Tag Archives: gambling

College Football? There’s an API for that

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I’ve always wondered if there is a public source of college football stats to play with, and there is (at least one) called the College Football Database. There’s also an R package that taps it.

Of course, don’t think for a second that you can crunch these numbers and make money through gambling. Only large “professional gamblers” can consistently make money through gambling, by (legally, as I understand it, at least in certain states) cornering the market by manipulating betting spreads. The idea there is that you can bet a large amount of money on the underdog in a contest that is not getting a lot of attention, which will move the spread in favor of the underdog. You can then bet an even larger amount of money on the favorite. If you are able to manipulate the odds in your favor, you will lose this bet less than half the time, and over time you will make money off the backs of us poor schmucks who take bets with expected values less than what we put in. Don’t try this – there are smarter, richer people than you doing it and you can’t beat them. Also, don’t take my word for it that it would be legal. Finally, think of making small, occasional, close-to-even-money bets as a source of cheap entertainment and you’ll be okay, and then only if you do not have a tendency to become addicted.

An API, by the way, is an Application Programming Interface.

In contrast to a user interface, which connects a computer to a person, an application programming interface connects computers or pieces of software to each other. It is not intended to be used directly by a person (the end user) other than a computer programmer who is incorporating it into software. An API is often made up of different parts which act as tools or services that are available to the programmer. A program or a programmer that uses one of these parts is said to call that portion of the API. The calls that make up the API are also known as subroutines, methods, requests, or endpoints. An API specification defines these calls, meaning that it explains how to use or implement them.

Wikipedia

more on lottery winners

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I followed up on a link in yesterday’s story about lottery winners. In 2017 a group publishing in the Columbia Journalism Review submitted Freedom of Information Act requests to basically all the U.S. state lotteries and analyzed all the data they were able to get. The results are really surprising, verging on basically impossible.

  • Clarance Jones of Lynn, Massachusetts, the nation’s most frequent winner, claimed more than 7,300 tickets worth $600 or more in only six years.
  • Jones would have had to spend at least $300 million to have a 1-in-10 million chance of winning so often, according to a statistician we consulted at the University of California, Berkeley. (Jones did not respond to requests for comment.)
  • The odds are extraordinary even for winners with far smaller win tallies. According to the analysis, Nadine Vukovich, Pennsylvania’s most frequent winner, would have had to spend $7.8 million to have a 1-in-10 million chance of winning her 209 tickets worth $600 or more.

What could explain any of this? I don’t know, of course. But here are a few explanations that would fit the evidence.

  1. Psychic powers, or just straight up magic. Let’s rule this out.
  2. The data is flawed and/or the analysis of the data is flawed. An intern filled down the same name next to all the winning numbers in a spreadsheet. Something like this seems likely.
  3. Corruption. Certainly plausible.
  4. Computer bugs or computer hacking. This does not seem impossible to me. A pseudo-random number generator could be programmed wrong, using a seed that is predictable somehow. Or someone stole the code and figured out the seed. This has happened with slot machines. I don’t know how similar lottery machines are to slot machines but they would seem similar.
  5. People are figuring out ways to exploit certain obscure, flawed games. We know this has happened. The people who run the lottery know this too, and it is hard to imagine them making these mistakes often, and not correcting them quickly when they occasionally do.
  6. Shadowy crime syndicates, corporations, middle eastern princes, Russian oligarchs, Professor Moriarty (etc.) are funding corruption and/or exploiting flaws on a large scale and/or hacking into lottery computers. The world is not what it seems, and if you are not one of the chosen few you are just another victim plugged into the blood-sucking matrix.

I’d place most of my bets on #2 and #3, and a small side bet on #4 or #5.

beating the lottery

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Here’s a long, interesting article in Huffington Post about a couple who developed a system to beat flawed lottery games in Michigan and Massachusetts. Eventually, they got found out, but not before making over $7 million. They reported all their earnings and paid all their taxes. Nobody really got in trouble, expect some store owners who lost their licenses to sell lottery tickets for breaking minor rules. Some other groups of people managed to exploit this same game too.

As interesting as the whole story is, there are a few paragraphs buried in the middle that really caught my eye. There really are people out there who win the lottery more than anyone should by random chance.

