Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Optimal Strategy For Gambling Pools, Aaron C. Brown

International Conference on Gambling & Risk Taking

In gambling pools, entrants submit predictions and the prizes are awarded to the prediction or predictions closest to actual outcomes. Some well-known examples are football pools (both the global and American game versions), toto, NCAA March Madness bracket pools and horse racing tournaments. For small pools with complete information about outcome probabilities, exact game theory optimal solutions are straightforward to compute. If there is also complete information about the number and strategy of other players, optimal exploitive strategies are even easier to derive. These problems have been treated in the literature.

This paper argues that the complete information approaches are …

Well I'Ll Be Damned - Insights Into Predictive Value Of Pedigree Information In Horse Racing, Timothy Baker Mr, Ming-Chien Sung, Johnnie Johnson Professor, Tiejun Ma

International Conference on Gambling & Risk Taking

Fundamental form characteristics like how fast a horse ran at its last start, are widely used to help predict the outcome of horse racing events. The exception being in races where horses haven’t previously competed, such as Maiden races, where there is little or no publicly available past performance information. In these types of events bettors need only consider a simplified suite of factors however this is offset by a higher level of uncertainty. This paper examines the inherent information content embedded within a horse’s ancestry and the extent to which this information is discounted in the United Kingdom bookmaker …