Bachelor Australia - Season 5 - Matty Johnson - Media Social Media - *Sleuthing Spoilers* #3

Bobette wrote:Love your work @SugarAndSpice.  If you have time, when the season is over it would be interesting to see a line graph of the trajectories of the top few girls over time, if such a thing is easy to produce.

solaroo wrote:I must confess I don't really understand betting odds, so I'm just wondering is the max loss for Sportsbet the most important figure to know?

SugarAndSpice wrote:

Bobette wrote:Love your work @SugarAndSpice.  If you have time, when the season is over it would be interesting to see a line graph of the trajectories of the top few girls over time, if such a thing is easy to produce.

@bobette Already on it Graphs are updated every time I enter new data. Love me some trajectories!  

ssin0547 wrote:I don't know how Sportsbet are allowed to even have bets on a prerecorded show where the outcome is known to a small number of people. It is completely unfair to anyone betting. It's not about chance at all. It's about Sportsbet knowing they're going to make crap loads of money off of people betting on anyone who isn't F1. How do we know they don't just pay a bribe to someone at Channel 10.

SugarAndSpice wrote:

solaroo wrote:I must confess I don't really understand betting odds, so I'm just wondering is the max loss for Sportsbet the most important figure to know?

Depends who you talk to. The following is my understanding/learning of odds and betting. Sportsbet (and other betting agencies.. in fact all bookies!) try to minimise their losses. Odds can be driven by betting popularity, research or (as I suspect in this case) knowing the outcome. Now, Sportsbet also needs to make money off the betting (otherwise they wouldn't do it). To make money they shape the odds to give several contestants "attractive" odds, like Lisa for example. Her odds are reasonable, meaning you will win a significant amount, but at the same time, the odds don't look ridiculous (I'm looking at you Sharlene!). In this way punters are likely to bet on contestants other than Laura "just in case" that contestant wins.

Now, to add to that, Sportsbet set a maximum on how much you can place on each contestant. In doing so Sportsbet has assessed the "risk" that the contestant might win, thus safeguarding the profit margin for Sportsbet.

For these reasons, I believe the "odds" tell us who the publicand Sportsbet thinks is going to win, whereas the max loss for Sportsbet tells us who Sportsbet is backing. Both values IMO are details worth noting for sleuthing, but I place a higher importance on the loss for the bookie.

Eek. Sorry for the long post (probably much more detail than you were after!)

Sundy wrote:It's unusual for the F1 to watch any of their own season apart from their own dates yeah?