Sunday, December 4, 2011

Are Experts Better At Predicting Sports Than Ordinary Fans?

From William M. Briggs (statistician to the stars):
Today’s post is over at the new and, yes, improved Edgehogs.com. Our launch was a couple of months ago. Since that time we’ve got a good chunk of games and predictions for those games. Patterns are beginning to emerge.

Both Experts, true sports pros and professional bettors, and regular Users make predictions for the NFL, College football, and Mixed Martial Arts—and now College basketball and NHL hockey (maybe even the NBA, if they ever begin playing). We track and rate the picks based on a secret-sauce formula that accounts for the difficulty and number of the picks.

For the NFL it’s not surprising that all Experts aren’t better than all Users, but the best pickers are Experts. But for College Football, Users do almost as well as Experts.
Head on over to see the analysis.