What Monte Carlo or Bust (and the whole gambling industry) gets wrong
I've recently been reading a new book out by Joseph Buchdahl entitled "Monte Carlo or Bust: Simple Simulations for Aspiring Sports Bettors" . I'm a fan of Joseph's work more generally and am naturally drawn to anything that tries to analyse sports betting from a principled analytical perspective and the book delivers on many fronts in this regard. However, I believe the book makes one key mistake in it's choice of the main metric used in many analyses which affects a number of the chapters: the analysis and conclusions based off this metric end up reflecting the fundamental error of the metric itself and a number of these conclusions end up looking meaningless once you understand what's driving them. I don't blame Joseph for this choice of metric - it's the de facto standard the whole gambling industry uses for the same problem - it's only when someone tries to run with it as far as Joseph does in his book that the flaws become so apparent. In