Silver’s final odds were 70-30 for Hillary.
Which were a lot better than almost everyone else who was doing oddsmaking on the election.
Most of those people were imitating Nate's method: poll weighting, poll averaging, Monte Carlo simmulations, etc.
What's 70 / 30 odd look like in more familiar NFL football odds?
70% works out to -235 in a moneyline bet.
For those not that familiar with legal gambling on sports as can be done at Nevada casinos the moneyline for the favorite represents the amount you have to bet to win $100 if that team wins. It is expressed as a negative number. So a money line favorite of -200 means that you have to wager $200 to win $100. (And, of course as the winner your original wager is returned to you.)
Here is the list of NFL teams that have a 70% chance or more of winning their week #4 matchup based on the moneyline odds.
| Favorite Team | Moneyline | Predicted Loser |
|---|---|---|
| Ravens | -310 | Browns |
| Cheifs | -305 | Lions |
| Chargers | -1100 | Dolphins |
| Patriots | -340 | Bills |
| Colts | -315 | Raiders |
| Seahawks | -240 | Cardinals |
| Rams | -450 | Buccaneers |
That's seven teams, or about 1/2 of the 15 games being played. Which says in the NFL it's not at all uncommon for a team to have a 70% chance of winning, and it's not at all uncommon for them to lose.
Let's come back and visit thie post next week and see how good the odds makers are.
By the way I got these moneylines is from bet.365,com which is an online casino servicing people living in New Jersey, where on-line book making is now legal
The conversion from moneyline to % odds are available at several places, I used this one.
My point is that odds makers get a lot of contests wrong, a 30% chance means if they game was played 10 times you'd expect the underdog to win 3 of those. Not never win.
Nate's background is in sports, and sports betting and sports oddsmaking, which he is quite respected in. (And why ESPN became his owner/publisher). People (like giant casinos in Las Vegas) care a lot about having very good oddsmakers because they are going to take millions and millions of dollars in bets every week.
It's always going to be harder to odds make on an election than on a series sporting event with a 17 week season.
By the way: The Dolphins really suck. The Chargers have a 92% chance of beating this. But it's not a sure thing. Is it worth $1100 to harvest $100 from the State of New Jersey on this wager? (Assuming you lived in N.J. and were able to do so.) Even a lot of people who bet moneyline and bet on favorites don't go for these huge odds, it's just too expensive to lose.