Election Betting Recap

I can't believe this is the 4th time I've done this post. Getting old! 

I understand these elections are emotional for a lot of people, but for those who bet these crazy things and have followed along since 2012 here on the blog, here we go. --

Pre-Election Day

If you've followed these posts, my pre-election day bets are usually quite small because I don't think they're often wise bets for me, and because election day provides a much better opportunity for us as bettors. Since 2020 was so difficult to play on E-day with mail-in ballots and weird data etc, I was a little more active this year. 

I don't use polls much at all, but I do use the underlying questions in the poll as a guide to what the top-line should show. This helps deciphering the potential error. 

One item this year I found helpful to deriving at a probability, was the "approval rating" of a presidency, because we saw something distorted. 

This year was a unique situation but several polls showed the approval rating of Trump's presidency at 51%-52% and his underlying down 1% or 2% or 3% to Harris; meanwhile, the other side, even adding an error for a new candidate, was stuck around 42%. 

As a rule, 47%+ for this number usually results in a win. There was *some* evidence the top lines we were seeing were shaded once again, just like 2020 and 2016. You may hear marketers talk of A/B testing for a customer base; this was a good A/B test. 

At this time (August) I decided to bet Trump at anything plus money when I saw it. 

In early October, a few nuggets I found worthwhile came out, which are too long to talk about, and I went a little longer (most of which I traded out before E-day, just in case I was wrong, and because, as I tweeted before the election, I thought Trump was in overbought territory).

I bet Trump in AZ at prices (-200) I never would've in previous years. I also bet Trump 312 EV's and built a tail for Harris at similar (again, because I could be wrong, of course). I bet Trump Nevada at -150 and -130 because the Ralston numbers said I should. I bet WI, which in retrospect I was totally wrong on; again with a nugget of info I found helpful. This number moved way out of whack with the Selzer poll release on Saturday (that I felt was wrong) so I had to take advantage of big plus prices. I had no opinion otherwise. 

Bottom line I guess -- I thought the betting markets, which were leaning around 60% Trump, were probably closer to right than wrong. So, you kind of had to nibble with this. 

Election Day

Here's the chart:

The most interesting part of this chart, in my view, is what I went through early on, at 6 PM when the polls closed in Indiana and Kentucky. 

That little probability change (see the jump just after 6PM?) towards Harris was real, because the early dump showed Trump running 2% to 3% lower than in 2020. But, both states are early-count early states (stupidly I lost my early dump spreadsheet in cyberspace from 2020 and I couldn't find it). 

Where things got interesting, however, and where I could make a betting decision was the northern counties of Florida. Although @Quantum_Sport discussed on the twitter last week how we both took a bath betting Georgia on the early Florida numbers in 2020, this time it was definitely different. The northern counties were atrocious for Harris. My projection with these numbers was Trump winning Georgia by 3. Georgia at that time was about -250 Trump. 

If Georgia goes, North Carolina goes. -207 in N.C. was a bet for me. 

The last spec of data needed for me to make bigger wagers was coming from Virginia. 

Two things happened here on open. Loudon Co swung hard to Trump which is an important county. And, god bless Virginia's running of elections. They had dump one - the early vote in first, but (unlike other states) had the second dump in really fast. 

Prince Edward Co showed 90% Harris in early, and the second dump moved this county to 65% Harris - a massive swing where we could final model this in some form. 

This little nugget, along with the second dump in Indiana, and the first dump in OH (this, despite Harris leading early, showed Trump between 9.5% and 12% at close) allowed me to move in a few markets. 

Popular vote Trump at around +200 was in play. 

Michigan at plus money was in play. 

WI and PA were in play (Wisconsin was still plus money, and Hovde senate was still in play at +190)

Trump > 310 EV was in play. 

I played those, along with a hedge I posted to twitter: 61-1 on Trump wins popular vote, Harris wins EC. There was still a chance for her, in my view, because if all that time and money (she had a massive money edge) worked in those three states, everything else meant nothing. 

Less than an hour later the books closed a bunch of markets (broken record, this is why we need a legal exchange in North America!). The curve above made that big move and the betting night was over early. 

Post Election thoughts and what can I fix for next time?

I can fix Wisconsin by never betting it again. I am totally in the dark on that state. I had that a relative blow out with the numbers I saw. It was close. Despite loving the cheese, I am daft on them. 

Nate Silver preaches "don't look at the early vote" and I couldn't agree more. But now I don't. There was *a lot* of nuggets in this vote that weren't just coincidence, or influenced by outcome bias in my view. I am going to reevaluate. 

