Betting.Betfair

Betting markets are incredibly reliable predictors of chance. Over the course of many hundreds of events, they prove remarkably prescient in telling you the likelihood of something happening. This will come as no surprise to anyone who has read The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. The premise of the book is that when it comes to making predictions, provided you get a large and diverse enough group to state their opinion, they will show amazing predictive powers. All this leads to an obvious question: if the market is so accurate, then what's the point of betting? Surely, in the long-run, you can do no better than break-even? Not so. Whilst the market is right across thousands of events, it is unlikely to be right about every selection. Far from it. The job of the successful...