Where would be a good place to start for someone with a general understanding of math and some programming experience? Are there open datasets, books, blogs, or academic papers that you'd recommend? I'm also curious how professionals in this space (like sports analysts or data scientists) approach modeling player/team performance and factoring in uncertainty.
If you work in this area or have dabbled in it as a hobby, I’d love to hear how you got started.
vgeek•4mo ago
Parimutuel vs house odds is probably a good start in seeing how odds change in different types of markets. Monte Carlo simulations will be useful in coming up with your own tissue odds. Then it is the matter of backtesting and comparing your derived odds versus the books' by looking at things like Closing Line Value, Margin of Error and Return on Investment.
For data, check out Kaggle. Learn how to scrape and circumvent platforms like PerimeterX, Recaptcha and Cloudflare. There are dozens of sites that provide historical odds data, even more basic sports statistic data.