I’m happy to announce that my paper “A statistical theory for optimal decision making in sports betting” is about to be published in the peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE.

Diagram of sportsbook versus betting public

This paper is something like a bucket list item for me, as I have long been fascinated with the math of sports betting. As a child in the early 90s, I remember walking to the corner store to pick up the paper menu for “Sports Action”, the provincial sports lottery in British Columbia. I suspect that it may be more difficult for children to place wagers in present times. Somewhere along the way, I realized that betting in sports is just a problem of statistical estimation – albeit a very noisy and perhaps even chaotic one. The development presented in the paper came about over several years (evenings and weekends) of having the key equations crystallize in my mind. My hope is that the paper helps the astute sports bettor and piques the interest of those who enjoy interesting problems in applied statistics.

Link to the paper.

Link to a lay summary.

Link to the git repo containing source code to reproduce the paper’s analysis.