Author Archives: byoscope

Has this tournament been exciting or what?! I’m writing this at the halftime of the England and Denmark semi final. Starting tomorrow Make Better Bets, the story where I bet the World Cup with an Excel model, will be available for free! I’d love to hear your thoughts and an Amazon review would be moreContinue reading “Free Ebook for this Exceptional Euro Tournament”

We were placing the bets last night and discovered some of our bets’ odds have shifted out of our favor: Also we couldn’t find the place top 2 bets. We downsized some of our big boys (Netherlands, Italy, and Spain) winning their groups for search of greener pastures. We did see that we thought theContinue reading “Updated Strategy”

I wanted to make a post to show the picks before kickoff but will try to go more in depth with the improvements (at least I hope) to the modeling. If you want to read the analysis, which spurred a bunch of the new improvements, that can be found here: Amazon.com: Make Better Bets: AnContinue reading “Euro 2020/21 is Approaching!”

This is the story of how I made an Excel model to bet the 2018 World Cup, with lessons learned and European travel stories sprinkled in. Please enjoy and any feedback or reviews would be greatly appreciated. Amazon.com: Make Better Bets: An Actuary’s Quest to Bet the Russian 2018 FIFA World Cup with Excel eBook:Continue reading “Make Better Bets Free for Next Two Days!”

Get the E-book for free! Here’s the synopsis: This is an actuary gone rogue story. Actuaries assess all kinds of risk and in this case it’s in the realm of sports betting. This is a look at how anyone can methodically setup a program to imitate and model future states of the world in aContinue reading “Revamped Book Cover and Free for the Weekend!”

My book about how I bet thousands of dollars on the 2018 World Cup is available for free, but only for the next week!

The book is now available on Kindle at:  

The stats that I used last time are essentially dead to me.  It’s time to adapt or die.  I will use the slightly altered FIFA rankings from the European qualifying campaigns and I’m finally going to try and collect salary data.  Salary data is tough to get for some of these lower teams so I’mContinue reading “FIFA Changed their Methodology again…”

Here’s a small excerpt from The Bet is Round: I was first going to try to replicate what Syzmanski and Kuper did for Soccernomics.  I was going to see if I could figure out a regression model using country statistics including GDP/capita, population, and international appearances by country to predict goal differential.  They found thatContinue reading “How to Make Sense of it All”

In the 2014 Brazil World Cup , as many before it, the first pot consisted of the host country and the other top 7 teams in the world by FIFA ranking.  Pots 2 thru 4 were then formed by region trying to explicitly accomplish geographic diversification from the onset, with small exceptions such as theContinue reading “What are in the FIFA Rankings?”