Sunderland - WBA

[PesceLesso]

Insane: at 20' WBA @ 1.30. put 4 (laid for 4 of liability) and greened up for 8 quid and change whem Sunderland equalized.
on second thought: I think I better keep my mouth shut and also delete this thread this evening. let them keep cover them arses the way they do.. keep a low profile and grind.

So newbies take notes: opportunites like this do pop up. stay sharp and focused

[PC0845]

I'm intrigued, let who cover their arses?

Is there a conspiracy ?

[Morgans Choice]

Hi P,

according to my stats, where the home team has one more point than the away team, the before the game starts the match result probabilities are :-

Home 52%

Draw 27%

Away 21%

I'd have layed West Brom before the game (if they'd been at 1.3), but 20 minutes in play a goal up? Brilliant decision,

well done, MC

[Emkayracing]

I'd have layed West Brom before the game (if they'd been at 1.3), but 20 minutes in play a goal up? Brilliant decision,

Sunderland were 2-0 at the time of the lay (Given that they scored after 5 & 6 minutes respectively).

Not sure of the point from the initial post - at 2-2 the market more or less reverted to the same shape as kick-off;

Pre match
Sunderland 2.30
Draw 3.40
West Brom 3.40

At 2-2 (27 mins, from the screenshot)
Sunderland 2.56
Draw 2.70
West Brom 3.95

West Brom had just surrendered a two goal lead, Sunderland were a home team on the charge - playing the better football after a sloppy start.

No conspiracy theories here....

[PesceLesso]

my "cover their arses" was referred to those pros who had to discharge liability at the speed of light because their "risk model" (a BOT like any other but the use of somehow sophisticated mathematish jargon makes them feel like hovering 10 feet above us, common mortals) tells them to do so.
Having most likely an MBA (sometimes even a PhD... wow!!) and the same understanding of Statistic and Probability Theory my parrot owns (just because they can solve a few differential equations, but mind! linear functions for chrissake!.. as they stubbornly refuse to dirt their hands with the vulgar and trivial non-linear real world), they go along the following lines:

abstract from The Black Swan (by Nicholas Nassim Taleb)

-----------------------------------
FAT TONY

"Fat Tony" is one of Nero's friends who irritates Yevgenia Krasnova beyond
measure. We should perhaps more thoughtfully style him "Horizontally-
challenged Tony," since he is not as objectively overweight as his
nickname indicates; it is just that his body shape makes whatever he wears
seem ill-fitted. He wears only tailored suits, many of them cut for him in
Rome, but they look as if he bought them from a Web catalog. He has
thick hands, hairy fingers, wears a gold wrist chain, and reeks of licorice
candies that he devours in industrial quantities as a substitute for an old
smoking habit. He doesn't usually mind people calling him Fat Tony, but
he much prefers to be called just Tony. Nero calls him, more politely,
"Brooklyn Tony," because of his accent and his Brooklyn way of thinking,
though Tony is one of the prosperous Brooklyn people who moved to
New Jersey twenty years ago.
Tony is a successful nonnerd with a happy disposition. He leads a gregarious
existence. His sole visible problem seems to be his weight and the
corresponding nagging by his family, remote cousins, and friends, who
keep warning him about that premature heart attack. Nothing seems to
work; Tony often goes to a fat farm in Arizona to not eat, lose a few
pounds, then gain almost all of them back in his first-class seat on the
flight back. It is remarkable how his self-control and personal discipline,
otherwise admirable, fail to apply to his waistline.
He started as a clerk in the back office of a New York bank in the early
1980s, in the letter-of-credit department. He pushed papers and did some
grunt work. Later he grew into giving small business loans and figured out
the game of how you can get financing from the monster banks, how their
bureaucracies operate, and what they like to see on paper. All the while an
employee, he started acquiring property in bankruptcy proceedings, buying
it from financial institutions. His big insight is that bank employees
who sell you a house that's not theirs just don't care as much as the owners;
Tony knew very rapidly how to talk to them and maneuver. Later, he
also learned to buy and sell gas stations with money borrowed from small
neighborhood bankers.
Tony has this remarkable habit of trying to make a buck effortlessly,
just for entertainment, without straining, without office work, without
meeting, just by melding his deals into his private life. Tony's motto is
"Finding who the sucker is." Obviously, they are often the banks: "The
clerks don't care about nothing." Finding these suckers is second nature to
him. If you took walks around the block with Tony you would feel considerably
more informed about the texture of the world just "tawking" to
him.
Tony is remarkably gifted at getting unlisted phone numbers, first-class
seats on airlines for no additional money, or your car in a garage that is officially
full, either through connections or his forceful charm.

