advantage of statistical significance: bet on as many teams as possible in a given day.
  • As you win, continue betting on other teams the next day to take advantage of "compounding interest": the more chips you gain, the more you can bet on the following day (until your chip count is reset the following week).
  • This strategy has a weakness of being very naive: you might not want to bet against a team with a perfect winning record playing a team with a "perfect" losing record, for example. However, even with this weakness, this strategy has on average won twice the amount that I bet for a given week. 

After seven weeks of betting, I stopped because I became bored with the copious amount of clicking required to play using my particular strategy (i.e., as many bets as possible on high-payout picks). (Again, I’m not a big sports fan.) However, if (when?) WinTheTrophy offers rule-based betting (or bots, as they’re usually known), I plan on taking advantage of them.

Posted by Andrew Shindyapin Mon, 07 Sep 2009 13:19:00 GMT


Trackbacks

Use the following link to trackback from your own site:
http://blog.winthetrophy.com/trackbacks?article_id=9

Comments

Leave a response

  1. Avatar
    Chris Cairns 28 minutes later:

    Andrew, great write-up! I’ve been wondering why your BetIQ is so high (6.5) yet your winning % is so low (43%). Your strategy definitely explains why this is the case. Amazingly, it has worked because you remain the top Genius after 468 bets.

    Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe most of your bets have been in the MLB. Do you think your strategy would work in other sports as well? Particularly NCAAF?

    In terms of all the clicking, we definitely plan to offer rules-based betting automation. If I knew nothing about sports, and didn’t study any of the matchups, I’d get bored just clicking, too!

  2. Andrew Shindyapin about 2 hours later:

    Chris, thanks for the compliments :-).

    As I mention in my post, this strategy is very naive, so I think it should apply to all sports equally. Of coures, there’s only one way to find out.

Leave a comment

Copyright © 2009-2010 WinTheTrophy LLC. All rights reserved.
The name of and logo for WinTheTrophy are trademarks of WinTheTrophy LLC.
The names BetIQ, BetBot and BetDuel are trademarks of WinTheTrophy LLC.
Patent Rights Pending: 61/338,524 and 61/341,304.