Next, the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series; if you would have told anyone in 2013 that the Chicago Cubs were going to win the World Series in 2016 they would just look at you with a look of derision and befuddlement.\u00a0 Of course this likely was just a knee jerk reaction to the standard anthem of most Chicago north side residents of \u201cWait till next year!\u201d Theo Epstein, the General Manager who broke the \u201cCurse of the Bambino\u201d for the Boston Red Sox was brought in to try his hand at breaking the ever feared \u201cBilly Goat curse\u201d that lingered over the Chicago Cubs since 1908.\u00a0 He moved the pieces around the chess board in way that gave the Cubs the optimal chance to win, and they did just that.<\/p>\n
The 2016 US Presidential election has been called the biggest political upset in the 200 plus years of its history.\u00a0 There were countless \u201cnews\u201d casts where main stream news anchors were constantly berating the chances of Donald Trump as the Republican nominee for President not to mention putting it at an impossibility of a President Trump. There reasons were numerous, and were supported by polling from what were, till November 2016, considered to be very reliable.\u00a0 Politicians and celebrities lined up one after another, all to display their angst for the Businessman turned Reality TV star turned Politician.\u00a0 All signs, at least from the major news networks pointed to another Clinton Presidency, but this was grossly misconstrued.\u00a0 Polls as close as November 1st<\/sup> put Trump 11 points behind Clinton.<\/p>\n The perceived rarity of these events, were all well defined by the media.\u00a0 But I wanted to see if these events were reasonably foreseeable and at least could be put into a toss-up category.\u00a0 I poked around and spoke with several well respected statisticians including Michael Shackelford of the dominant gaming and strategy website Wizard of Odds<\/a>, and writers who were familiar with the events. \u00a0The Brexit vote was predicated on a changing Europe.\u00a0 A change that many felt weren\u2019t in the best interest of the citizenry of that country.\u00a0 For years the UK had been slowly losing its sovereignty to the EU and that coupled with declining economic conditions caused the public of that country to feel disenfranchised and when a group feels disenfranchised they vote in herds for a change and thats exactly what happened. The margin narrowed leading up to the vote and the late momentum was with Yay votes. In the end the Yays had it. \u00a0This was completely foreseeable.<\/p>\n The odds of the Cubs wining the World Series at the beginning of the 2016 season were 5-1. It was well anticipated that the Cubs were going to have a strong season.\u00a0 The Las Vegas bookmakers weren\u2019t too keen on the idea of the Cubs not making it to the World Series.\u00a0 Many sports writers also anticipated the strong finish; long time sports\u00a0columnist \u00a0and senior writer for The Casino City Times John Grochowski<\/a>, is a Chicago native and was among the group that anticipated the Cubs at least making it to the World Series.\u00a0 We spoke about this often during post season and he was hardly surprised when they made it to the championship game.\u00a0 Most of the skepticism about the Cubs comes from their long history of falling apart down the stretch. From a strict numbers point of view the Cubs were the favorite to win the MLB Championship, so this was no big surprise.<\/p>\n The last event is the US Presidential election.\u00a0 The polls indicated an overwhelming victory for Hillary Clinton. So what happened? Well the nice thing about polls, like any accounting protocol, is that you can pretty much report any numbers that you want as long as you let everyone know what you did in the summary page of the report.\u00a0 So what did they do? \u00a0And why did the media not report the full story.\u00a0 First, most of the polls were oversampled<\/em> and skewed in a way that gave the perception of a democratic victory. This means that groups of people that traditionally favor the Democratic candidate were asked in greater numbers than those that favor the Republican candidate. Instead of 33%, 33%, 33%; Democratic, Republican and Independent sample that makes up the electorate, the samples were in the neighborhood of 40%, 30%, 30%; A clear skew in the direction that favored Secretary Clinton.\u00a0 Another contributing oversight was the assumption that minorities would turn out in the same numbers that they did for President Obama. \u00a0The reasoning for why the media outlets didn\u2019t report this is because they didn\u2019t want to.\u00a0 Mark Twain once said \u201c if you don\u2019t read the newspapers you\u2019re not informed and if you do read the newspapers you are misinformed.\u201d I believe that the media has no interest in reporting the news they just want to shape opinion.<\/p>\n These events were not as unpredictable as they were made out to be.\u00a0 They were in fact a real possibility.\u00a0 I read that if 2 years ago you would have made a 100 parlay bet on these three events occurring, you would have won 50 million dollars.\u00a0 This seems high to me now, or even at the beginning of the year, but it does seem reasonable if you take into account that no one even had these events on their radar 2 years ago.\u00a0 The astute numbers driven student always tries to make an informed decision, and doing so in this instance would accurately conclude that these series of events had a better chance of happening than not happening.<\/p>\n Nicholas is the Managing Director of <\/em>Alea Consulting Group<\/em><\/a>, a casino gaming consulting firm with a player centric philosophy.<\/em><\/p>\n As 2016 comes to a close I was reflecting on some of the events that occurred this year, and the associated probabilities with those events.\u00a0 I also contemplated these events occurring independently, and as part of a sequenced parlay bet. \u00a0\u00a0Most of the time year\u2019s go by with no real deviations from the norm.\u00a0 But […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n![\"Facebook\"](\"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/gambling-with-an-edge\/wp-content\/plugins\/social-media-feather\/synved-social\/image\/social\/regular\/96x96\/facebook.png\" "\\"Follow")
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