2028 will not look like this. This is a unicorn, and things will change. I won't be anchored to much in '28 I would imagine. 

Thanks for reading, as always, and good luck at the ponies this weekend!

Chuck Simon

As most of you have heard, Charles Simon passed away yesterday at age 57. 

Although a lot of you knew Chuck better than I, I still felt a strong kinship with him. 

Conversations with him over the years were always what we want conversations to be - enlightening, learned, respectful, and most of all fun. 

I think back on my time with Chuck fondly, and absolutely loved chatting with him for his very good Going in Circles pod a year or two ago. 

On the blog, and on twitter I continually joked with Chuck, relaying that I wanted to to make him "President of HISA". Like most of the satire and goofiness here, there's more than a grain of truth to it. 

For Horse Racing Commissioner I'd want, in no particular order -

Someone smart, who understands the game. One that knows the difference between banamine less than 48 hours out, and a real needle; one that understands lasix; stable management; one that knows trainers who are good and no damn good. 

Someone with a wide range of experience. Mucking stalls, betting, the business of the sport. One that could talk with the same respect and brevity with the recent immigrant groom of the three horse in the sixth as he or she does with Jim Gagliano of the Jockey Club. 

Someone that understands the politics of the game. And has the skill and personality to navigate it. 

Someone that gets along with others to get things done. Someone we can all say "that's my horse racing commissioner" about. 

Like I said, there was more than a grain of truth to it. 

Chuck had this marvellous way about him. When you disagreed with him it was never a shut door and you still felt listened to. This worked to his advantage with me personally more times than not, because I usually ended up on his side of the argument after stepping back and thinking about his point of view. He was ridiculously sharp. 

Twenty or thirty years from now I sincerely expected Chuck to be arguing about the use of a rabbit in the Sword Dancer; why this new synthetic lasix adjunct was good or bad for the game; why that jockey or driver made a brilliant or bonehead move. But sometimes life doesn't work that way, and sadly we were reminded of that yesterday. 

I hope there's an afterlife where this good man - Charles Simon - could look down and read what's being said about him today. It's been all true. 

Please allow me to extend my deepest condolences to Chuck's closest friends and family. I will very much miss him. May he rest in peace. 

AI and Data Can Put a Number on Handicapping "Guesses"

 The NFL announced today a few new features in their data and stats offerings. 

One - tackle probability - I found to be pretty Jetsons. 

Traditional statistics like solo and assisted tackles have long been used to measure defensive performance, but they often fail to capture the nuances of the game. Enter Tackle Probability, a revolutionary AI-driven metric developed in collaboration with the Amazon Web Services Professional Services team and trained on AWS SageMaker. 

Tackle Probability leverages a tree-based machine learning modeling architecture to process millions of data points per game, incorporating 20 different features for each of the 11 defenders every tenth of a second to estimate the chances of a tackle. By predicting the likelihood of a successful tackle after a handoff or catch, the model converts these probabilities into detailed metrics like tackle opportunities, missed tackles, group tackles and more.

So, we're now looking at player movements as a real modelable data point. 

We know the NFL shoves mega-bucks into these things, whereas in horse racing we're wondering if the first-time gelding data is real or memorex, but it theoretically portends some amazing stuff for this sport, right?

We often watch, say, a completed turf race and wonder (and argue on twitter) what a faster pace would've meant to our losing closer. Imagine being able to punch in our own fractions and having an AI spit out the new finish. 

We all have the horse racing disease where results bias elicits the feels. When a rider makes a winning move it's a great move, a losing one is boneheaded. But what are the true probabilities of the move? Was Borel and Street Sense going up the wood a probabilistic losing move, not a winning one, based on his speed and margin at the finish? Could Borel have been dumb for risking being shut off, when he could've won without incident going wide?

Let's take something remarkably simple. Imagine if we had a personal AI model that spit out accurate fair odds after the race based on each horse's position, movements, pace, etc. A back-marker 40-1 shot could've raced like a 6-1 shot with this buried line - this happens all the time - and we'd actually have that quantified for ourselves to use for next time. 

I'm sure many of you as sharp players could think of a hundred things you'd want to see with this data. 

Right now, smart players and sophisticated tools can predict with accuracy some of these things. But we're truly guessing. We're guessing if our horse would've won by four if the jock went up the wood, just like we're guessing that safety Kyle Hamilton would've made that tackle at a 47% higher rate than Josh Metellus. 

The NFL and Amazon AWS and AI tools are taking some of the guesswork out of it for a very popular sport. At some point we'd have to figure horse racing tries to join that party. 

Have a nice Thursday everyone.