Yo guys, not gonna post results till end of year, been playing a nice mix of 500nl-20knl over the last few months with the predicatble swings but mostly got through it unscathed
Thought I'd cross post this from my bitB blog since it's been an interesting few days:
So last week or so for me has basically been dominated by the election.
a) I really really wanted Biden to win on a personal level. Being in Canada in 2016 and seeing Trump win was one of the biggest wtf moments of my life.
I don't know where I'd place myself on the political spectrum, maybe slightly to the right of centre by UK standards, I guess clear democrat by US standards. But I don't think the political spectrum was really relevant at all to how I viewed Trump. The complete disregard for facts and truth in his arguments and actions, and the number of people willing to accept it because they liked the sound of populist noises he was making definitely made me realise that the majority of the electorate is still not thinking on a logical level ; DRAIN THE SWAMP, BUILD THE WALL, REPEAL AND REPLACE, STOP THE COUNT, all of this complete nonsense, basically words with no plan or action after them. And also self awareness, #1 asset imo, is obviously completely missing from his reportoire. So emotionally already very invested.
b) Had BY FAR the biggest bet on my life on various combinations of Biden to win/ Democrats to win popular vote. Not going to go into the thesis too much but;
- Original small amount based on 538 overperformance vs bookies historically including 2016, reasonable indications dumb money was on trump (90% of bets for trump, DraftKings map, trump longer odds, high stickiness, 'history can repeat itself lol').
- People conflate 'Trump has a chance of winning' with 'Trump has a chance of winning the popular vote' and push out the odds on completely impossible events, even Biden to win California you could get 1.05
- Bookies aren't trying to take a side on such events, just moving the line so they make profit on either outcome. If the enough dumb money pours in on Trumps side, then Bidens odds become too short compared to reality.
Then I topped up a lot on basis of:
- inside information about one of the top guys placing many many M on it
Then came election night itself. Got a big group going with @PATRICK, European (untaggable), and the other coaches here who had all jumped on the bandwagon. Trump won Florida, the first swing state, and the odds just went completely and utterly haywire. By the models we follow without Florida Biden was still 70% ish, but the order the vote was counted in the MidWest swing states made it appear Trump had a heavy lead there too. Now before the election I'd read enough to know there would be a blue shift as the night went on in the midwest and mail ins were counted (PA, MI etc) but wasn't really prepared enough and didn't understand the magnitude. I guess I can say I was probably panicking the least and telling people not to sweat the live odds, but I didn't have the conviction to fire more at longer odds, eventually put myself to bed telling Markus I had to before I bet too much at 3.0 I was also quite overexposed before and probably didn't have enough liquidity left, had ~40k on prior to election night.
Anyway, once I woke up again some form of normality had resumed and Biden was odds on. I actually bet a lot more over the last few days actually when as far as I could tell Trump was converging to zero % with the way the votes were trending, and Biden had 3 paths to victory all wiht 90% + equity (AZ+NV, NV+GA, PA). Maybe ended up with just over redactedk of my own money on.
Anyway I definitely learnt a lot and have some takeaways for next time:
- Politics markets are inefficient. On election night and amongst poker players they are INSANELY inefficient. It's super worth being well researched enough to trade these in future.
- Leave capital free to swing trade election night!
- Predictive models are very bad a long way out, overestimating certainty, not having enough of a drag back to the mean. EG if you say something has 90% chance with 100% uncertainty, you should grade it at 50% chance.
Models seem to grade uncertainty at almost 0% then just wildly change their predictions through the cycle, meaning they are very good to use a day before, very bad to use a month before.
- Maybe polls still underestimate trump, will see here when the count finishes, think the overall margin wasn't far out and a lot of the reason for betting was that Biden could survive a Hilary Clinton style miss.
- Set your sleep at night number and don't bet more than that!
In the end I think it's actually going to be a fairly convincing win for Biden, a few States to spare, just the order of events effected the narrative too much.
Next big bet is on Doug to win, probably got average odds 1.2 and redactedk on. This is a bit different since we have so much inside information, close friends with top 2 HU players in the world, obviously a quasi poker expert myself, have seen Dnegs play with hole cards. People way underestimate HU w/rs because they look at them by 6max standards even I can win at 10bb/100 vs other regs often. By Kelly should obviously go way bigger but Dnegs actually played quite well on the last online match imo and seems to be taking a reasonable approach, all the value is in him not handling HU swings well mentally rather than having some -20bb+ lossrate. Market moved him 6.0 to 8.0 on the basis of that and think if it goes to 12+ with him still playing well and not down too much I'll just hedge out.
Anyway upshot of all this is that now we are in lockdown, my sleep pattern is ****ed, I've played 6k hands this month, and claimed 1 piece of exercise, so time to get back on the grind Will be trying to put volume in this week and streaming some study and play sessions again.
Last edited by PlasticElephant; 11-08-2020 at 09:25 AM.