General question: What else do you wager on?

[Dunbar]

Originally Posted by MaTH716

What's a matter a guy can't like cocks?


But to answer your question,
Poker, Craps, Blackjack, Jai-Alai (absolutley love it)

There's an interesting book on betting Jai-Alai. "Jai Alai Wagering To Win", by Don Lostritto (1985). He calculates the inherent bias that the play format imposes on certain exacta combinations. (Even if each player has a 50% chance of winning every point, some exactas are far more likely than other exactas.) If you bet Jai Alai, I'm sure you already know that; but you may not know the degree of the effect. For example, if everyone is of equal skill (and no one is cheating), then it's 10 times more likely there will be a 3-1 exacta than a 6-8 exacta.

--Dunbar

[robfla]

Originally Posted by Dunbar

There's an interesting book on betting Jai-Alai. "Jai Alai Wagering To Win", by Don Lostritto (1985). He calculates the inherent bias that the play format imposes on certain exacta combinations. (Even if each player has a 50% chance of winning every point, some exactas are far more likely than other exactas.) If you bet Jai Alai, I'm sure you already know that; but you may not know the degree of the effect. For example, if everyone is of equal skill (and no one is cheating), then it's 10 times more likely there will be a 3-1 exacta than a 6-8 exacta.

--Dunbar

I used to have a sheet of like 100+ trifecta combos to play EACH game. ( the tellers hated me ) The numbers would hit like 75% of the time and pay 150-250. This was years ago when there was actually money in Jai Alai pools. The numbers NOT on there were like 8-7-6, 8-7-1, and other numbers that based on the rotation rarely came in, but when they did, usually due to a playoff or extremely long or short game, the tri's would pay 700+. There were quite a few people playing "the numbers".

Used to be a fun sport to watch and bet back in the early 80's

[Dunbar]

Originally Posted by robfla

I used to have a sheet of like 100+ trifecta combos to play EACH game. ( the tellers hated me ) The numbers would hit like 75% of the time and pay 150-250. This was years ago when there was actually money in Jai Alai pools. The numbers NOT on there were like 8-7-6, 8-7-1, and other numbers that based on the rotation rarely came in, but when they did, usually due to a playoff or extremely long or short game, the tri's would pay 700+. There were quite a few people playing "the numbers".

Used to be a fun sport to watch and bet back in the early 80's

The book I mentioned has tri prob's, too. The most likely tri's (under the assumption of each player having an equal chance to win every point) are 142 and 241 at 0.94% probability. Next is 152 and 251 at 0.84%. And 413 and 423 at 0.81%.

The least likely tri's are 487, 567, 578, 678, and 687 which all have less than 0.005% chance of coming in. (they are listed as 0.00% in the book.)

As you realized back then, there's a humongous built-in difference in each tri's likelihood. The likely tri's were 100-200 times more likely to come in than the least likely tri's (under the same assumptions) A lot of players just played their favorite numbers, and in most cases I think it had little to do with the built in bias.

--Dunbar

caveat: Even though the approach is clearly correct, I've never checked the fig's in the book. It wouldn't be hard to check them, though.