The Coming of the Web

In order to proceed with the project, I needed to provide my computer with an extensive database of jai-alai statistics and results. I needed three kinds of information:

• Game Schedules - In order to perform an appropriate Monte Carlo simulation, I needed to know which players were playing, in which post positions, in which games, on which date. This meant obtaining the game schedules for a given fronton.

• Player Records - To customize a Monte Carlo simulation for the particulars of a given match, I had to know the relative merits of the players in each post position. This meant obtaining enough game results and player statistics to rank the pelotaris, with some level of confidence.

• Payoff Information - Judging whether a given bet was desirable meant I needed to know how much money each betting outcome would pay off if it won. This mean accumulating the prices paid to bettors over enough matches to predict the payoff without making the bet.

There seemed only two sources from which to get these statistics:

• Directly from the Frontons - Running a parimutuel betting operation is very much an information-intensive business. Clearly, frontons used computers to compute payoffs and results, so I knew that all the information I wanted must have been on some computer, at some time. However, except for general season statistics, frontons had no interest in keeping detailed records on each and every game. The public relations directors of every fronton I spoke to tried to be helpful, but they never had more than Xeroxes of records for the past few nights, or old programs with last season's general statistics.

• Directly from Newspapers - Several local newspapers in both Florida and Connecticut print the results of jai-alai matches each day. That meant somebody at the newspaper had to type them in in the first place. I figured that if I could get ahold of whoever did the actual typing, I could convince them to save the files for us to process.

  I figured wrong. Nobody I spoke to ever kept more than a week's worth of data around. Local newspapers are in the business of producing newspapers, and understandably could not be bothered with yesterday's news. Of course, I could have gone through old printed copies of the paper, and retyped everything into the computer, but doing so for a year or two's worth of statistics would be too great a task to bear.

Neither of these options were tenable. The jai-alai project was dead in the water until the Internet and World Wide Web (WWW) suddenly became popular.   

I hope you have enjoyed this excerpt from Calculated Bets: Computers, Gambling, and Mathematical Modeling to Win!, by Steven Skiena, copublished by Cambridge University Press and the Mathematical Association of America. This is a book about a gambling system that works. It tells the story of how the author used computer simulation and mathematical modeling techniques to predict the outcome of jai-alai matches and bet on them successfully -- increasing his initial stake by over 500% in one year! His method can work for anyone: at the end of the book he tells the best way to watch jai-alai, and how to bet on it. With humor and enthusiasm, Skiena details a life-long fascination with the computer prediction of sporting events. Along the way, he discusses other gambling systems, both successful and unsuccessful, for such games as lotto, roulette, blackjack, and the stock market. Indeed, he shows how his jai-alai system functions just like a miniature stock trading system. Do you want to learn about program trading systems, the future of Internet gambling, and the real reason brokerage houses don't offer mutual funds that invest at racetracks and frontons? How mathematical models are used in political polling? The difference between correlation and causation? If you are curious about gambling and mathematics, odds are this is the book for you! This book is available in both hardcover and paperback.