Nate Silver: evaluation

Transcript context

…What’s the potential edge they think you might have? It’s just that. If you’re betting $2,000 on the Wizards-Hornets game the moment the line comes out on DraftKings, you’re clearly not a recreational bettor. Just the hallmarks of trying to be a winning player, meaning betting lines early because the line’s early and you don’t have price discovery yet. The early lines are often very beatable. Betting on obscure stuff like “Will this player get X number of rebounds?” or things like that. If you have a knack for — if DraftKings has a line at -3.5 and it’s -4 elsewhere, then it can be called steam chasing, where you bet before a line moves in other places. If you have injury information . . . It’s a very weird game. One thing I hope people are more aware of is that a lot of the sites — and some are better than others — but they really don’t want winning players. Their advertising has actually changed. It used to be, they would say for Daily Fantasy Sports, which was the predecessor, “Hey, you’re a smart guy” — the ads are very cynical — “You’re a smart guy in a cubicle. Why don’t you go do all your spreadsheet stuff and actually draft this team and make a lot of money, and literally, you’ll be sleeping with supermodels in two months. You win the million-dollar prize from DraftKings. ” Now, they don’t even try to advertise it as a skill game anymore, which in some ways is a mistake because the appeal to the male ego is a huge way to get new customers for sports betting and things like that. Every sports fan thinks he has some proprietary edge or knowledge or insight. +EV sports bettors are not a big lobbying group, or not a big cause, exactly. I think there should be regulations on how much can you price-discriminate between your customers. Literally, they’ll take a million-dollar bet from somebody and wouldn’t take even a $50 bet from me on the same game, things like that, which also creates problems because money has a way to flow. Tyler, if you are able to bet a million dollars, and I’m able to bet $50, and I’m a winning bettor, then there are certain ways in which information will probably flow from me to you in an inefficient way, eventually. Sure.…

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