Opinion

By Steven D. Levitt May 6, 2006, 10:32 am

Some Kentucky Derby Picks, although maybe I should just stick to betting on American Idol

By Steven D. Levitt

I have bet on the Kentucky Derby just about every year for the last 25 years. The only winner I can ever remember having was Giacomo last year at 50-1. Accordingly, I have had zero requests for my picks in today’s Kentucky Derby.

Here they are anyway.

There are 20 horses. The early betting favorites at tradesports are: Brother Derek, Barbaro, Lawyer Ron, and Sweetnorthernsaint in that order.

I’m betting on Sweetnorthernsaint, the fourth favorite, currently at about 8-1, Keyed Entry who is now at 40-1, and Jazil who is at 30-1.

At Tradesports you can also bet on a horse not to win. I’m betting on Brother Derek, Lawyer Ron, A.P. Warrior, Point Determined, Private Vow, Bluegrass Cat, Cause to Believe, and Storm Treasure all to not win the race.

I have had my best gambling success in a long time betting on American Idol, also at Tradesports. You can bet on who will be the overall winner, and also on who gets voted off each week. In four of the five weeks that I bet on who would get voted off, I made a hefty profit. Only When Kellie Pickler got voted off was I on the wrong side. Part of my secret is being in touch with the youth of America. Perhaps a bigger part has been exploiting the information at DialIdol. Somebody has set up a website where you download an automatic dialer and then send the information on how many busy signals you receive on different contestants back to the website where they are tallied to predict the winner. Over 500,000 phone calls were tracked last week, with those calls correctly predicting that Paris would be voted off. Now the markets at Tradesports are incorporating the DialIdol info much more efficiently as word has spread (which is why I’m willing to write about it here). As you can imagine, the producers of American Idol hate this website (see his blog entries from mid-March when he got a cease and desist order) because it ruins a lot of the suspense, although the ratings certainly haven’t suffered.

[Added after the race: None of the horses I wanted to win did win, but none of the ones I wanted to lose won either. So I broke even on net, making it my second most successful Kentucky Derby ever.]

5 Comments

  1. 1. May 6, 2006 12:15 pm Link

    DialIdol recieves millions of hits a month. It is impressive that you were able to exploit it for 4-5 weeks.

    — sophistry
  2. 2. May 6, 2006 3:47 pm Link

    So..Steven…How much money have you gambled away in the past 25 years?

    — blou888
  3. 3. May 6, 2006 3:48 pm Link

    I thought that as economists, you would try to consider the opportunity costs versus the amount of incentives…

    — blou888
  4. 4. May 8, 2006 7:41 am Link

    American Idol producers could hire some guy to write a code that sends random data to the DialIdol servers. We all know what measurment error does.

    — MVPY
  5. 5. May 8, 2006 10:56 am Link

    Prof. Levitt:

    Here you have your next paper “Is DialIdols Cheating?”

    The idea of the paper is that the developer of the program is builded his reputation as a predictor of the American Idol outcome in order to benefit in online bets. Would you trust his result for the final? He knows that online traders use them to post bets which gives him the incentive to provide false results and place bets based on the true information that he has.

    — MVPY

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