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Dragon Ball: After the End

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Simon_Jester said:
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Good analysis, but there's a few problems with it:
1) You're working off assumption that the gambling is being done by small time businesses or individuals or whatever. This is incorrect: all gambling is done through official offices. Aka, it's all one organisation, not many smaller ones. This means they can take losses far better.
2) Again, you're assuming the people setting the odds don't have experts helping deciding the odds. This is not a founded assumption, and would be quite foolish of them.
3) You're assuming they don't take a great many bets. Tournaments are a regular pass-time, and while pro-league ones might only happen every few years, small time ones probably occur a few times per year. And with big events like this one, there's tons of betting.
4) You're assuming they're foolish enough to give odds and pay out bets they can't afford to. Maximum pay-out size is thing IRL, and so are cash reserves.
5) Her known resume was accurate last year, and while secret training is a thing, it would rarely be to this extreme. As Matsuba said, they know everyone at this level, or thought they did. This is likely a random guy off the street, who has had no training from any Martial Arts Master, defeating a 6th Dan Master, when by all indications they had only basic training a year ago.
 
Gore17 said:
Good analysis, but there's a few problems with it:
1) You're working off assumption that the gambling is being done by small time businesses or individuals or whatever. This is incorrect: all gambling is done through official offices. Aka, it's all one organisation, not many smaller ones. This means they can take losses far better.
2) Again, you're assuming the people setting the odds don't have experts helping deciding the odds. This is not a founded assumption, and would be quite foolish of them.
3) You're assuming they don't take a great many bets. Tournaments are a regular pass-time, and while pro-league ones might only happen every few years, small time ones probably occur a few times per year. And with big events like this one, there's tons of betting.
4) You're assuming they're foolish enough to give odds and pay out bets they can't afford to. Maximum pay-out size is thing IRL, and so are cash reserves.
5) Her known resume was accurate last year, and while secret training is a thing, it would rarely be to this extreme. As Matsuba said, they know everyone at this level, or thought they did. This is likely a random guy off the street, who has had no training from any Martial Arts Master, defeating a 6th Dan Master, when by all indications they had only basic training a year ago.
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Honestly, the big concern to me is they explicitly don't employ seers and it's not illegal for seers to make bets so I have to wonder how many seers tap particularly long odds by checking the outcome and betting hard if it's an upset.
 
Terrabrand said:
Honestly, the big concern to me is they explicitly don't employ seers and it's not illegal for seers to make bets so I have to wonder how many seers tap particularly long odds by checking the outcome and betting hard if it's an upset.
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Eh, probably not. I don't think Seers tend to be strapped for cash thanks to people paying for visions, there's almost certainly an upper limit, and abusing it to much would ruin it for everyone. More likely, they make small bets on a regular scale, means they won't get banned, and the small number of Seers means that it's only a small percentage of bets being made.

Plus, you know, there's bound to be Seers that like gambling without knowing the outcome.
 
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Gore17 said:
5) Her known resume was accurate last year, and while secret training is a thing, it would rarely be to this extreme. As Matsuba said, they know everyone at this level, or thought they did. This is likely a random guy off the street, who has had no training from any Martial Arts Master, defeating a 6th Dan Master, when by all indications they
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Going by that Kakara would be very interested in talking to her. Right now she is desperate to get good fast and by all apperences this is someone that has gotten good fast.
 
Kakara has huge communication skills to apply to talking to Cynthia and given she is asking how to protect her people she would apply the protecter bonus.
 
Gore17 said:
Good analysis, but there's a few problems with it:
1) You're working off assumption that the gambling is being done by small time businesses or individuals or whatever. This is incorrect: all gambling is done through official offices. Aka, it's all one organisation, not many smaller ones. This means they can take losses far better.
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Yes, but it also means they should have better statisticians. And good statisticians are usually reluctant to rate things with hidden information and a measure of anti-inductive behavior (amateurs who enter tournaments are not a representative sample of amateurs as a whole) as having probabilities on the close order of one in ten thousand.

This also addresses (2).

I'm not saying "it's impossible they would fuck up like this." I'm saying "look, let's be realistic, they fucked up."

3) You're assuming they don't take a great many bets. Tournaments are a regular pass-time, and while pro-league ones might only happen every few years, small time ones probably occur a few times per year. And with big events like this one, there's tons of betting.
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From an actuarial point of view, the unit of betting is the fight. Having a thousand bets on one fight doesn't mean the law of averages behaves better for you. It just multiplies the payoff and reward.

4) You're assuming they're foolish enough to give odds and pay out bets they can't afford to. Maximum pay-out size is thing IRL, and so are cash reserves.
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I'm not assuming it, I'm saying it's a practical problem. If Kakara can bet a hundred zeni, so can several thousand other people who are just plain too attracted by the sheer size of the payout to resist. If two thousand people (1 in 150 Exiles) does it, the payout is in the range of 1.5 billion zeni. Can the gambling operation cover that? Maybe so- but they're losing a staggering amount of money. If they'd been more modest and only rated Cynthia as having a one in FIVE thousand chance of winning, they would in all probability have saved themselves hundreds of millions of zeni in losses, while losing no more than a few tens of thousands of zeni in revenue.

