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GoSouthCourt OP t1_jctqopb wrote

Last week, Cheltenham hosted one of the largest horse racing events in the UK. Gambling plays a significant role at the festival, so I plotted the outcome of 4 different strategies that a gambler may implement during the event. They are:

  • Favourite only: Bet £10 on the pre-race favourite of every race
  • 2nd to 5th: Bet £2.50 on the 2nd to 5th pre-race favourite of every race
  • All horses except Top 5: Split £10 across the horses that are not in the top 5 and bet on all of them equally (So if there are 10 horses, bet £2.00 on the 6th to 10th pre-race favourite)
  • All horses: Split £10 across all horses and bet on all of them equally (If there are 10 horses, bet £1.00 on each of them)

The empirical expected values of the strategies are 73.5%, 76.3%, 61.8%, 70.2% respectively.

A few notes:

  • Odds are calculated with Industry Starting Price, which is close to the median price of all major bookmakers in the UK
  • If there is a tie between 1st and 2nd, the stake is split evenly among the two horses. No other tie in prices relevant to this calculation occurs.
  • Gambling is a scam. You are expected to loss around £3 to the bookmaker for every £10 you gamble, which is far worse than most slots (they tend to have EV of at least 90%)

Source: https://www.timeform.com/cheltenham-festival/odds

Tools: Python's matplotlib, Excel

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ImpliedProbability t1_jcxr6dd wrote

No one employs these strategies. This is a naive analysis.

Plenty of sharp money makes profit from gambling. Tony Bloom is a notable, high-profile figure who made all his money from gambling, and still generates large sums from it. He has been so successful in mathematically calculating value bets he is now the owner of Brighton football club, and the 'Asian handicap' exists because of him.

You have a very basic understanding of gambling and are coming at it from a biased angle that presumes to treat everyone like children that shouldn't be left to the consequences of their own bad decisions.

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Thebitterestballen t1_jcxtdak wrote

Yeah, you don't really make money from any kind of gambling by playing the odds/maths alone but by playing the people or having more information than others.. My brother used to make money from online poker, but he was a very average poker player. His entire strategy was based on profiling other players to rate them as good or bad and then joining games that have a large number of bad players... My point being many people DO play in a simplistic way, if there are enough naive players you can take relatively more of their money.

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krs1one1 t1_jcxy6kd wrote

I think your naive is you don’t think the vast majority of general population having a random bet AREN’T taking one of these strategies.

People who bet “seriously”, obviously not. But I’d be shocked if the vast majority of blow ins for. A big race weekend don’t either have a favorite or roughies approach.

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ImpliedProbability t1_jd4fil8 wrote

They aren't. I've never met or heard of a single individual who either only backs the favourite, or backs multiple selections in each race based solely on price.

In conclusion: you're as clueless as the OP. Most random punters will have a look at form, names, trainers or jockeys. There is no-one who is purely looking at the prices like this data does.

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krs1one1 t1_jd51kr2 wrote

I mean, I only played poker professionally for about a decade and my best friend for that entire time WAS bookie.

But hey. What would I know!?

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