|
motbob
United States12546 Posts
Sports betting is a pretty established enterprise. There are people who bet on sports for a living, though it's really hard to do at a profit, since they usually only work with information that everyone can see. Bettors have to make tough choices: Let's say the Cavs looked really mediocre in their first 15 games. They're the current Vegas favorites to win the NBA Championship, but if they were to have a slow start, the odds would shift towards another team, like the Spurs. As a bettor, you have to decide whether the oddsmakers are overreacting (leading you to put your money on the Cavs) or whether the Cavs' slow start is reflective of what their level of play in the playoffs will be. It's not easy, since hundreds of other people with money will be trying to make the same decision, and you effectively have to make a better decision than them. It's rare to see an "easy bet" where everyone gets caught up in the hype / media narrative and where you as a bettor can exploit that.
But ESPORTS betting is easy. Just look at the front page of Dota2lounge. Right after Merlini joined Zephyr, the odds for Pokerface vs Zephyr were 29%/71%. That's far too skewed in Zephyr's favor given those two teams' recent performance, and it's unclear whether Zephyr was even the favorite. People got caught up in the Merlini hype and bet accordingly.
This blog is about Dota2lounge's TI4 prediction event and how I made my decision on who to bet on. My goal for this blog is to help bring Dota 2 betting to a level of sophistication closer to that of sports betting. The only way this will happen is if more people exploit bad odds.
http://dota2lounge.com/predict
The above link goes to a page where you were once able to bet on which team you thought would get top 3 at TI4. Take a look at the odds for EG: what those odds are saying is that if EG had placed 1st, someone who bet on EG would both keep the items he/she bet and receive 3.06x the value of those items from other people. As it happened, EG placed 3rd, so EG fanboys got their rares back along with 1.02x the value of their bet.
Some fairly high value items could be bet in this way. You could bet arcanas or Rotten Staches (~$60 value). Accounts were limited to two items bet maximum, but dedicated bettors could (and did) make multiple accounts.
Let's take a look at the odds for the teams as they existed shortly before TI4 began (they changed slightly as betting closed):
First of all, look at the difference in odds between Newbee and DK. You might remember that, in the time period leading up to TI4, DK and Newbee played an unusual number of tournament games against each other, going almost even in their series. Yet the odds for DK and Newbee are very different. This is an example of "favorite team bias," which is another way of saying that the odds on popular teams are almost always too high, and the odds for teams that aren't in the eye of Western bettors can sometimes be way, way too low (the Zephyr vs Pokerface match is another example of this). If people thought DK was the favorite to win, why was Newbee, a team clearly right up there with DK in skill, so far down in the rankings? This alone meant that a bet on Newbee was probably a +EV bet.
The next thing to look at are the odds for Alliance and Na`Vi vs the other Western teams. Bettors apparently thought that Na`Vi had better odds of winning than Newbee and had more than 5x more of a chance to place than C9 did. Why the huge difference between C9 and Na`Vi? The answer might lie in bias towards CIS teams, which would also explain why Empire had such (comparatively) good odds. It might also lie in the fact that C9 never won any of the major tournaments they attended this year, and that leads to another type of bias: wins stick in the minds of people who watch tournaments. The highs of Alliance's and Na`Vi's 2014 were higher than C9's, but their lows were certainly lower (see: D2L for Alliance). People remember the highs, especially if they're fans of a certain team and want to have faith. In fact, that last statement might be a better explanation than anything else I've written: people wanted to have faith. At any rate, thanks for the rares!
I wanted to find the best team to bet on, and it wasn't easy. The odds for NAR and the SEA teams were ridiculously high, but were they high enough to warrant a bet? Did a Chinese team down on its luck (LGD) really only have a 1-in-69 shot at winning?
So that led me to simulate the whole tournament in Excel. I gave teams an ELO and gave the ELOs the opportunity to fluctuate based on chance, to reflect the fact that it's hard to know the true skill of a team based on results. For example, Fnatic was assigned an ELO of 1300 with a chance to fluctuate up to 125 points, while Newbee was assigned a 1480 ELO with a chance to fluctuate up to 75 points. Fnatic was sort of an unknown quantity due to the whole Era situation, while Newbee had posted very consistent results.
I ran the tournament 10,000 times and kept track of how often they placed first, second, or third. Then I used the odds on Dota2lounge to calculate expected returns on each team, and came up with this:
Accordingly, I bet my most expensive items on Newbee. Too bad I only bet Kunkka whale swords and not arcanas...
Obviously, when you use this sort of method, assigning the ELOs is everything. I think there was room for improvement in that regard. VG's performance in TI4 definitely showed that they were better than even the highest ELO my model allowed them to be. I think I need to switch to a model that allows for teams to get much better than their current performance has shown, if the stars align. Also, I fell into the trap of overvaluing C9's recent (bad) performances and gave them a low ELO that they didn't deserve. I think I relied too much on Gosugamers's ELO ranking. That ranking underrated Chinese teams before TI4, so when C9 lost to a bunch of Chinese teams in a row, their ranking tanked.
Anyway, ESPORTS betting is easy as long as you're not an Alliance or Na`Vi fanboy. Or maybe it's easy if you always bet on Chinese teams. Or maybe it's not easy and requires close attention to the scene and thoughtful analysis. Pay attention to the biases that the rest of the betting community has, try to eliminate your own biases, choose your bets wisely, and soon you'll be swimming in rares. I think "choose your bets wisely" is the most important piece of advice here. Just bide your time, and eventually a bet will come along that will make you smile and think "Thanks for the rares" in advance.