It's like, a casino or a lottery can stay afloat despite making huge payouts once in a while, but that's only because they've correctly estimated the odds of having to do so. Otherwise they'd go out of business very rapidly.

At a bare minimum you'd expect the gambling operation to employ people who know fighters to directly observe the contestants in the preliminary rounds. Whoever had that job, and didn't notice Cynthia acting like a much more competent and confident fighter than her resume suggests, is probably going to lose that job.

5) Her known resume was accurate last year, and while secret training is a thing, it would rarely be to this extreme. As Matsuba said, they know everyone at this level, or thought they did. This is likely a random guy off the street, who has had no training from any Martial Arts Master, defeating a 6th Dan Master, when by all indications they had only basic training a year ago.
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This comes down to a Bayesian statistical argument.

The odds against a random challenger defeating a master, in itself, might be 10000:1.

The odds against a random challenger with a secret (say, a willingness to use a dangerous technique, or a huge amount of secret training) defeating a master might be 50:1. That is, still incredibly favorable to the master because most ambitious punks with one secret up their sleeves lose. But not as ridiculously favorable.

Now, we know that a seemingly random challenger has climbed into the ring with a master. What are the odds against them? At one end of the scale we might say 10000:1, at the other, 50:1.

Suppose there is a ten percent chance that any given random bozo who climbs into the ring with a master willingly has some secret that they think will allow them to win. It may be much less powerful than they believe and in reality only give them a 2% chance of victory, as discussed above, but they have something going for them. The other 90% have nothing special, and they know this. But that 10%? They have something. Something that may give them only a one-in-fifty chance, but something.

90% of random bozos have a 1:10000 chance of winning, but the other 10% have a 1:50 chance of winning. The true odds of a random bozo winning against the master wind up being about... (.9*0.0001)+(.1*.02), which is pretty close to one in five hundred.

It takes only a small minority of all random bozo challengers having ANY secret or unusual trait that gives them even a slight chance of victory, one that in normal everyday life we'd completely shrug off and ignore. Even a little of that happening once in a long while is enough to make it so that when you see a random bozo step into the ring with a challenger, you need to remember. Yes, their odds of victory are still hilariously slim. But they're not "would only happen once in a lifetime if you did it twice a week for your whole life" unlikely.

...

It's like a generalization of the rule in martial arts that if a smiling little old man challenges you, expect to feel some pain. Because he's a little old man, weak and frail compared to you physically. Superficially the odds are against him, and he knows it... so why is he smiling?

Maybe he's just a fool. But... sometimes he knows something you don't.
 
Salient point: the odds were over 7000:1 when Kakara walked up to the booth. They crashed to even as soon as she (the Scion) placed her bet, and rose only to five-to-one once the booth got somebody out to look at the challengers.
 
PoptartProdigy said:
Salient point: the odds were over 7000:1 when Kakara walked up to the booth. They crashed to even as soon as she (the Scion) placed her bet, and rose only to five-to-one once the booth got somebody out to look at the challengers.
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So the bookie types here would probably double take at any known seers making big bets on long odds, too, then. That makes a fair amount of sense.
 
Terrabrand said:
So the bookie types here would probably double take at any known seers making big bets on long odds, too, then. That makes a fair amount of sense.
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Yeah. Prior to Kakara's bet, they never actually had had anybody look at Cynthia. No time. There are a lot of amateurs in this tournament. They only had her history. Once they realized that something was up...
 
Terrabrand said:
So the bookie types here would probably double take at any known seers making big bets on long odds, too, then. That makes a fair amount of sense.
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Smart, they promise up and down that they don't employee any Seers, but they don't have to. They just watch how the Seers bet.
 
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Simon_Jester said:
From an actuarial point of view, the unit of betting is the fight. Having a thousand bets on one fight doesn't mean the law of averages behaves better for you. It just multiplies the payoff and reward.
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True, but thousands of fights do.
Simon_Jester said:
This comes down to a Bayesian statistical argument.

The odds against a random challenger defeating a master, in itself, might be 10000:1.

The odds against a random challenger with a secret (say, a willingness to use a dangerous technique, or a huge amount of secret training) defeating a master might be 50:1. That is, still incredibly favorable to the master because most ambitious punks with one secret up their sleeves lose. But not as ridiculously favorable.

Now, we know that a seemingly random challenger has climbed into the ring with a master. What are the odds against them? At one end of the scale we might say 10000:1, at the other, 50:1.

Suppose there is a ten percent chance that any given random bozo who climbs into the ring with a master willingly has some secret that they think will allow them to win. It may be much less powerful than they believe and in reality only give them a 2% chance of victory, as discussed above, but they have something going for them. The other 90% have nothing special, and they know this. But that 10%? They have something. Something that may give them only a one-in-fifty chance, but something.

90% of random bozos have a 1:10000 chance of winning, but the other 10% have a 1:50 chance of winning. The true odds of a random bozo winning against the master wind up being about... (.9*0.0001)+(.1*.02), which is pretty close to one in five hundred.

