Continuing the discussion from Jose Aldo has more of a claim to GOAT than Khabib:
Was having a chat with @MMApurist about a buddy of mine who goes by the moniker MMA ELO on YouTube.
As his bio says, he’s a data analyst by trade and an MMA aficionado in his off time. His ELO Rating model, for as long as I’ve been aware of it, has always intrigued me as a system that I always knew I wanted to build, but never knew I actually wanted to.
By that I mean I always was in my own mostly failed search for an unbeatable betting system that would flawlessly predict outcomes of fights, and allow me to profit from it.
Mine was built around trying to memorize as many statistical outcomes and trends as I could and leveraging it to my advantage, his on the other hand, revolved allowing a high end computer to do all that for him in real time. Points to ELO.
And if I’m really being honest, this software/system/thing he’s created is something I don’t actually think I would have actually ever be able to build. Or even think of myself. And while ELO is the curator and creator of this sacred set of code, even he borrowed a thing or two in order to help build his ‘model.’
He took the bare and basic core of his rating/predicting system from the Elo Rating System used to rank players in chess which basically uses the results of previous chess matches between chess players to predict the outcome of future ones. Or, at least that’s how I think it works.
Plainly put, in chess, a player with a higher ELO rating is statistically more likely to win against a player with a lower ELO rating. The higher the discrepancy, the greater the probability of winning for the higher tiered player.
The same basic concepts of that system in chess can be used to predict the outcome of a fight in mma.
The thing with applying this to mma, and with applying it to betting in particular, is that he doesn’t simply decide who will ultimately win a fight, he measures the likelihood of any and every outcome of a fight happening against the implied odds on various sportsbooks around the web. And attacks where he sees weakness.
So he isn’t simply betting on the fighter with the higher ELO rating every time, he is betting on a line where a bookie fucked up and gave an implied win probability beneath what his own internal model predicted.
So if his model predicts a 33% (+200) chance of a fighter winning inside the distance, but there’s a line out there that gives a 22.2% chance (+350), then he inputs that bet. I think he did something similar to that with Clay Guida this past weekend.
It seems pretty simple, but it just gets more and more complicated and confusing the more questions I ask him about it.
He bets on more than UFC and track all his winnings (and his losses) on his Instagram page. He’s on something of a downswing atm relative to where he was, the same happens in my world of poker (it’s almost expected), but he’s still massively up from his initial $300 investment and quadrupled his bankroll this past weekend if I’m remembering correctly. Little tip: He’s basically all in on Charles Oliveira this weekend.
Fair warning that I could be wrong about literally all of this.