Results Based Thinking Breeds Charlatans

Posted: November 24th, 2009 | Filed under: "Strategy" | Comments Off

Let’s pretend that in the year 1975 a degenerate sports broadcaster for CBS fathered 50 children in 50 different cities and that 23 years later these children shared one common trait: the ability to pick winners ATS at a 52% clip.

For the sake of this discussion I am going to assume that these hypothetical bastards have to pay -110 on all bets (it is only 1998 after all), are disciplined enough to risk exactly 2.2 units per wager ($550 in this case), and otherwise share all of the defects that most of us possess, including a general inability to quantify our “edge*.”

Using the parameters above and the Monte Carlo simulator provided by XLS Sports, I ran a simulation to see how the results of the 50 half brothers might vary over a 1,000 bet sample size. Here’s what Excel spit out:

Remember, there is no difference between any of these guys, but while Steve M. would be sitting in a GA meeting or lying dead beneath the Meadowlands, Ryan H. would be claiming skill in an AOL chat room and considering turning pro.

Of course given more time the entire Musburg…errrr, excuse me, bastard clan would be exposed as the (slight) losers that they are, but it is unlikely that this would occur before others became collateral damage to randomness mistaken for skill. We saw it happen here last year at The TMLJ, and there is no doubt that it still goes down every single day elsewhere.

What’s the solution? There really isn’t one, but I’ll be discussing some concepts in upcoming posts that could help us to guard against this a little in the future. Step #1 is obviously to stop being results based in your thinking. I think for the most part I am already preaching to the choir there, but the objective today was to bring the stragglers and future results oriented thinkers up to speed.

If you’d like to further discuss this issue as it pertains to sports wagering then feel free to drop by the designated thread in Contrarianville.

* – Edge in quotes because they are actually losing players.

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