A 2017 investigation by the Columbia Journalism Review found widespread anomalies in lottery results, difficult to explain by luck alone. According to CJR’s analysis, nearly 1,700 Americans have claimed winning tickets of $600 or more at least 50 times in the last seven years, including the country’s most frequent winner, a 79-year-old man from Massachusetts named Clarance W. Jones, who has redeemed more than 10,000 tickets for prizes exceeding $18 million.

It’s possible, as some lottery officials have speculated, that a few of these improbably lucky individuals are simply cashing tickets on behalf of others who don’t want to report the income. There are also cases in which players have colluded with lottery employees to cheat the game from the inside; last August, a director of a multistate lottery association was sentenced to 25 years in prison after using his computer programming skills to rig jackpots in Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma and Wisconsin, funneling $2.2 million to himself and his brother.

But it’s also possible that math whizzes like Jerry Selbee are finding and exploiting flaws that lottery officials haven’t noticed yet. In 2011, Harper’s wrote about “The Luckiest Woman on Earth,” Joan Ginther, who has won multimillion-dollar jackpots in the Texas lottery four times. Her professional background as a PhD statistician raised suspicions that Ginther had discovered an anomaly in Texas’ system. In a similar vein, a Stanford- and MIT-trained statistician named Mohan Srivastava proved in 2003 that he could predict patterns in certain kinds of scratch-off tickets in Canada, guessing the correct numbers around 90 percent of the time. Srivastava alerted authorities as soon as he found the flaw. If he could have exploited it, he later explained to a reporter at Wired, he would have, but he had calculated that it wasn’t worth his time. It would take too many hours to buy the tickets in bulk, count the winners, redeem them for prizes, file the tax forms. He already had a full-time job.

algorithms

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Algorithms don’t sound like a topic for riveting reading, but these two articles are pretty good.

The first is from a marketing magazine, Adbusters. The claim it makes – that markets have never really worked before, but are starting to work now because of computer algorithms – is  bit of a stretch, but entertaining. Here’s a quote:

The critical flaw in Hayek’s vision of the hand was that a “central body” could never gather enough information. We know this to be untrue, and with big data and the analysis and manipulation of that data through algorithmic equation, the missing link between money and the machine was discovered.

The searches we make, the news we read, the dates we go on, the advertisements we see, the products we buy and the music we listen to. The stock market … All informed by this marriage between mathematics and capital, all working together in perfect harmony to achieve a singular goal — equilibrium. But it’s a curious sort of equilibrium. Less to do with the relationship between supply and demand, and more about the man and the market.

All these algorithms we encounter throughout the day, they’re working toward a greater goal: solving problems and learning how to think. Like the advent and rise of high–frequency trading, they’re part of an optimization trend that leads to a strange brand of perfection: automated profit.

The second, from ESPN, is about how numbers are being crunched by big-time professional sports gamblers:

Eventually, he grew to understand one of Walters’ keys to success: Some of his bets were intentional losers, designed to manipulate the bookmakers’ odds. Walters might bet $50,000 on a team giving 3 points, then $75,000 more on the same team when the line reaches 3.5. The moment the line gets to 4, a runner is instructed to immediately place a larger bet — perhaps $250,000 — on the other team. The $125,000 on the initial lines will be lost, but if things go according to plan, the $250,000 on the other side will win enough to make up for it many times over. Walters uses the same method on multiple games, often risking millions each weekend.

Since the days of the Computer Group, analytically inclined professional gamblers have relied on technology as well as research to produce what is called a delta: the difference between the Vegas line and what the bettors conclude the point spread should be. The greater the delta, the more money a gambler like Walters will bet. There’s nothing illegal about manipulating lines, and many prominent gamblers have the ability to move a line with as little as $1,000. Walters’ strategy is simply more sophisticated and uses more people, better information and, of course, more dollars bet in far more places than anyone else’s, insiders say…

The vast Walters network also includes a guy on the East Coast known as The Reader, who scans local newspapers, websites, blogs and Twitter for revealing tidbits or injury updates. That information is weighed and plugged into the computer alongside other statistical data — from field conditions to intricate breakdowns of officiating crews. Armed with algorithms and probability theories, the objective is to find the mispriced team, then hammer the line to where Walters wants it.