Risk vs Uncertainty

In sports betting it’s sometimes hard to judge where you stand on your way to profits. Is it a matter of good fortune (or bad fortune for that matter) or are you genuinely holding an edge over the bookmaker(s)?

To answer this question a proper understanding of risk and uncertainty helps.

Risk, as first articulated by the economist Frank H. Knight in 1921, is something that you can put a price on. Say that you’ll win a poker hand unless your opponent draws to an inside straight: the chances of that happening are exactly 1 chance in 11. This is risk. It is not pleasant when you take a bad beat in poker, but at least you know the odds of it and can account for it ahead of time. In the long run, you’ll make a profit from your opponent making desperate draws with insufficient odds.

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The 80-20 Rule

When it comes to poker, sports betting or any other game of chance your profits are almost never determined by your skills alone, but also by your opponents’ skills.

I was merely in the upper middle class of poker players and needed to be in a game with some bad ones to be a favourite to make money. Fortunately, there were plenty of these bad players – what poker players call fish – during the poker boom years.

There is a learning curve that applies to poker and to most other tasks that involve some type of prediction. The key thing about a learning curve is that it really is a curve: the progress we make at performing the task is not linear. Instead, it usually looks something like the figure below – what I call the Pareto Principle of Prediction.

using-the-pareto-principle-in-betting-graph

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