ON BETTING ON WISDOM OF CROWDS

TAKE YOUR CHANCES...

TechCrunch's redoubtable Michael Arrington reviews a new company called PicksPal today.  When one reads about the company, it makes one ask, "what took them so long?"

Here's how Michael describes PicksPal,

"PicksPal is a free sports site where people “bet” on upcoming games. No money is involved. If they win, their point total goes up and they have bragging rights around the office.

Since launching about a year ago over 100,000 people have joined the site, making daily picks on just about every kind of sporting event in the U.S. - boxing, NFL football, pro football, bass fishing, ultimate fighting, basketball, baseball, etc. The site makes money from advertising."

So it's a "Wisdom of the Crowds" startup, but here's the twist:

"Recently, however, the PicksPal team noticed that a very small percentage of users tend to be correct in their picks significantly more often that they should be statistically. When they grouped these special users they found them to be a powerful predictive force."

So of course, the founders are moving to capitalize on this:

"Tom and his team figured out pretty quickly that there was a potentially massive business here. And next Tuesday they are going to start tapping into that business when they launch what they call “Genius Picks”. For $10, users can get access to the collective wisdom of the 30 best PicksPal players over the previous five weeks in a given sport, and get five predictions on upcoming games.

They’ve been running this internally for a while and the results are impressive."

It'll be interesting to see how this goes, but as one commenter to the post rightly points out:

"The Muso

1. September 19th, 2006 at 1:59 am

   Top executives of both BetOnSports and SportingBet have been arrested in the US in the last few weeks/months. Online sports betting and the facilitation thereof is illegal in the US based on the highly outdated and over-protective Wire Act.

   Think these boys should start moving their servers to the Bahamas."

Maybe the founders should shift the model to the stock market instead.  What do you think?

Comments

[M.]

Moving the model the financial markets would be good, though this is a lot more regulated than gambling, and I imagine there would be a lot more red tape involved.

If this model was applied to financial markets, it would have to be decided whether the website is deemed as offering financial advice, and if so, it would have to be regulated accordingly.

Still, I'd like to see it happen.

[howard Lindzon]

stocks - bad idea.

Posted on it again

[Peter Schankowitz]

Very interesting post re what can best be described as "fantasy betting". I too don't know what took them so long, but this is a long overdue homage to the now decades old phenom of Fantasy Baseball, Football etc. For many years corporations, lawfirms, schools and most other orgs haave been plagued by their employees rabid passion for the fantasy leagues. Like here, all for bragging rights and, hush hush,a few bucks.

The sports betting take will have the same rabid following and the contest application will kick start the passion.

And as for the audience's willingness to fork over a few bucks for the sage advice of the best and the brightest from the dark world of fantasy betting, you can count on it. Many in the fantasy sports world think they could assemble and run a sports team as well, if not better, than the owners. No doubt, when it comes to betting, the arm chair Jimmy the Greeks (dating myself)out there can't wait to stake the same claim.

More importantly, who do you like to take the NLCS this year?