Wednesday 16 October 2013

High Calibre

The "Donate" button on this blog must be a contender for the Internet's Least Used Button, or at least was until yesterday, when I noticed an extra £25 in my PayPal account. I won't mention any names, but it's nice to receive a tangible appreciation for my efforts. In this case, the reason given was:

Wow thanks for your very solid deconstruction of Iverson's crap app.
While much of what I write is intended to stimulate some debate, and to put ideas out there that will enable people to make some money, saving people from losing money is just as good I guess, and I appreciate the recognition. The generous gentleman and myself haven't always agreed on everything in the past, in fact quite the contrary, so the gesture was even more unexpected and appreciated. 

My faith in humanity is restored and although there was initially, and understandably, some disappointment that the Nobel committee decided to award this year's prize for Economics to Eugene Fama, Lars Peter Hansen and Robert Shiller for their "empirical analysis of asset prices", this donation has helped cheer me up and I remain optimistic that 2014's prize will be mine for my "empirical analysis of football prices". I'm not sure the prize is awarded via PayPal, but I shall make sure my credit ceiling is raised just in case.

My new friend continued:
I have a lot of time for Mark's blog but the problem in this game is you never know people's real situation or motivation.
Fundamentally I have very similar views to you in that I see football as a very difficult nut to crack. As you yourself have said the big problem is there is such a big shift in odds upon a goal and goals are infrequent. I mean if this were racing it would be like backing a horse having just seen it smash through a fence.
I will have to re-read the posts but it's great to see such a high calibre of posts recently. I really liked that one about team x v team y being more important than goal expectancy which is very much how I see things myself, not that I have any data to prove it!
I've had a couple of good comments on goal expectancy, although no additional inputs for the equation, and pricing up football matches, and have a post drafted on another computer, but for today, only a rather mundane update on John Walsh's NFL and NHL selections I'm afraid.
The NFL selections had another loser on the Monday night game as the Indianapolis Colts did not beat the San Diego Chargers, and his NFL returns on the season dip into the negative, but his NHL success continued with two regulation time winners from three last night. The New York Islanders lost in overtime after leading 3-2 with 2:01 remaining in regulation, a result which gave the Buffalo Sabres their first win of the season.
   

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Been a recent bandwagon in terms of the "marketing " of predictive models . Have a look at betegy who claim to use a " genius predictive model " for example . Social media is to blame for the motivation of people to make cash from implying their work is based on academic research as in general we want to believe that there is a way of beating the market . Football data analytics is still in its birth phase but social media is developed to take advantage of people .