Is Trusting Presidential Betting a Dangerous Gamble?

what are presidential betting odds you can bet on the president the answer is yes uh what we have up here is uh from uh real clear politics or RCP uh it's RCP betting averages chart and essentially they look at Le the top eight betting pools and they uh potentially come up with an average of s and uh in this particular one we're seeing Trump and red Harrison blue and uh you can see the period where we have this meteor meteor a meteor likee rise uh where Cala briefly overtook Trump in the odds and as of uh last last two days maybe three a little hard to see but uh Trump is back on top just slightly so what is this how does it work and what does it mean well first uh obviously it varies a little bit by country and state but uh depending where you're at you can bet on the president you can bet on individual races uh there's things you can vote on uh control of the Senate control of the house uh impeachments pretty much any political event uh that somebody is willing to make a bet and a counter bet on is something that'll uh end up in the betting pool in some way or form so obviously the really big things like a presidential race will show up in every betting pool uh more obscure events like someone getting impeached or something along those lines might only show up in a pool order too so uh as I suggested someone has to take the counter bet for the BET to be valid so if you're going to bet something happens you have to find somebody who's willing to bet against it now in typical uh sporting events where we're more familiar with betting I mean there's always going to be a counter bet so it's not a it's not as hard of a thing to do think like uh races between different candidates same thing it's it's it's a contest there's always going to be people willing to take either side so it's very similar to a sporting event or a horse racing or anything else like that uh essentially people come in they make bets for various outcomes and odds are generated the idea is the people betting the more people betting that someone's going to win raises their odds of winning but lowers their payout and yes in this presidential P betting pool uh there are payout if you're in if you're in one of the pools uh that's betting on so if the underdog wins or the least likely candidate or in horse terminology ology the long shot uh you can make more money on it now let's talk a little bit about horses because people probably even if you haven't bet on horses you've probably seen it depicted in movies and depicted in TV shows uh so it's something we have a vague amount of familiarity with so what happens is people come in betting on horses and a lot of people are showing up they don't really know much about the horses so a lot of times um they might be just betting on the name of the horse where it's like okay that sounds like a lucky name or it ring you know it H has some kind of uh familiarity with something going on in their life uh and then you get people who try to do more realistic interpretations of things uh maybe they're more professional betters or they've done it more often so what they'll end up doing is looking at the betting sheets and look how these horses have raced in the past and try to come up with some kind of interpretation for uh what's the likelihood of them winning and a lot of times uh there's essentially it's it's gaming the system where you may be wanting to bet on multiple outcomes that have a potential of giving you a slight gain In The End by doing by doing it that way now one of the things that fits in heavily to all betting and this is this this is important to understand as we move along with the concept is Insider information so let's say you know you're out there on the track maybe you're you know just somebody who does maintenance on the track and you see the hores training and you see one of the horses has a limp and he's like oh wow that's that's the that's the favorite and he's got a limp and they're desperately you see him like rubbing linament on it and everything trying to get it back in shape and he shows up at the race the next day well you know have Insider information so you're going to bet against that horse uh you may bet against the next odds on favorite give a much better payout than that one because you know something they don't or maybe you're the veterinarian that's juicing the long shot who just might make it through the rate race with a heart attack but still win those kinds of things uh so what ends up happening is that Insider knowledge on an event move the uh move the betting pool in directions that give better indicators of what's going to happen U when the Insiders make their moves it changes the odds people who are watching the odds change may act on those changes as well now obviously assumed your horse race isn't fixed which is a whole another subject now here's a kind of interesting thing that happened back in the 9s uh DARPA uh essentially the advanced research uh group with the defense department uh started up a betting pool and anyone could join and you on the likelihood of various world events occurring um literally will a War break out in EXC country yes or no will a War break out before X date in such country or will there be a terrorist event in these countries or there will be a Revolution Will governments be overthrown and the reason why DARPA was doing this is because uh they realized looking at gaming Theory essentially experts predicting something weren't as accurate as gamblers betting on something um part of it has to do with a gambler is has stake has a stake involvement putting money on it so you know some make bets Without Really uh working out the knowledge part of it but if you have something that's very specific like this where it's informational you're going to have a lot more people doing the research and looking at the likelihoods but the main thing that the DARPA program was hoping uh to benefit from was Insider information if You Were Somehow adjunct terrorist organization and you knew something was going to happen you could make a lot of money by accurately predicting the date something's going to happen um so the DARPA system literally counted on Insider information uh to make the BET work unfortunately it didn't get very far before Congress freaked out and shut them down in all honesty it would have been a very interesting experiment I kind of wish they would have uh let them go through with it just to see how well it worked I mean um terms of the scientific things the Department of Defense does at least that one probably wouldn't get people killed so um by about 2010 Bing pools were considered to be excellent predictors uh just based on past uh the past workings of these uh various elections