 
|
What are these rares you speak of?
|
Needs a gallery showing off rares betted and obtained
|
motbob
United States12546 Posts
|
When you win, do you also get your bet items back? :O
|
motbob
United States12546 Posts
On August 12 2014 08:35 IntoTheheart wrote:
When you win, do you also get your bet items back? :O
Ya.
|
|
|
You are a betting master.
|
Ezgame ezrares
Motboob is a god
|
NB was underrated simply because people had this nasty opinion of them, and refused to recognize their skill. But they were far and away the scariest team with momentum. The stats were really nice, and it was a clean presentation, but the oddsmaking was horrible.
TL DR: That bet was amazing, but so is Newbee :D
|
How do you know you´re not feeding organized crime by betting?
|
Aotearoa39261 Posts
Why isn't this on Liquid dota?
|
why no shoutout 
|
On August 12 2014 16:55 Plexa wrote:
Why isn't this on Liquid dota?
Probably to protest how dumb it was to split up blogs.
|
Katowice25012 Posts
On August 12 2014 16:55 Plexa wrote:
Why isn't this on Liquid dota?
It is! Looks like he posted it to both.
Good hustle, motbob.
|
Germany25658 Posts
On August 12 2014 23:49 Pokebunny wrote:Probably to protest how dumb it was to split up blogs.
Haha, good one ^^
|
There's a bit more to it than just stats I'd say - did a player have a bad day ? Is his internet having issues ? Has he been on a vacation for the past week ? Will there be standins playing ? If you are dealing with high value bets, you definitely should monitor twitter accounts and maybe even streams
|
A 1 off tournament seems like an awful way to make the point/lesson you say you're trying to, so this basically ends up being an "I kind of knew Newbee was better than other people did, and got a little lucky and won" post. I mean, they were literally a game away from failing to qualify for the main event at 2 points(one more group stage loss, one more loss to Titan in mini playoff), which is why betting is all about long term consistency in picking.
Your means for estimating EV is just your personal evaluation of the teams, which is what everyone else who didn't just blindly throw something on their favorite team did, you just perhaps have a better eye for what results mean what, or perhaps just flat out watch more of the scene(as you note).
Also, sports betting involves a TON of blind bets on emotional favorites, I'm not sure why you're trying to make it sound like it's nothing but pro bettors trying to make dollars off each other. The odds just look different because Vegas(and other bookies) runs shit to make money themselves, which D2Lounge doesn't.
|
Yeah that whole developing ELO and everything sounds like way too much work. I just bet like 50 cents worth of items on teams to make the game more exciting for me so i have some investment in the results. If I were betting relevant amounts of money worth I'd put more effort into it though.
|
Korea (South)17174 Posts
standard fish runs good in 1 bet thinks hes a pro
|
I feel like this would be a way more meaningful result if the ELO was based on more than just "I think fnatic is like a 1300". I'm not aware of any website that has a calculated elo for dota teams (TLPD pls), but if there was a project to have one, then that would certainly change the betting game.
|
On August 17 2014 21:25 Rekrul wrote:
standard fish runs good in 1 bet thinks hes a pro
We're not on a boat, son. There are no fish here.
|
On August 18 2014 21:37 Serejai wrote:Show nested quote +On August 17 2014 21:25 Rekrul wrote:
standard fish runs good in 1 bet thinks hes a pro We're not on a boat, son. There are no fish here.
Maybe not, but theres definitely some things that are washed up.
|
motbob
United States12546 Posts
On August 18 2014 03:30 packrat386 wrote:
I feel like this would be a way more meaningful result if the ELO was based on more than just "I think fnatic is like a 1300". I'm not aware of any website that has a calculated elo for dota teams (TLPD pls), but if there was a project to have one, then that would certainly change the betting game.
Gosugamers does it. I don't think they've put nearly as much thought into their system as something like Aligulac thought.
But it's not just about assigning ELO. The simulation is important because it helps show how likely it is that the best team will win. It's not just "Oh, I think Newbee is the best team, I'll pick Newbee." If TI4 were just a single elimination tournament with best of 3 matches, the odds on teams like EG and DK wouldn't have been justified, since that tournament format lends itself to weird placements (and, as an aside, in retrospect the tournament format at ESL One might have led to iG being overrated coming into TI4). It's important to know how much variance there is in a given tournament format. In a theoretical month-long tournament with Bo3 group stage and Bo5 double elimination, there's not much variance that comes from the tournament format. The best team will probably win. In that instance, the variance in your model comes from how uncertain you are about different teams' true skill.
When you're just making a bet on a specific match, the only things that matter are the respective skill of the teams + whether it's Bo1/Bo3/etc, but for a bet on a tournament result, it's more complicated.
|
Just the thought of doing the calculation in excel seems traumatized. Matlab was made for this shit.
Great post though! Qualitiy work!
|
|
|
|
|
|
EPT![[image loading]](http://www.teamliquid.net/staff/motbob/Blogs/rares1.png)
![[image loading]](http://www.teamliquid.net/staff/motbob/Blogs/rares2.png)
![[image loading]](http://www.teamliquid.net/staff/motbob/Blogs/bet.png)
