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Elihu D. Feustel

Conquering Risk: Attacking Wall Street and Vegas Paperback – January 1, 2010

by Elihu D Feustel (Author), George Howard (Author)

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All manners of gambling are becoming increasingly popular in our society. Whether a person places a bet on sports or gambles on a stock, he is making a decision on risk. Most people need much more information than they have to make good decisions on either. A majority of the book focuses on sports betting. Four in-depth winning models are demonstrated for MLB, NFL, NCAA Football and WNBA. In addition to methods for handicapping these sports, there are explanations of a variety of approaches to exploit sports market inefficiencies and incorrect assumptions of bookmakers. The approaches to stock betting challenges commonly accepted knowledge. How important is diversification? Are investors in individual stocks just gambling? Is maximizing your portfolio growth worth taking on added volatility? Is sports betting a better investment than stocks for some people? The approaches offered to risk taking, especially sports betting are ground breaking, with more fresh ideas than ever seen in a single coherent publication.

Print length

304 pages
Language

English
Publication date

January 1, 2010
Dimensions

6 x 0.69 x 9 inches
ISBN-10

1450723004
ISBN-13

978-1450723008
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Editorial Reviews

Review

The authors present a lucid and comprehensive guide for developing a plan to succeed at sports gambling in an increasingly complex marketplace. Whether you're interested in becoming a winner at sports betting or simply fascinated by the role of risk in our society, 'Conquering Risk' is must reading. --Jeff Haney, Sports Columnist

About the Author

George S. Howard, Ph. D. is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Notre Dame. He has served as Chairman, Department of Psychology and Director, Laboratory for Social Research at Notre Dame, as well as the Joseph Morahan Director of College Seminar. He served as President, Division of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology and President, Division of Humanistic Psychology of the American Psychological Association. He also was the 1998 winner of Notre Dame's Faculty Award. Author of 14 books and over 190 scientific articles and chapters, his specialties include philosophical psychology, research methodology, narrative psychology and environmental psychology. Elihu D. Feustel, J.D. is a professional gambler. He was an insurance lawyer for 10 years until he began sports-betting full time. He was an odds maker and consultant for Pinnacle Sports in 2004-2006. His primary focus is on winning at sports betting. He still has a minor involvement in law mediating internet gambling disputes.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Independent Publisher (January 1, 2010)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1450723004
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1450723008
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.69 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #693,318 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #99 in Sports Gambling (Books)

Customer Reviews:
29 ratings

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5 star		69%
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2 star		6%
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Andrew Student

Shows how high the bar is

Reviewed in the United States on October 1, 2014

Verified Purchase

This is a must read for those aspiring to be a winning sportsbettor but it is not appropriate for the complete beginner - concepts are rolled out at a pace that assumes that the basic principles and terminology of betting have been internalised. As someone who has built a few soccer regression models and read much of the academic literature, I found the outline NFL model to be an eye opener - it is more sophisticated than models that have formed the basis of PhDs and yet would still not beat the odds. There is no magic formula in here for betting success but there are valuable hints and tips for those who have the skillset required to model sports data.

5 people found this helpful

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Alex

must have

Reviewed in the United States on May 29, 2015

Verified Purchase

one of the best on the market

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Jevon Jaconi

go from intermediate to advanced

Reviewed in the United States on August 25, 2010

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Excellent book to go from intermediate to advanced in betting. To elaborate, this is a book that is more of a guide to thinking about gambling in an advanced sense as opposed to a cookbook detailing recipes of how to do various bets. Examples include: 1) a sobering analysis of misusing the Kelly criterion; 2) using modeling for various types of bets w/ the associated pitfalls of relying upon regression, correlation, etc.; and 3) properly using Poisson distributions vis-a-vis prop bets. Very in-depth book that will be consulted many times in the future - to borrow a sabermetric concept, the books with highest similarity scores to this book would be: Theory of Poker by Sklansky; Mathematics of Poker by Chen/Ankenman; Sharp Sports Betting by Wong; Gambling 102 by Shackleford; Poker Face of Wall Street by Brown; and Beyond Counting by Grosjean. Highly recommended!

16 people found this helpful

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Lawrence E. Edmondson

Great Book!

Reviewed in the United States on August 18, 2019

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Highly informative and detailed

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Aaron C. Brown

An uncommonly good book on sports betting

Reviewed in the United States on November 7, 2010

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There are many more bad books about gambling than good ones, and learning from a bad book is more dangerous than not learning at all. Most of the good books require quite a bit from the reader: experience, judgment and/or mathematical ability. Conquering Risk is nearly unique in offering a thorough explanation of sports betting for beginners, sound psychological and risk management advice and plenty of warnings; while requiring only essential, basic mathematics. On top of that, it's well-written: both clear and precise. This book will do no harm, and will do a lot of good.

The rest of this review is mostly negative. It is intended for people who have already read the book, to point out a few areas in which I disagree. I like 95% of this book, for the reasons given in the first paragraph. This covers the remaining 5%.

While I appreciate the reasons for keeping the mathematical level low, the trend among professional sports bettors has been to use far more rigorous and sophisticated methods than the ad-hoc-plus-regression-and-backtesting described here. In particular, signal processing and natural language processing techniques have revolutionized the field. For all the additional equations and computer power, it's not clear that the new methods outperform the simpler ones. Their huge advantage is they can be applied to far more markets with far less human intervention. Thus they are more suitable to someone who wants to build a business than someone who wants to work for himself and make a living. It would be nice to have a chapter on this, at least to point out the competition. This could have replaced the staggeringly dull and useless blow-by-blow account of one author's experience in fantasy fencing.

