Sneakylong
True and I agree.
But with in-game "situational" wagering - lines change in current real-time based on data, similar to that of what a stock trader on Wall Street might experience on the trading floor, as the news breaks from 8000 miles away that China has increased their taxation on certain US imports.
Analytics and algorithms data will consume the sports industry, to an even much larger degree than it already has, including golf. What impact will that have on the players competing? What influence will this have on those who stand to lose a substantial amount of money, who're also in the galleries?
I'm just playing devil's advocate. Overall I see it as a plus, but also realize that it could potentially open a can of worms for golf, given the tour's history of indifference regarding spectator behavior.
This article was written 8+ years ago, back in 2010. It's pretty interesting. And it's also very long, but worth the read.
A snippet from the article:
"The heart of the operation exists inside a 2,000-square-foot back room that I was not allowed to enter, where there are racks of servers and a handful of Panasonic flatscreens on the wall being monitored by a control-room staff. It’s connected to the M Resort and other Cantor facilities by a dedicated 50-megabit Ethernet circuit.
To illustrate how it works, take an August game that pitted the Atlanta Braves against the San Francisco Giants. With the score tied 2-2 in the bottom of the sixth, the Braves’ Eric Hinske comes up to bat, and the money line on his team is minus 117, which means that for every $117 you bet on the Braves, you can win only $100. Though the score is tied at this moment, Midas believes that the Braves are a favorite to win.
Then the pitch comes in—an 82-mph changeup— and Hinske blasts it out of the park for a home run. Midas finds out about this a split second after the spectators at Turner Field. Cantor commissions several data processing services to send live game info directly to its control room; whichever feed arrives first is the one that Midas takes. It absorbs the new developments and correlates them with similar events that have happened in the past. The money line dips to minus 327. Winning $100 on the Braves will now mean putting $327 at risk. A play later, when the Braves’ Rick Ankiel grounds out, the process repeats itself, and winning $100 on the Braves now requires a bet of $283.
It all happens in seconds, and Midas may well be crunching the numbers for other games, in other sports, at the same time. After the day’s games are over, Cantor programmers scour the stats for mistakes or new correlations that could make Midas stronger for the next day’s matchups. “Every game is a new market,” Tara says.
Amaitis acknowledges that Midas still misses some factors. “There is a thing called momentum, and a computer doesn’t understand how to calculate that,” he says. Not yet, anyway. “Over a series of years and results and matchups, Midas will come to understand momentum,” Amaitis says. “Three years from now, it will be 1,000 times smarter than it currently is.”
https://www.wired.com/2010/11/ff_midas/
This article was back from 10 years ago. We can easily assume that the analytics and algorithm formulas based on today's standards are much, much more advanced than they were back then.
It's just interesting to note just how much the science of analytics and algorithms have changed not only sports gambling, but financial investing.
Where does the "science" stop and the "luck" begin?