In the comments of this week's Survivor post, there was a fairly animated discussion about strategy. One anonymous commenter, though not presenting his argument in the best way, made some good points about the importance of "pot odds". Others theorized that what everyone else was doing didn't matter; the only thing you should worry about is giving yourself the best chance to survive as long as possible.
As it turns out, pot odds do matter, although their importance was probably exaggerated. An extreme example makes this clear. Say there were 1000 people left, and 999 of them were taking the Bears this week; the 1000th person hasn't made their choice.
If that final person were to take the Bears, they'd have the exact same pick as everyone else, and thus the same chance of winning; 1 in 1000. But if they took the Lions, they would stand to win the entire pool right then and there if Detroit upsets Chicago; there's about a 1 in 6 chance of that happening. In that situation, you'd be crazy to take anyone except the Lions, even though they are 13 point underdogs.
Ths line of thinking can easily be extended to a real pool. You only need two things: the percentage of people in the pool that picked each team, and the percentage chance each team has of winning. We can get the former from the ESPN contest, or you can get that information from your pool. The latter can easily be derived from the money line of each game. With this information, we can figure out the odds of winning the pool each pick gives you. I have uploaded the results for the ESPN pool this week here; you can personalize it for your pool by just changing what percentage of people are on each team.
Here are the five best options for the ESPN pool in Week 9:
Even after considering the "pot odds", the Bears are the best option in the ESPN pool this week. This doesn't take into account whether you want to save a team for another week, but we've already established that that isn't an issue with Chicago. Since I have already used the #2, #3, and #4 picks on this list, the Bears are a very easy choice.
For the most part, the list stays with the order of each team's odds to win, but there are some exceptions. You'll notice that the Giants jump up on the list a bit, since not many people picked them. And even though the Lions are easily the biggest underdog this week, they're only second to last on this list, since you would be in such good shape if you picked them and they did win.
Original Story:
http://vegaswatch.net/2008/10/revisin...