One specific problem is the discussion of Poisson models. An example is given of betting on Kobe Bryant's Assists+Rebounds total in the 2009-10 NBA season. The authors review whether this meets the assumptions of a Poisson distribution, but don't look to see if the actual numbers follow one. They don't. Kobe averaged about 10.5 for the season. The Poisson model says he should have had 52 of his 73 games between 8 and 14; he in fact had 38 (he had 22 games below 8, instead of 13 from the model, and 13 above 14, instead of 8 from the model). The key point, which is never made in the book for any model, is that the deviation from Poisson very likely means Kobe has different expected totals in different games; the most likely influencing factor is who he is guarding, but it could also depend on his health, how evenly-matched the game is, the Laker line-up and so on. That means any bet using any model that does not incorporate the additional relevant information is likely foolish. Simple models are valuable because they often work, and when they don't, they tell you to find new data rather than elaborate the model. Transforming the data so it fit a Poisson, or using a non-Poisson alternative, would be very foolish.

I also would have liked to see a better discussion of Kelly, including modern work and extensions for overlapping and correlated bets. The authors treat expected value and expected return equally, without considering the important problem of setting the appropriate denominator for games with more than two outcomes. They claim it is impossible to generate positive expected value out of a series of negative expected value bets. This is not true (see, for example, Parrondo's Paradox) but it is probably wise to leave that fact out of a book like this where it could do far more harm by encouraging disastrous schemes than good by refining ideas of risk.

Although the book claims to cover Wall Street as well as Las Vegas, there is no mention of high-frequency trading. That is both the type of trading most similar to sports betting, and the field with the most cross pollenization. Many successful HFT practitioners started in sports betting. "Chasing steam" in sports betting is the same as "sniping" in HFT, "syndicates" are like "icebergs." Moreover, this is not an area where the authors' anemic debate about market efficiency is relevant; there is no doubt that HFT makes consistent money. Setting up an operation has costs similar to setting up a medium-sized sports-betting syndicate. Medium-frequency trading (a.k.a. day trading) is accessible to individuals with relatively small bankrolls. As with sports betting, a large fraction, maybe 98%, of people who do this will lose money; but it takes only moderate sense and discipline to make a living at it.

In the discussion of longer-term investing, the authors seem more like fish than professionals. They recommend a Roth IRA. The difference between a Roth and a regular IRA is you pay the government today for the promise that it won't tax you later. Only it's not really a promise, it's just how the current tax code is written, and the tax code changes every year. Personally, I think retirement accounts will become irresistible tax targets as budget pressures mount; and are odds-on to at least render holders under 50 ineligible for social security benefits. Of course, others disagree, but you should at least look as carefully into the issue as into whether an Internet sports betting sites pays its winners (I'd give Washington a D rating based on its history). The authors also recommend market orders, which no one should ever use. If you want to be pretty sure of buying or selling something, enter a limit above (buying) or below (selling) the current market. But unless you want to pay $1,000 for a $50 stock, or sell it at a penny, avoid market orders (if the execution price is more than 60% away from the previous price you might, emphasize might, get the trade cancelled, but that's far too much to risk).

There's also a recommendation of index funds. While I am a big fan of low-cost, tax-efficient index investing; there is also a big flaw. An index fund, by definition, has to be overinvested in the overpriced stocks and underinvested in the underpriced ones. You may not know which stock is which, but it's a mathematical certainty about the index fund. Plenty of research indicates you do better with almost any other weighting; equally-weighted, weighting by revenues or employees or whatever. Also lots of research, even by the strongest efficient-market partisans, indicates value stocks do better than growth stocks, levered low-volatility assets do better than high-volatility assets and momentum investing does better than passive investing. There are also plenty of well-documented arbitrages out there: buy merger targets and short acquirers, buy convertible bonds and short stocks, borrow in low-yielding currencies and invest in high-yielding ones and more. These may or may not be suitable for individuals, but it's silly to say you have to be smarter or have better information than everyone else to do better than average in the market. There's also little doubt that individuals who focus on niches, a few small companies or currencies, a minor commodity spread, can make consistent profits.

While this is a great book for what it does, it has its limitations. For a more professional look at advantage gambling, there is no competition for James Grosjean's Beyond Counting. There are a number of good mathematical treatments, but Ed Thorp's The Mathematics of Gambling is a great one, and available free on the Internet. Unfortunately I don't know a good book on advantage financial trading.

70 people found this helpful

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Five Stars

Reviewed in the United States on December 14, 2016

Brilliant!

Book for professional gambler.

Reviewed in the United States on December 17, 2012

Verified Purchase

This book is required for professional gambler. Strongly recommend for reading. The bbok was written by professional gambler in cooperation with Professor of Psychology.

Reviewed in the United States on February 14, 2011

Verified Purchase

I really enjoyed this book. It made me reevaluate the financial risks I take gambling both in the Vegas sense and in the markets. The chapters on model building testing and evaluation were the clearest presentation of this material I've read.

3 people found this helpful

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