Mathematical Models for Sports Betting

[JamieSignorile]

Hello,

I know this isn't directly related to quant finance but it is an interesting topic. Has anybody come across any articles/ books on topics involving creating models for sports betting? There are many parallels between this topic and trading. For sports fans this could be a creative way to apply quant skills to other areas.

 

[Andy Nguyen]

I know a few people are doing it or interested in doing it, at least when it comes to apply to fantasy sport league betting
@Uncle Max @bob @Yike Lu @alain

 

[Yike Lu]

I know a few people are doing it or interested in doing it, at least when it comes to apply to fantasy sport league betting
@Uncle Max @bob @Yike Lu @alain

I've taken a look at this, but not a serious one. The thing is, like with any source of data, it costs money to get a good clean source of data. If you were to try to extract it from play-by-plays, you would spend 80+% of your time on text processing heuristics to try to figure out what happened on each play. Because of all this effort, most people with this data typically are selling it or are selling analytics based off of it.

That said, I'm sure this field is ripe for quant methods. There was an article about the excess return of players based on draft # (in the REAL NFL draft). The conclusion was late 1st round/early 2nd round picks give the highest excess return. I found the article because on of the authors runs a football analytics service (surprise surprise).

A separate challenge is getting good data for betting odds as well.

 

[PTN]

Hello,

I know this isn't directly related to quant finance but it is an interesting topic. Has anybody come across any articles/ books on topics involving creating models for sports betting? There are many parallels between this topic and trading. For sports fans this could be a creative way to apply quant skills to other areas.

I was contacted by sports betting co. early this year. I did load their data feed, but it doesn't seem liquid enough with a spread of one to two consistently.

 

[tfors]

Try Nate Silver's book, more a light overview though.

 

[JamieSignorile]

One of my professors from school, Joel Sokol, uses a model to predict the NCAA bracket every year.

http://www2.isye.gatech.edu/people/faculty/Joel_Sokol/lrmc/about_lrmc.html
http://www2.isye.gatech.edu/~jsokol/ncaa.pdf

 

[Ken Abbott]

Ken Baron at 2 Sigma wrote a book on using parimutuel analysis in financial markets.

 

[presto]

A great book is Mathletics by Wayne Winston

http://www.amazon.com/Mathletics-Gamblers-Enthusiasts-Mathematics-Basketball/dp/0691154589

 

[Daniel Duffy]

Some punters 'study form', not maths. But how to model rigging?

 

[Cavas]

Bayesian Modelling should work.