Non-Brooklyn John
I found the perfect non-Brooklyn in someone I will call Dr. John. He is a
former engineer currently working as an actuary for an insurance company.
He is thin, wiry, and wears glasses and a dark suit. He lives in New
Jersey not far from Fat Tony but certainly they rarely run into each other.
Tony never takes the train, and, actually, never commutes (he drives a
Cadillac, and sometimes his wife's Italian convertible, and jokes that he is
more visible than the rest of the car). Dr. John is a master of the schedule;
he is as predictable as a clock. He quietly and efficiently reads the newspaper
on the train to Manhattan, then neatly folds it for the lunchtime continuation.
While Tony makes restaurant owners rich (they beam when
they see him coming and exchange noisy hugs with him), John meticulously
packs his sandwich every morning, fruit salad in a plastic container.
As for his clothing, he also wears a suit that looks like it came from a Web
catalog, except that it is quite likely that it actually did.
Dr. John is a painstaking, reasoned, and gentle fellow. He takes his
work seriously, so seriously that, unlike Tony, you can see a line in the
sand between his working time and his leisure activities. He has a PhD in
electrical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. Since he
knows both computers and statistics, he was hired by an insurance company
to do computer simulations; he enjoys the business. Much of what he
does consists of running computer programs for "risk management."
I know that it is rare for Fat Tony and Dr. John to breathe the same air,
let alone find themselves at the same bar, so consider this a pure thought
exercise. I will ask each of them a question and compare their answers.

NNT (that is, me): Assume that a coin is fair, i.e., has an equal probability
of coming up heads or tails when flipped. I flip it ninety-nine times and get
heads each time. What are the odds of my getting tails on my next throw?
Dr. John: Trivial question. One half, of course, since you are assuming
50 percent odds for each and independence between draws.
NNT: What do you say, Tony?
Fat Tony: I'd say no more than 1 percent, of course.
NNT: Why so? I gave you the initial assumption of a fair coin, meaning
that it was 50 percent either way.
Fat Tony: You are either full of crap or a pure sucker to buy that
"50 pehcent" business. The coin gotta be loaded. It can't be a fair game.
(Translation: It is far more likely that your assumptions about the fairness
are wrong than the coin delivering ninety-nine heads in ninety-nine
throws.)
NNT: But Dr. John said 50 percent.
Fat Tony (whispering in my ear): I know these guys with the nerd examples
from the bank days. They think way too slow. And they are too
commoditized. You can take them for a ride.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

now, cutting it to the chase, Emkayracing, who on the post above just played the Fat Tony role (watch the bloody match -or look at some commentary- and use simple common sense), stated the obvious:

Sunderland is the home team
They are playing a better football
They took 2 goal in less than 5 mins at the very beginning of the match
There are still 70 mins of regular time to go..

how can anyone on earth think that, given the above, the likelihood for WBA to win the match is 76.33% (cause that's what odds @ 1.3 means)? beware that this would be standing true even if WBA held the score for other 70 mins and took home a winner.

The problem here is that a BOT based on some risk model treats a 0-2 halfway along the 1st half in the same fashion as there were no differences between the away team being WBA or Man Utd, and above all is incapable to watch and judge what's going on on the playground and factor it into the model.

So what I'm saying is: for the market to be pricing such ridiculous odds there must have been a shitload of backing money to push it down in a sort of self-fulfilling narrative (and not statistical) fallacy (OMG we laid 50K on WBA @ 3,7, they are already 2 goals ahead, let's start to cover our arses no matter at what price...)

EDIT
I haven't run any math but I'd say, by rule of thumb, that in a match such as that, WBA @ 1.31 (on 0-2 score) would be legitimate at some point around the 55/60 mins (10/15 mins in the 2nd half)