Bet the Process - Shipper

Podcast Release Date:
Podcast Link:
hagrinBPR Review Date: 2024-05-23 11:28:13
Rating: 8.00

Notes:
Summary - This was VERY good. I thought for less than an hour they covered a bunch of topics and while some topics are old hat, I thought Shipper approached them in unique ways that I haven’t heard before that are easily digestible.

1:30 - Crawley and Xander recap.

5:05 - Shipper starts. 8:00 - Interesting, Ship was also asked to do Circles Off, but chose to do BTP. Starts with the extolling of criticism and direct feedback which is rich coming from someone I'd put in the same category as Count Chocula for being open to feedback. Shifts to the Kirk Evans podcast and makes a good point that I think a lot of old timers still have issues grasping at times which is there is this new era/age of betting against these smaller markets at softer books and you shouldn't dismiss these types of bettors. (Note - I was guilty of this when SGPs launched once you dove in and looked at the pricing for a few I sort of ignored it for a while, but have come to realize there's a real, new attack surface here for people willing to do the work so Shipper is right to make this point even if it's not novel/new). Both Rufus and Shipper make the point that not only is it finding these markets, but getting down *multiple* times (obviously).

12:20 - MA Regulator Hearing: Talk about the impact about a "minimum bet" law and what that would look like re: operator impact. Think he explains it very well taking a very objective middle view which is both sides are disingenuous - operators say they would be largely impacted taking a min bet on large markets while bettors saying they can't bet (not bid, ty for the last pod review correction Ship, see that's positively taking feedback and applying it) on larger markets. Makes the point FanDuel sort of already works like this middle ground for the larger markets which is a great point. Brings up the Kirk Evans poll about what % of bettors are limited b/c they win and Ship I think answers this perfectly that the Type I error rate is probably extremely small. 17:20 - Brings up "there's no incentive to develop the technology to limit a player on smaller markets but allow them to bet NFL", but then mentions that FanDuel does this. (So clearly someone was incentivized to build it lol, which btw, would take about 10 minutes for me to code.)

19:15: What is "Good" Sports Betting Content: "More frustrated with the outcome of the education that the intent. The intent is probably reasonably correct." (What you mean to say is the "content" is fine. The "intent" is to make money and increase influence and drive traffic to other endeavors - this is how the internet economy works in the Year of Our Lord 2024.) 22:00 - Brings up a VERY good point about how right now there's an overabundance of top-down content and ecosystem building with no ecosystem of people trying to originate. (I hadn't thought about it, he's 100% right, I'd add that top-down has a far lower "barrier of entry" which is why it's more attractive to everyone involved, normies, content creators looking for followers/views/paid Disc subs/etc.) 25:30 - Shipper and Rufus are Eskimo Brothers? 25:30 - Jeff makes the very understood point that it's extremely difficult to produce good betting content, but the goal he has is "to make people intellectually curious". 26:30 - "The Goldsberry podcast may not have been interesting in the way to any of you people in #cville". Let's get something straight here - Jeff does this all the time where anyone who criticizes him is "#cville". Shipper isn't cville, he's got the misanthrope part down sure, he's got the run of the mill social disorder part, but the original Contrarianville wasn't just "you're a sports AP who is mad online all the time" so we need to stop lumping non-cville people in just because they win at sports and tweet abrasively especially about BTP.

27:15: What is a rort?: "Something where the market is fundamentally wrong." Ex - When Anthony Joshua fought Francis Ngannou, "there's a rort in general in boxing". "There are very few market participants that know what the true price should be" (due to liquidity/getting down issues, public money ratio to sharp money is way higher in certain boxing events vs say NFL where sharp money vacuums up retail money). There's some ZigZag talk here and then talking about looking at the effect and then figuring out the distribution of that effect (which is VERY nice way of explaining it, not sure I've heard someone say it quite like that I thought that was easily digestible). Rufus mentions this past golf event, after Round 1 showing some of the biggest edges he's ever had example being Xander pricing ($700k swing on the outcome due to these edges / exposure). Later, at 1:00:00, Rufus and Jeff discuss this and bring up the obvious one of McGregor/Floyd where the ratio that Shipper mentions was a wild anomaly.

35:40 - Betting Conviction: Jeff asks a great question about Rufus' scenario to Shipper and basically asks about the conviction needed to bet these large, perceived edges. Shipper mentions - depends on if it's a top-down or bottom-up edge. Ex - top-down NFL edge at post, you're probably adding for your max in that spot. Ex 2 - NBL (New Zealand Basketball) - you have a large edge, you're also probably adding here because of the lack of market sophistication and you probably can identify the "why" you have this perceived edge. Ex 3 - Large markets, post/in-play, highly liquid, you should probably regress pretty aggressively to the market if you can't "understand" the edge. (This was FANTASTIC this was the highlight for me, this was VERY well broken down.) Mentions that due to the types of markets he's betting, his problem almost always ends up being underbetting the large edges although not participating in the same highly liquid market types Rufus brought up with in-play golf.








41:30 - Motivation/What Drives Success in Betting: Love of prediction markets. Turned down 115k banking job to make $10k coaching basketball. (Very cool). Gets to the gaming side. "I could talk about gambling all day every day." 47:00 - Jeff - "I've never cared about money except once I had kids." "Solving problems, comradery, team building" drives Jeff. Rufus - "It used to be curiosity, doesn't have the drive / motivation like he used to" and Rufus dives into the existential existence. Enjoys working with brother. He hoped Unabated would have gave him more purpose. (I thought this was very interesting, very honest, very open.). (For me, the huge takeaway is here are 3 super successful people … and they are all wildly different in their own ways. Just a reminder that there isn’t one correct view or process here, you need to find your own path.)

52:45 - Mentions a tweet - "The usefulness of a piece of software is 1/n where n is the number of users." Nope, wrong but Shipper does explain it correctly/better right after this. I looked up this tweet because I had hoped there was some nuance missing, but it wasn't in fact the tweeter stated the equation "is probably shorter" for betting software. I've covered this topic of scalability multiple times already. If anyone cares I already wrote up the correct approach, but was too long to attach this review. In fairness to Shipper, he actually explains the reason why a naive look at n is wrong right after this so while he presented it as a tweet he agreed with, he actually correctly states the issues with modeling a tool's usefulness for the next sub n when naively looking at the totality of n.