Hey...I was wondering if anyone has heard of this, as I stumbled upon it the other day. I like counterintuitive paradox math problems and hadn’t heard of it. But it could clearly be applied to sports betting since it has to do with how much to bet based on your confidence in the bet. Might be useful for
@mgcolby ’s system if he isn’t already bet sizing based on his system’s probability.
And
@Biffins you are a hedge fund manager correct?
I’m guessing there’s an online calculator that can simplify this, but here’s the article and the basic concept.
Kelly criterion - Wikipedia
In one study, each participant was given $25 and asked to bet on a coin that would land heads 60% of the time. Participants had 30 minutes to play, so could place about 300 bets, and the prizes were capped at $250. The behavior of the test subjects was far from optimal:
Remarkably, 28% of the participants went bust, and the average payout was just $91. Only 21% of the participants reached the maximum. 18 of the 61 participants bet everything on one toss, while two-thirds gambled on tails at some stage in the experiment.[9][10]
Using the Kelly criterion and based on the odds in the experiment (ignoring the cap of $250 and the finite duration of the test), the right approach would be to bet 20% of the pot on each toss of the coin (see first example below). If losing, the size of the bet gets cut; if winning, the stake increases. If the bettors had followed this rule (assuming that bets have infinite granularity and there are up to 300 coin tosses per game and that a player who reaches the cap would stop betting after that), an average of 94% of them would have reached the cap, and the average payout would be $237.36. (In this particular game, because of the cap, a strategy of betting only 12% of the pot on each toss would have even better results.)
here are the results from the Conference Championship Games....
