It is interesting that people are treating the Moneyball movie as if it were full of radical new ideas. The statistical revolution in baseball was not even new at the time the book was written. But the book's central idea, taking advantage of market inefficiencies, has been around forever, since the first time someone did uneven trading at the local bazaar.
I, like thousands of other baseball fans, was aware of all the statistical analyzes described in Moneyball in the 1980s when reading Bill James' baseball summaries. I was practicing law at the time, but I applied for a job at the Kansas City Royals' scouting department with the idea of applying some of these methods. They rejected me for being overqualified, which in the Royals' case was probably true. They have been arguably the most hostile statistics organization in baseball, which is a losing strategy for a small market team. I'm not even sure they really believe in the modern statistics that are in common use in today's major league baseball.
But Moneyball is not really about statistics versus explorers or the old versus the new. Sure, there was some disagreement about which stats are the most important, but everyone in baseball has always used stats. What Billy Beane was really trying to do was what all companies are trying to do: take advantage of market inefficiencies. Since Beane thought other organizations were using the wrong stats, she thought she could get players who were just as good, albeit in a non-traditional way, for less money. In base percentage he was undervalued, so he focused on that. Athletes who didn't "look good" were undervalued, so he focused on that. But all he was really trying to do was get more for his money.
The same philosophy can be applied to soccer pools. There are all kinds of market inefficiencies in sports, situations in which players are incorrectly rated due to bias or misunderstanding of statistics. Short quarterbacks (too low, see Drew Brees), basketball players with high scores (too high, see Allen Iverson), baseball players who walk a lot (too low, see Moneyball). So what is the inefficiency of the market in a soccer วิเคราะห์บอล.
Every week in an NFL season, there is a series of games where virtually everyone chooses the same team. If you follow the package, even if the choice is correct, you win nothing. You're just stepping on water. To win the group in that week, you must choose most of the games correctly from everyone in the group. You can't choose the teams that everyone else chooses. So the key to winning soccer groups is identifying the games every week in which the public almost unanimously predicts a team's victory, but in reality the other team has an excellent chance of winning. Your goal each week should be to find every 50-50 game you can, make the public think it's going to be a blast, and take the underdog.
For example, in week 3 of the 2011 season, if we used a Moneyball system, we would choose Buffalo instead of New England, something that practically no one else would do on earth. This would take advantage of a huge inefficiency in the market to choose two games (our win plus loss) for everyone else in the group in a game that we qualify as a virtual release. Sure, if the Patriots had won, we would have looked foolish. But we are not trying to impress people with our choices. We are trying to win the group. And you don't win groups by choosing a team that all the other people in your group also choose. A Moneyball system is specifically designed to identify those games where everyone and their mother are on one side, but the game is fairly even.
Now, if the team that the public likes really should be highly favored, go ahead and choose it. We're not crazy.But if your analysis predicts a close game, and everyone else in your group chooses one team, you should take the other. It's what Billy Beane would do. And then someday maybe Brad Pitt will play you in a movie, too.
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