Let's bet imaginary money against Nate Silver

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Let's bet imaginary money against Nate Silver

Postby cmsellers » Thu Sep 27, 2018 2:49 am

I have naturally been following the midterms very closely, and the nice thing is that FiveThirtyEight has odds on various races. So I decided it might be fun to look at them, and place bets on the over-under as if this were a betting market.

Now, I don't have actual money to spare, wouldn't gamble if I did, and if I did gamble, I wouldn't do it here where it would get Tess in trouble. So the point of this game is to use imaginary money. I was going to call them "batcoins," but that's apparently a real crypto. So let's call our imaginary money "brettcoins" in honor of Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court nominee who is introducing unpredictable wrinkles into this election.

The winner is whoever has the greatest net gain/lowest net loss relative to the amount of imaginary money they wagered.

Now, here's my initial wagers:

538 has the Democrats taking the Senate at 31.6%. This seems slightly underrated to me right now, because I expect that the Kavanaugh issue is going to be salient one way or another. Right now, I think my hold point is about 35%, because I think the GOP will probably rush Kavanaugh through and that will be bad for them. I think that a failure to confirm him because of a "Democratic smear campaign" would rile up the GOP base, making a GOP Senate hold even more likely.

I think that if the GOP does successfully confirm Kavanaugh, I would buy Democrats up to about 40%. If they don't confirm him, I'd buy Republicans up to 80%, because I feel like the odds of Democrats holding Florida, Missouri, North Dakota, and Indiana all go down, though their odds of taking Texas and Nevada go up.

I'm starting with 200 brettcoins. Except in Indiana and Florida (and maybe Missouri), I think that if FiveThirtyEight is wrong, it is probably in the direction of underestimating Democrats. This is based entirely on my gut feelings, and I would probably end up losing money if this was real money, so good thing it's not. I will revise my estimates again after Kavanaugh's fate is decided or other major news stories happen.

Nevada — 53.9 : 46.1 Rosen : Heller. 80 brettcoins on Rosen
Texas — 69.1 : 30.9 Cruz : O'Rourke. 50 brettcoins on O'Rourke.
Florida — 51 : 49 Nelson : Scott. 30 brettcoins on Scott.
Arizona — 61.6 : 38.4 Sinema : McSally. 20 brettcoins on Sinema.
Indiana — 74.9 : 24.1 Donnelly : Braun. 10 brettcoins on Braun.
Senate — 68.4 : 31.6 GOP : Dem. 10 brettcoins on the Dems.

Anyone else want to play?
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Re: Let's bet imaginary money against Nate Silver

Postby Windy » Sun Sep 30, 2018 2:13 am

I have no idea what's going on in the world at any given time but I want to bet all of my money on the opposite of whatever Nate Silver predicts, if this guy is as accurate as the people who predict bitcoin prices this should work out well.
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