Post by Tom AdamsPost by Tom AdamsSomeone expressed the opinion to me that Poologic has cause pool
managers to stop running pools with upset incentives. It's true that
a Poologic user would do well in pools with upset incentives (some
types of incentives at least) and perhaps make the pool manager want
to change. In the early days of Poologic, I got some reports about
people getting banned from pools with upset incentives for winning too
often.
Riiiiiight. Once a year office pools noticed something like this after someone
actually pulled it off? Riiiiiight. Small odds times small odds are peanuts.
1. Brad Carlin got kicked out of a pool after winning 3 times in 5
years. This pool had upset incentives, but it also had something
called "insurance" where you could insure a team for a fee so it was
replaced with the team that knocked it out, and Brad was also skilled
at optimizing that rule.
2. Victor Mather (according to an email he sent me) was threatened or
banned because he bet too many underdogs. He had figured out a
Poologic-style system before Poologic. He wrote a nice piece for the
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/sports/ncaabasketball/14pool.html?_r=0
3. An office pool manager decided to award some money to the player
with the lowest scoring sheet. A guy who was allowed in the pool
because his wife work in the office, decided to advance all the bad
seeds. He had the 16 seeds all in the Final Four. He won the
consolation prize and was banned from the office pool.
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None of that is really relevant, and is somewhat suspect.. The article you
cite even claims you'll never stand out as anything but a lucky absent-
minded professor.
--Tedward
In my company's pool in the last 6 years against 250 entrants I have a
first, a third and a fifth place.
Here's what Mather said:
"Anyway, last year the pool organizer sent me an e-mail saying I was
cheating by picking so many longshots!
Then this year's pool contains the following note:
"The Board has discovered that some entrants in previous years have
used a formula for trying to pick upsets. This runs counter to the
spirit of the pool and the awarding of bonus points. The purpose of
the pool is to pick winners of games and be rewarded by identifying
unlikely victors. It is not to capitalize on a formula and gain an
edge on entrants who are playing by the spirit of the rules. Therefore
any entry deemed by the Board to be a "formula play" will be
rejected.""
So Mather was identified as a kind of pool shark.
Now, in the case of Brad Carlin, he had published a paper on the
subject, so he could have been IDed based on that.
The last guy, it was so obvious.
But these are isolated cases, so I don't know how often it happens.
Seems to me the pool manager would notice if someone kept ending up in
the money every year more than half the time.
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In a bozotic pool where it sticks out. That would never happen in a
normal pool. And we weren't originally talking bozotic pools, so so
what?
--Tedward