in the betting pools people said you know the betting pools seem to do better than a lot of the polls do so uh if we look at um the last nine elections eight of the nine last elections were predicted by the betting pool predicted correctly I.E though the person who had the best odds was the person who won which was the election in the last eight of nine that didn't match the betting pool expectations should be able to figure it out that'd be Trump in 2016 so the question is you look at it say and Trump was pulling horribly throughout the entire year and that was actually in 2016 I was following this CU at the time uh one of the people I was following online was very big on the whole uh efficacy of the uh betting pools being a good source of information and so I was following it on a very routine basis just to see you know what events in the news had any impact on things what was going on that you like if you saw a change could you kind of look and see what was causing the change and throughout uh uh Clinton was pretty much the odds favorite by a fairly decent margin throughout so did it fail or did it work well okay one thing got to remember with odds the person who has the best odds doesn't always win I mean if someone only has a 1% chance of winning which was not the case here I think it was more 40% but I mean someone with a 1% chance of winning still has a chance of winning um so the thing is if you had 100 elections and you had in each election someone who only had a 1% chance of winning and they won once then the system works if they are winning half the time then your system has failed it's just a general understanding of how odds work but something interesting happened with this 2016 election as I told you I followed it very routinely and uh weird thing happened because uh I think it was a bookmark issue where I was because uh I pretty much follow the big elections online I just check the numbers as they come in and I think I clicked a bookmark that brought up the betting odds like well the betting odds have been saying Trump was going to lose this the entire time so I'm not too concerned and I brought it up about 7:00 in the evening when the first polls were just starting to close and I said oh how weird they're showing Trump at even odds at this point I'm like I wonder if that's just kind of some glitch what's going on with the with with the current election you're like if is that really the abetting odds or is it just being kind of messed up because uh the elections in progress and then I started noticing because now I was curious I kept checking it and in 15 incre 15 minute increments uh Trump's odds began skyrocketing so it would appear it does work and I think what happened was is you started having insiders at the last moment realizing what was going to happen and anybody who was sitting on a bad betting position exited their position uh probably at a loss but not as big a loss as they would have sat on that bet all night long and a bunch of other people piled in basically buying up cheap Trump bids in order to make decent money so I would say it's e even though uh he was the uh not long shot but he he he was the underdog for the entire election and still won that means the system still works it just wasn't predictive uh and the fact that somehow late in the evening people were able to take advantage of it kind of shows that The Insider knowledge works it's just a matter of whether they can apply it at a time where they can make the more money off so what's been going on with the current election here so you can see uh you had a period there where essentially unfortunately with this particular one the colors are a little bit uh off in terms of uh Biden and Harris have very similar colors here but you can basically watch as the Biden fall off was occurring uh basically hit bottom there uh that big precipitous fall there was I believe the debate and then uh go and you see it fall completely to the bottom there essentially as as he dropped out of the race and you see this uh moonshot from Harris basically flying up passing Trump and then coming back down to the point where Trump is now a little bit in front so are they odds working it would appear um is it possible that people are doing something to the equivalent of pumping dumping like in a stock I think that's possible um I don't know how easy it is to trade or sell a bet once you have it in place uh another question is is betting pools could they be manipulated and the answer is most definitively yes uh if somebody with a lot of money entered the pool and didn't really care about uh the odds as much as they were changing the odds so uh essentially you could even if you thought your candidate had no chance throwing lots of money at that candidate in the pool would cause them to rise up uh so are the pools being manipulated I think to some extent they have to say yes uh just as uh political operatives figured out that controlling the news was important to elections just as they figured out that polls controlling the polls were critical winning elections um the fact that a lot of people uh give this a lot of credence means that odds are people are playing around it as well I think it probably has more potential to be correct just because of the nature of uh the people piling into it I don't think you have a lot of novices going I'm voting for my guy I think it's more people coming in going I think they're more experienced betters who basically know how to crunch numbers and know and know what they're seeing but I'm definitely going to keep an eye on this again this year I'm sure it'll be very interesting um and uh you know again eight of the nine elections were predicted in advance uh by the but betting pools and uh Trump's Oddball 2016 did correct in the last several hours uh so it's not an absolute but it's a tool in your tool belt that's probably a little bit more honest than a poll because at least some Outsiders have input and control over it as opposed to a poll where you have no idea who's controlling it and manipulating uh the data outcomes right so in the comments below uh were you familiar with these presidential betting pool pools uh have you ever Betten one before uh do you have have any general feelings on how betting odds perform in terms of real world events uh some information you know or maybe just a gut feeling on whether this is useful or nonsense please smash a like button if the YouTube algorithms brought you here and you're not a regular subscriber check out my other titles lots of different stuff I get into surely you like something consider subscribing and if you know somebody who might find this interesting please share it with them thank you for spending time with me this evening hope to see you again in a future video