To Be Honest, I Hate All the Dem Debate Markets
I am going to let you into my head for a minute so try not to get blown away. I honestly recommend sitting down before you read this because getting on my level is almost as brutal for your brain cells as Charlie Day’s neural handshake with this Kaiju in Pacific Rim.
Anyway, I am basically a savage beast that moves at two speeds: walk and kill. I want to absolutely kill PredictIt’s betting markets, and I want to walk you through how to do it on this blog. However, sometimes these things get in the way and cockblock each other massively. Sometimes there is a conflict of interest for me to write about bets, when in fact all the bets that are available on PI are huge losers. That day is today.
The truth is that the markets PI is offering for the Dem debates are total garbage. The only markets that I would even begin to entertain are PredictIt’s official tournament bets. This is because they are tied to a single poll: the forthcoming June 26 Rasmussen survey. All of the other ones about whether or not Mayor Pete, Beto, Sen. Amy Kloubachar etc. go up in the polls after this week’s debates are stupid. Why? Because the RCP Averages are constantly changing, so you are basically just guessing: (1) which polls are going to fall out of the average and which polls will replace them; (2) how the candidate will perform in the debate; and (3) whether or not polls conducted in the next few days will show that the public actually gives a shit/bothered to tune-in the past two nights. That’s three dimensions of movement aka one more dimension than Jamiroquai is dealing with in the “Virtual Insanity” music video:
And even that is tense.
My hunch is that most candidates won’t budge upwards in the RCP averages because the math to do that is just weird. Also, Rainbow Jeremy is currently pumping YES shares on the boards, which tells me he thinks there is a lot of dumb money floating around wanting to take a mustache ride on its favorite candidate.
Love him or hate him, he’s a smart guy. Beware.
Why I am hesitant: when I bet, my goal is to find a market that I can narrow down to one question that drives the outcome in D.C. In many cases, if the odds are right, I am game to play bets that have two moving parts. But when I have to risk my money betting on a three-part juggling act, I get severely uninterested. That is because I have just as much difficulty fighting in three dimensions as Tom Hardy did in Mad Max.
Yes he technically survived, but I do not have a harpoon gun at my disposal so it honestly makes me nervous. I guess I like one of these markets but am not really going to get into it until tomorrow.
Usually front-runners get smoked at these early debates. Partly because they are rusty and partly because voters act the same way drunk dudes do at a bar — they just really want to smash with something new. Once they wake up hungover from that hook-up, they’ll go back to something they love more, like Biden or Warren or something.
IDK. These markets are garbage.
KEENDAWG.
I noticed the period of time in the RCP average is currently a 19 day window…if the window remains constant at 19 days, then it’s a lagging indicator of public sentiment by 10 days (the average age of the polls included). Biden 1st on 8/1/2019? YES and Biden 2nd on 8/1/2019? NO will slide downward over the next few weeks, but the longer you wait to pick them up, the better because they are safe bets. I should have waited longer to buy Biden 1st? YES.