Bernie at like 1.5% and Trump at around 35% for 2020 seem like very, very easy buys.

If Bernie declares for 2020, you win. Need to be 80-90% sure he's not running to not take the bet.

Trump has incumbent advantage plus all the voting rights stuff. Come on. If you literally put a gun to my head I think I would have to say he's President in February of 2021.

Oh and Clinton's odds are > 3%, double Bernie's. Ludicrous.

I'm assuming this is barely liquid/bettable at all.

^ Yeah you're probably right, but it's four years away, not many people want to bet that far out. (Obviously you can cash out early on betting markets like betfair if you want, but still. And liquidity will definitely be terrible unless you can find a bookie to take your bet at decent odds.)

Though on the other hand, if anyone is dumb enough to try to run Clinton for president AGAIN, it would be the democrats. Too bad Sanders seems to have lost his balls or he could have taken this as an opportunity to try to take over the Democrats and send them in a new direction, but instead he's just gonna complain about Trump from time to time.

Well done on winning your bet.

When every educated person and every person on political forums and with experience betting on previous US elections tells you that Clinton is almost certain to win, it's hard to ignore. This guy for example: https://betting.betfair.com/politics...71116-171.html

It's funny reading these things after the election is over. "Experts" lol. More like people who are paid to give analysis, but have absolutely no clue whatsoever. Makes them look like complete fools. Then again, they are paid to write this rubbish.

Moral of the story: don't trust experts, trust your own instincts.

To follow up from the above post, anyone who wants a good laugh, check out this blog: http://politicalgambler.com/category/us-politics/

A "political gambling expert" who got it wrong at every single point.

Sort of ludicrous how much money is being given away by Trumpers since election day, PI is a money printing machine atm.

Sorry, what is PI?

which markets specifically?

PredictIt, politics site that is legal for Americans (but has an $850 limit on all bets)

Secretary of State, and a lot of the other cabinet markets

Yes shares for "Will the gov't shut down on 12/12?" seem really juicy.

I'm already maxed No, this is free money https://www.predictit.org/Contract/4...1%2c-2017#data

Brandstad would have to be confirmed and sworn in by 1/31/17 to resolve yes. They'll be lucky to get the cabinet confirmations done by then, much less start hearings for ambassadors.

There's been like >$10m worth of volume in the Secretary of State market on PI

The comment section there is a cesspool. There's probably a lot of money to be made riding the waves but I went the safe route and accumulated several hundred dollars in negative risk. The pricing nearly always makes it easy to jump in, and then accumulate more when new people get added to the market. I hope the other cabinet positions will go similarly.

Are you domah on Disqus?

I don't consider those people experts.

It should have been obvious after Brexit and the UK General Election that there was a small far right grouping that wasn't showing up in opinion polls and skewing the results. When Trump and Hilary were essentially tied in the polling it was clear Trump was the value bet.

Political betting is one of the easiest things for a professional gambler to do. I have won money on 15 of the last 16 elections bet since 2000, more often on longer odds.

The guy you link to never mentions the relationship between price and expectation or frames it in any kind of betting context at all. He is an idiot.

Maybe!

Tillerson at $0.70 to be SoS seems way too high. I don't see how he gets confirmed. Not to mention he hasn't even been officially announced as the pick.

Seriously though - never take gambling or investment picks from people on an internet forum. (That most often applies in person as well, unless you're talking low-risk, market-wide investments.)

Take the information they provide, analyze it yourself, and make sure you seek out information that could contradict the viewpoint provided (or contradict your own viewpoint).

Be aware of your own limitations - if you're unable to find the flaws in other people's analysis, it may do you more harm than good (if you bet on it). You also need to be aware that other people placing bets may have access to information you don't - which could lead you to making a sucker bet.

Not just far right voters, but right wing voters in general I feel. In the UK Election of 2015, Labour and Tories were supposedly tied according to polls, before Tories won a majority.

So should polls be completely disregarded for political betting? When you have polls in Wisconsin showing Trump never ahead, then he wins the state, you know something is terribly, terribly wrong with polling.

Yes, lesson learned there. Every political betting forum I was going to, people were betting on Clinton. Their reasons were all the same - Trump had alienated too much of the electorate, Clinton had a massive advantage in the electoral college based on historical voting patterns.

In the end, I (foolishly) believed this line of thinking. Because how could all these people get it wrong? Back in September, I questioned whether Trump could win WI, PA and MI. I quoted that professor who said Trump would win, and all I was greeted with was 'lol that guy comes from X university, he has no clue what he's talking about'. I asked if it was safest to bet on Betfair (which has a cash out option on your bet), just in case Trump did well in those states on election night.


If you go back in this thread, some posts are quite hilarious, now we know the result. Post after post of supremely confident predictions, which ended up completely wrong. Look at this post for instance:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...postcount=1805

I can find many more examples. (admittedly you might find 1 post of mine that does that, but it was only after I stupidly went along with the crowd, after going against my gut instinct that Trump had a decent shot )

The confidence was a result of polling. This was a monumental polling miss in the most heavily polled event in history. You would expect in states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania where the votes were close there would be at least one Trump poll. Further, it was assumed that Trump would need Nevada (a state that actually polled close) in his path to victory. Early results from Nevada looked great for Clinton.

I guess there's two ways to look at this. Either the black swan of polling errors really occurred or Comey's last minute news really moved the electorate by a significant amount especially in the midwest and the state polls didn't have time to react.

Looking back, I still think Clinton at 60-70c in that last week was a good bet.

Am I an idiot ?

There are a lot of people who knew something would happen but didn't bet on it after an event happens

Sure, but in this particular instance, there were probably a lot of people that didn't want to deal with 8 people shouting about how dumb they were if they questioned the "Hillary 90%+" narrative.

So many of those people would have simply decided not to post anything at all, causing somewhat of a self-perpetuating bubble. (Obviously, there are some that don't mind or even seek out confrontation, but overall it results in a net loss of participation.)

Edit for gloating purposes from September:

Yeah pretty much. MultiTabling's posting is like a litany against "so called experts" on poker hand equity because one time he got it allin with KK v AQ preflop and lost.

I had Hillary at 85-90% and that is likely to have been wrong (based on the fact that Trump actually won more states than he needed) but 538's take was fine. There's nothing wrong with Hillary 70% as a line, even in hindsight.

It's easy after the fact to be like "omg the people forecasting a Trump win were right!" but the same people all thought Romney was going to win on the eve of the 2012 election. And a lot of the stories about why Trump was going to win are still false, for instance he didn't get a lot of people voting who normally don't vote, which is what a lot of Trumpkins were predicting.

Well I'm not predicting anything after it happened. Just saying that Clinton was not the certainty that people on here were making her out to be. She could have won. The point was that more states were competitive than people thought.

I'll reply to the other posts when I have time.

Yes more states were competitive. But why didn't people think that? It's the polling! The polls were off massively.

I'm still waiting to read from a trump bettor why they were able to make this incredible call in the face of all the polling evidence to the contrary. What model are you using that puts MI or Wisconsin in the win column for Trump (>30%) when there wasn't a single poll out there that had him in the lead in those states? These midwestern states also have gone blue since the 80s.

Every trump supporter has a magic stone that can be used to tell if a minority is near. They used these magic stones to determine that the poll weightings were off and that not as many black people would vote for Hillary as the first black president.