search

Maxim-Mazurok / gtao-betting

Testing strategies of betting on horse races in GTA Online. Calculating adjusted advantage compared to the odds and using Kelly Criterion to determine bet size, then simulating games.
1 stars 0 forks source link

Why betting on the best horse always beats betting on the worst horse? #2

Open Maxim-Mazurok opened 6 months ago

Maxim-Mazurok commented 6 months ago

I ran experiments, and betting on the best horses always returns amazing results. While betting on the worst horses leads to very small gains even over the very long term. I don't understand why... In theory, playing 1/1 game to infinity should be the same as playing 100/1 game to infinity. Payouts should be approximately equally weighted depending on the horse's chances of winning. Need to look into it, I kinda suspect there might be a bug in my code. Or maybe the game is just designed/rigged for this disbalance?

Maxim-Mazurok commented 6 months ago

I have a theory - it might be because by betting on the best horse you get much more stable growth. Basically you always go a bit up or a bit down. But with crazy odds like 30/1 you will have more times when you go and go for a while without winning. I think visualization will be the best. And since we look only at the final balance - sometimes it might be in the middle of loosing streak, right before we get lucky and make ton of money. I really think that visualization will help to see that overall trend is the same, but with the best horse it's just more stable and so it's more likely the "final" result will be high.