Appreciate the write up on the tournament. I was wondering why I got a bunch of random twitter followers over the past 24 hours. Just to share some thoughts on the tournament of my own
1) I didn't play the tournament at all like the 2nd place guy. For basically any prediction market I've ever been in, I've totally ignored the fees and have just tried to get the answer right. I had no idea that some knew how much money everyone had the entire time. The tournament rules were changed to specifically not allow this, but they were able to do it through the API anyway. I didn't care at all when the markets were ended and I pretty much avoided bonding markets that were ending soon until the last month of the tournament. This was probably stupid in hindsight, but I treated this like any other prediction market and I've found that bonding is for losers unless you're really really really disciplined. Finally, I only did the bot monitoring that Robert talks about because I kept noticing these insanely bad trades would happen frequently and my main competition at the time (Johnny 10 Numbers) would then buy the market back to fair value within an hour. I assumed first place was the most important factor in getting the money, so I don't think I had a choice
2) Predictive ability was important. While I did make some fake money reacting to breaking news, I only lost money in 11 out of the 48 markets that I participated in. Most of the markets where I made money reacting to breaking news (will PI survive, basically all of the Trump indictments, many elections), I was on the right side anyway.
3) Competition was soft. Not trying to be mean, but there just weren't enough people playing after the midterms. Markets that would have moved on PI in a few minutes on news took twice as long in this tournament
4) They really dropped the ball the last month. There weren't any new markets put up for the last month plus of the contest. The only one that was remotely in play was Trump getting indicted a third time. The rest of them were just bonds. This meant that the contest turned into a who can monitor the webpage the best and wait for someone to make a stupid bet to buy the other side. As the person who was likely to win, this sucked.
Appreciate the write up on the tournament. I was wondering why I got a bunch of random twitter followers over the past 24 hours. Just to share some thoughts on the tournament of my own
1) I didn't play the tournament at all like the 2nd place guy. For basically any prediction market I've ever been in, I've totally ignored the fees and have just tried to get the answer right. I had no idea that some knew how much money everyone had the entire time. The tournament rules were changed to specifically not allow this, but they were able to do it through the API anyway. I didn't care at all when the markets were ended and I pretty much avoided bonding markets that were ending soon until the last month of the tournament. This was probably stupid in hindsight, but I treated this like any other prediction market and I've found that bonding is for losers unless you're really really really disciplined. Finally, I only did the bot monitoring that Robert talks about because I kept noticing these insanely bad trades would happen frequently and my main competition at the time (Johnny 10 Numbers) would then buy the market back to fair value within an hour. I assumed first place was the most important factor in getting the money, so I don't think I had a choice
2) Predictive ability was important. While I did make some fake money reacting to breaking news, I only lost money in 11 out of the 48 markets that I participated in. Most of the markets where I made money reacting to breaking news (will PI survive, basically all of the Trump indictments, many elections), I was on the right side anyway.
3) Competition was soft. Not trying to be mean, but there just weren't enough people playing after the midterms. Markets that would have moved on PI in a few minutes on news took twice as long in this tournament
4) They really dropped the ball the last month. There weren't any new markets put up for the last month plus of the contest. The only one that was remotely in play was Trump getting indicted a third time. The rest of them were just bonds. This meant that the contest turned into a who can monitor the webpage the best and wait for someone to make a stupid bet to buy the other side. As the person who was likely to win, this sucked.