Crown Oaks Day Racing Challenge

Last night I was writing code to play around with an idea I had rather than studying the Form Guide. See today I am off to the races (Crown Oaks day at Flemington) with some clients - hence why I should have been studying the form guide and not playing around with Erlang.

So I've decided to try an experiment:

Can the wisdom of the Twitter crowd outperform both blind luck and the bookies favourites with regards to return on bets during the racing.

Now we all know blind luck should lose. Betting on a winner at random is probably not going to get a single hit but against the favourite should prove interesting.

What interests me most is that betting on a race is actually contributing to an Information Market. Now theoretically information is held by all the various agents (people betting) and each one doesn't have a full picture but together the market becomes efficient and pushes down the odds of certain horses winning and then having long shots.

In smaller races where you have not so many people betting this works and either the favourite or a horse will relatively low odds will win. At large race meetings this doesn't work because a lot of people bet randomly (based on name, birthday number etc) and because of this it creates a lot of noise in the market so it breaks down.

So here's the challenge.

I'll start this from Race 3 at Crown Oaks Day today.

Each of the races is displayed below with a link to the field list. I'll be making a bet based on complete randomness (random number of the horse) and following the bookies' favourite. I'll then take the majority from messages to my twitter account (@ajfisher) for that race and place a bet following that. Simply send me a tweet "@ajfisher Race: NUMBER Horse: Name or Number"

Race 3
Race 4
race 5
Race 6
Race 7

Also you can use the tag #crowd-oaks if you want.

So can a smaller crowd provide more wisdom and outperform the bookies and complete blind luck on a big race day. Let's find out. It'll be fun either way.