I dislike the $50 on 20 markets constraint. It doesn't really solve what you are trying to solve anyway. Someone could just get lucky on a single market that resolves early - lets say there is a fatality between Taiwan and China tomorrow, and someone gets a 10x return on it. They can then just spread $50 around to 19 other markets withou…
I dislike the $50 on 20 markets constraint. It doesn't really solve what you are trying to solve anyway. Someone could just get lucky on a single market that resolves early - lets say there is a fatality between Taiwan and China tomorrow, and someone gets a 10x return on it. They can then just spread $50 around to 19 other markets without really thinking about it, and they will still be up big regardless of how those 19 turn out.
Meanwhile if you spend your energies trying to spread the money around on different markets early, you may be right in your probability assessments on many of them, but will get very limited return on each, since only putting $50 apiece.
This seems difficult to overcome... maybe participants could be limited in $X profit for a given market (e.g., for a 10x market, if the profit limit is $100, the wager limit would be $10). If this is done, I don't think any limit in the amount spread would be necessary. Participants may be able to get around this somewhat using correlated markets, but I don't think this issue is too severe.
It would be best if this $100 limit was hardcoded into the site, and the judges didn't judge post hoc sum capped winnings to calculate scores. Under such post-hoc capping, someone could still take a longshot bet to win $10k. Then, even if just the first $100 is counted for their score, the participant stills has a ton of bonus money to play around with. Nonetheless, I imagine there are still pretty reasonable ways of doing these calculations post hoc if hardcoding the $100 limit isn't possible (e.g., by also subtracting capped losses, so if a player balloons to $10k then makes 100 bets that go even money, they aren't considered to be successful). Such a participant would still have an advantage, but it seems manageable.
I dislike the $50 on 20 markets constraint. It doesn't really solve what you are trying to solve anyway. Someone could just get lucky on a single market that resolves early - lets say there is a fatality between Taiwan and China tomorrow, and someone gets a 10x return on it. They can then just spread $50 around to 19 other markets without really thinking about it, and they will still be up big regardless of how those 19 turn out.
Meanwhile if you spend your energies trying to spread the money around on different markets early, you may be right in your probability assessments on many of them, but will get very limited return on each, since only putting $50 apiece.
Going against conventional wisdom is supposed to be rewarding in this game.
This seems difficult to overcome... maybe participants could be limited in $X profit for a given market (e.g., for a 10x market, if the profit limit is $100, the wager limit would be $10). If this is done, I don't think any limit in the amount spread would be necessary. Participants may be able to get around this somewhat using correlated markets, but I don't think this issue is too severe.
It would be best if this $100 limit was hardcoded into the site, and the judges didn't judge post hoc sum capped winnings to calculate scores. Under such post-hoc capping, someone could still take a longshot bet to win $10k. Then, even if just the first $100 is counted for their score, the participant stills has a ton of bonus money to play around with. Nonetheless, I imagine there are still pretty reasonable ways of doing these calculations post hoc if hardcoding the $100 limit isn't possible (e.g., by also subtracting capped losses, so if a player balloons to $10k then makes 100 bets that go even money, they aren't considered to be successful). Such a participant would still have an advantage, but it seems manageable.