INTERESTING
THOUGHTS ON "RANDOMNESS"
Here
are some thoughts on "randomness" that you may
find enlightening:
It
seems to me that the best approach is that of form study
using a problem solving model. This takes the form of
thinking about how an event might turn out by using all
available information, assessing it and then assigning
your own probabilities to the possible outcomes of that
event.
What
really interested me about it was how your mind can
deceive you because it always looks for patterns and
logic even though the events are completely random.I
think the betting exchange and the 100% book has caught
out a lot of punters. It seems to work something like
this. You are lucky and get a lot of positive results.
Your mind adds two and two and you think you have
an edge because you are in front, laying 100/1 shots
would be a good example of this. It goes on for long
enough and you develop the Messiah syndrome.
The inevitable happens and your results then fall onto
the negative side, as things start evening themselves
out a bit.
When you've blown your bank and a bit more, you (say)
something like .. "Betfair has ruined my life".
In fact all that has happened is that you have been fooled
by randomness and you never had an edge in the first place.Obviously,
things are more random at lower chances of probability,
so you are more likely to be lucky/unlucky, than if you
are at higher chances of probability. Its interesting
that the on-line hi/lo games results are based on 300,000,000
games to generate their results. These games are audited
and are judged to be ˜fair".
Horse racing is more of a closed universe in that it has
specific rules and the event type is repeated daily, worldwide.
So you have a chance of prediction if you can pin down,
prove and predict causation. A system might have a provable
cause ( as to why it might work and when it won't work.Causation
to me has to be, which horse on the day has the speed,
ability and fitness to reach the winning line before the
others. It might still not be completely predictable as
form in the past is the past; fitness is not even fully
known by the trainer; the going might be totally different
from the advertised and the racing pace that dictates
the result is yet another estimate. At least you are pointing
your estimates in the same, consistent direction.
If you stick to one method then you can have a chance
of seeing how well it behaves, when it behaves well and
what random effects might apply. If you chop and change
every time a result does not go the way predicted then
no chance of learning anything. The method / system is
as random as the result.Being random means that it is
as unpredictable at low odds as for high odds. So a hot
favourite that breaks a blood vessel for the first time
can fail and can fail for many other reasons that are
ignored as unlikely in a single event even if they do
occur quite regularly over a season.
It made me wonder if we overestimate/underestimate probability
and think, are the outcome of events less predictable
than we as estimators of probability assume. Are we possibly
putting a larger bias on certain factors than we should,
are these events more competitive than we really want
to believe? Ie:is that top class horse giving weight to
all his rivals up against today or will his class still
see him take the race, but the probability, dominance
he has is less than we, the market assumes and therefore
one or two of the opposition has an higher probability
of wining
Yes and no. If a horse has a 25% chance of winning, it
also has a 75% chance of losing. If we run that over 100
races we would expect the horse to win 25 times and lose
75 times. But what if we don't get exactly 25 winners?
what if we get 23/77 split, could we expect the next 100
to give us 27/73, or might our split never reach parity
in relation to its chance? When all is said and done about
pricing races, all we are doing is glorified guesswork,
based on what has happened in the past. I am coming around
to think that we would be better thinking that odds should
have a +/- built in to their chances to cater for luck.
For your example of the 25% true chance of winning expecting
to win 25 races in a 100:
The Bernoulli equation which is the basic formulae for
such random events gives the following probabilities of
wins in a 100 races:
15
wins 0.57%
20 wins 4.93%
25 wins 9.18%
30 wins 4.57%
35 wins 0.70%, and so on
You have to add up all the possibilities from 1 win in
a 100 to a 100 wins in a 100 to get 100%. The chance of
the "expected" 25 wins is only 9.18%, when most
people would believe it to be nearer 100% - they would
put money on it but again are fooled by randomness. This
may be where "luck" in systems or pricing can
be more rationally explained. You can never really say
a horse is 3/1 but you can say
it is somewhere between 5/2 and 7/2 with some probability.
You cannot believe a horse is rated at exactly 100 but
at best is rated somewhere between 95 and 105, say. Your
system which on average picks out 25 winners in a 100
system race trial may only score 20 for the next series
of 100 races. Bad luck ?-. 30 wins - Good Luck? No - absolutely
nothing has changed - it is just how probability works.
Good luck is when you are favoured quite randomly by chance;
bad luck when you are not. You can make probability work
for you by skewing the odds in your favour but you have
no control over luck or random chance. The longer you
play with odds in your favour, the more likely you are
to reduce the effects of luck. Using Bernouilli's equation
shows the expected probability distibution is less skewed
in proportion to the number of trials. In other words,
as you increase the number of trials, you will find more
values nearer to the middle of the range.
I don't believe you can ever prove conclusively that you
have an edge in relation to betting on horses or most
other sports. If you were to bet on about 800 races and
show a profit, I would accept that you had an edge but
someone else might accept a lesser or greater number.
Pedants might say that it can never be proved because
your next series of 800 bets might wipe out those profits.
Some will say that bookmakers(obviously) enjoy an edge.
While this is self-evident, it is possible for them to
lose over a period. Nothing is certain where subjective
probability and luck are concerned, although we can make
much more confident predictions about things like cards
and dice, where the parameters are objective and well
defined.
Even with cards, dice and roulette wheels(in particular),
computer simulations have shown that only in the very
long run do these probabilty distributions hold true.
People who have bet against the above proposition have
often gone broke. The next step in this discussion involves
posing philosophical questions such as:
given
the randomness of chance or luck(or its capricious nature),
how can we deal with it in our lives? Successful punters
will have had to tackle this thorny question to make any
progress in their quest for the elusive edge.I don't have
any pat answer to this, but thinkers from Socrates to
Berlin have mused over similar questions and generally
concluded that knowlege is the key while ignorance might
be blissful for most people who don't even want to think
about it. Know yourself, know the game, know statistics.
With all that knowledge you might just have the ghost
of a chance of getting that edge. Or, don't bother about
the edge.
Don't even think about it. Just enjoy the day with all
its surprises, then go to bed and forget about it.
We looked at how even with a 100 bets at 3/1 the number
of winners was far more random than common sense expected.
If you look at 100 bets for each of the prices a system
might be used for eg 1/1, 5/4, 13/8 etc etc, say 50 prices
then that means at least 5000 races to test. To be more
certain of any profitability it might mean 50,000 races,
if you can find them. That means going back years, when
the racing factors, market and SP calculation was quite
different. So you never actually arrive - systemwise.
In my opinion, you cannot quantify luck in horse racing
because races(and football games) are chaotic events
where so many expected and unexpected things can happen.
You are better off taking a long term view in the hope
that luck will even itself out. If you do have that
edge, you should be ahead of the game eventually.
