A Prediction Market Whale, and 3 More Things I Like
Imagine if prediction markets had been a thing during the Dean Scream. We probably would have seen a flood of losers asking for their tickets to be refunded.
An Order of Magnitude… Sounds Small… Is Actually Large
Nate Silver was on Bet the Process this week and so they discussed, briefly, Nate’s claims that prediction market efficiency was historically hampered by low liquidity. Nate is now an equity holder in Polymarket. I listen to effectively every BTP, and so I also recommend this episode.
However, if you’re looking for something that goes deeper on the topic of politics betting, then I recommend this podcast with Domer, who is probably the best known serious politics bettor.
There’s a bunch of interesting stuff in the interview, including a co-sign of Silver’s claim that Polymarket has significantly changed the market. Domer says liquidity is at least an order of magnitude greater now, and that could increase by November. Other interesting stuff from the interview:
Domer says that the legalization of sports betting has probably made people more comfortable with basic odds. I have said before that we are in the Golden Age of Ways to Lose Your Ass, and I didn’t even include politics when I made that claim.
Some of the action on Polymarket may be crypto gamblers bored with the recent lack of volatility in the crypto markets.
The rise of Polymarket has negated the need for OTC politics bets.
Domer started with a deposit of $10,000 and just one of the positions he mentions on the episode is worth ~$250k right now. He says he’s active in 1,000 markets.
Computer Vision is Coming for Sports Markets
Around 10 years ago there were a lot of stories in the sports world about how stadiums outfitted with dozens of cameras would deliver all of the most incredible sports insights you could imagine. Now it’s seeming like a single broadcast feed with one fixed camera can also probably also do a lot. There are a lot of problems to solve, like collecting all of the video, deriving accurate homography, and the latency of feeds. But when you see the stuff that makes it into the public domain, the natural question is: what are the world’s top betting groups already doing with this stuff?
The Golden Age of Advantage Play
Probably a corollary to the idea that we are in the Golden Age of Ways to Lose Your Ass, is that we are also in the Golden Age of Advantage Play. The house, and advantage players, are both eating from the pie that is baked by the losers.
Well Gambling With an Edge returned this week, to recap the Blackjack Ball, and they talked about the blackjack skills competitions. The TLDR is that in a room full of very very accomplished advantage players, there were some signs of skills atrophy on both basic strategy questions and speed counting.
Why does that matter, or why is it related to the Golden Age of Advantage Play?
Because if you get a group of talented advantage players together, one of the striking things is how many of them are doing “other stuff” - i.e. not blackjack and not casino table games. And also many of them are getting rich doing “other stuff.”
The Hyatt Calculator I’ve Always Wanted
My wife and I are on pace to hit the 60 required elite nights that will make us Hyatt Globalists again next year. If you think that hotel loyalty is stupid, or that Hyatt loyalty specifically is stupid, I will admit that your position sounds kind of right… but in fact you are wrong.
Early check-in and late check-out are pretty much like adding an extra day to every trip. We show up when we want, and our room is almost always ready. Also, we almost never run into the thing where we have to drop our bags with the bell desk for hours before we go to the airport.
There are other perks as well, and they’re all worth something - the free and usually very nice buffet breakfast is nice - but the early check-in and late check-out are the big things for us. Sometimes you get upgraded to a suite, sometimes you don’t… we don’t care that much because we don’t have kids.
Of course it also matters that I consider the Hyatt/Chase program to be the lowest hanging fruit in the credit card world.
On the way to earning Globalist status, Hyatt/Chase give you some milestone perks that are all worth something. I’ve often thought that each of them add some bps to the baseline earning of the Hyatt credit card. But I never sat down to figure it out. Well now I don’t need to. Frequent Miler did it for me.