@wolfgang59 said20:1 against is a good price. You can give yourself the possibility of winning £100 by risking £100 placing it on the Tories or by putting £5 on Labour. The implied probability at 20:1 is 4.76%, you only need the true probability to be 5% to make that a good bet.
I see the bookies have the Conservatives at roughly even money to have a majority. That seems about right to me. 50-50.
Labour are a dismal 20-1. .... mmm possibly worth a small bet.
Very small. 😉
@wolfgang59 saidI take it that another hung parliament is evens too.
I see the bookies have the Conservatives at roughly even money to have a majority. That seems about right to me. 50-50.
Labour are a dismal 20-1. .... mmm possibly worth a small bet.
Very small. 😉
@kevcvs57 saidRoughly.
I take it that another hung parliament is evens too.
The bookies have a hung Parliament as slightly less likely than Tory majority.
The bookies rely on the very best of advice combined with the weight of betting.
Apparently betting is heavy already.
@deepthought saidThe implied probability at 20:1 is 4.76%, you only need the true probability to be 5% to make that a good bet.
20:1 against is a good price. You can give yourself the possibility of winning £100 by risking £100 placing it on the Tories or by putting £5 on Labour. The implied probability at 20:1 is 4.76%, you only need the true probability to be 5% to make that a good bet.
Hmm. This is the exact same thing that Wolfgang59 and I were discussing in the thread "Bercow for Prime Minister?". You ought to be wary of conflating bets that have positive expected values with "good" bets. Given bookmaker's odds of 20 and true odds of 19 with a bet of £5, it's true that the expected value is £0.25, but gambling is more complex than expected values. I outlined why this is the case in post 3 on this page:
https://www.redhotpawn.com/forum/debates/bercow-for-prime-minister.182746/page-4
I don't dispute that odds of 20 are a "good price" in this case; in fact, those odds are the best I've seen. Looking at Oddschecker (https://www.oddschecker.com/politics/british-politics/next-uk-general-election/overall-majority), I cannot see anything longer than 17 from any bookmaker on the outcome "Labour majority", and I'd be interested as to where Wolfgang59 saw this so that I can calculate their margin. However, in my eyes, the difference between true odds of 19 and the bookmaker's odds of 20 is not enough to make it a "good" bet, given the (still high) probability of losing the stake.
If, as you say, I were to bet £100 on a Tory majority at evens, I might bet £5 on a Labour majority at odds of 20 to hedge as it's a paltry sum and I do think that those odds are relatively long. However, I expect that my loss would come from the outcome "hung parliament", and not "Labour majority".
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@wolfgang59 saidI see the bookies have the Conservatives at roughly even money to have a majority. That seems about right to me. 50-50.
I see the bookies have the Conservatives at roughly even money to have a majority. That seems about right to me. 50-50.
Labour are a dismal 20-1. .... mmm possibly worth a small bet.
Very small. 😉
Don't forget to adjust for the bookmaker's margin (their estimation of the true probability of that outcome occurring is less than the probability implied by evens). Where did you see these odds? I'm interested because of the 20/1 odds offered on the Labour majority.
Using Oddschecker (https://www.oddschecker.com/politics/british-politics/next-uk-general-election/overall-majority), at the time of writing some rough margins for some popular bookmakers are:
Ladbrokes: 7.88%
PaddyPower: 13.3%
SkyBet: 18.14%