It takes only a small minority of all random bozo challengers having ANY secret or unusual trait that gives them even a slight chance of victory, one that in normal everyday life we'd completely shrug off and ignore. Even a little of that happening once in a long while is enough to make it so that when you see a random bozo step into the ring with a challenger, you need to remember. Yes, their odds of victory are still hilariously slim. But they're not "would only happen once in a lifetime if you did it twice a week for your whole life" unlikely.

...

It's like a generalization of the rule in martial arts that if a smiling little old man challenges you, expect to feel some pain. Because he's a little old man, weak and frail compared to you physically. Superficially the odds are against him, and he knows it... so why is he smiling?

Maybe he's just a fool. But... sometimes he knows something you don't.
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You're missing a rather salient point: that they know every single Krillin-style Master that could have taught her, and it takes about at least a decade of dedicated effort to Master a style normally. That she hasn't been training with them is also something that is known. Meaning she has somehow either found an unknown Master, or gained her skill entirely through self-study and sparring with those of a similar or greater skill level, and they know most/all of those either. This level of skill is nigh-impossible to gain secretly, and indicates she's either studying under a secret Master who wants to stay secret, is an absolute genius at fighting, or, mostly likely, both.

So, here's how I see it instead:

(0.99*0.00005)+(0.01*0.002), which is about 1 in 14,400. This applies doubly, since this isn't a professional tournament with amateurs in it, it's an amateur tournament with professionals in it.
 
Gore17 said:
Good analysis, but there's a few problems with it:
1) You're working off assumption that the gambling is being done by small time businesses or individuals or whatever. This is incorrect: all gambling is done through official offices. Aka, it's all one organisation, not many smaller ones. This means they can take losses far better.
2) Again, you're assuming the people setting the odds don't have experts helping deciding the odds. This is not a founded assumption, and would be quite foolish of them.
3) You're assuming they don't take a great many bets. Tournaments are a regular pass-time, and while pro-league ones might only happen every few years, small time ones probably occur a few times per year. And with big events like this one, there's tons of betting.
4) You're assuming they're foolish enough to give odds and pay out bets they can't afford to. Maximum pay-out size is thing IRL, and so are cash reserves.
5) Her known resume was accurate last year, and while secret training is a thing, it would rarely be to this extreme. As Matsuba said, they know everyone at this level, or thought they did. This is likely a random guy off the street, who has had no training from any Martial Arts Master, defeating a 6th Dan Master, when by all indications they had only basic training a year ago.
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And yet, all those things would have led you to predict, quite confidently, that we'd lose. And we won.

In most cases where you'd be making this argument, speaking purely statistically, you'd be wrong. Are you really so confident in the competence of this anonymous bookie that you're willing to attribute them 1:7000 worth of charity?
 
Considering that the odds keep adjusting as bets are made I think it happened something like a speculation bubble. More than 7 thousand people bet on Mitsuba. The more people that bet him the more the algorithm tilted the odds. Until Kakara bets on the other side and the market crashed.

The brokers made money. If they have an algorithm like that. It keeps auto adjusting so that they win either way.
 
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PoptartProdigy said:
Salient point: the odds were over 7000:1 when Kakara walked up to the booth. They crashed to even as soon as she (the Scion) placed her bet, and rose only to five-to-one once the booth got somebody out to look at the challengers.
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:rofl:

Okay, now THAT is hilarious.

"OH CRAPBASKETS WHAT DOES KAKARA THE GOLDEN KNOW THAT WE DON'T?"

"OH CRAPBASKETS NOW WE KNOW WHAT SHE KNEW AND IT HUUUURTS!"

Terrabrand said:
Whoever trained Cynthia, presumably. Looking at it from Mitsuba's perspective.

Possibly Cynthia's not so friendly pal, if assumptions are being made.
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Mitsuba:

"I may be judging a book by its cover, but he doesn't look like a Krillin stylist. Too lean and hungry. Krillin Style takes for granted that most of the time, launching a serious attack is a mistake. You spend three quarters of your time waiting for your opening, so that the other quarter of the time you can make your shot count." She rubs her hand reflexively. "That fellow? I'm pretty sure he'd go for the jugular too fast to make a good Krillin stylist. He'd be a good something-else, just not a Krillin."

"Hmmmmm. Maybe a Frieza stylist. Wouldn't be the first lone wolf to master that style without letting word get out they were doing it, so that might explain it. Or if you told me he was a brother Demon stylist in a very bad mood, I might believe you- but I'd still wonder where he got his training."
 
Simon_Jester said:
Okay, now THAT is hilarious.

"OH CRAPBASKETS WHAT DOES KAKARA THE GOLDEN KNOW THAT WE DON'T?"

"OH CRAPBASKETS NOW WE KNOW WHAT SHE KNEW AND IT HUUUURTS!"
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That was likely said by all the people that had bet on Mitsuba. I don't think those odds we're the initial odds, but a result of a huge amount of people betting Mitsuba.
 
PoptartProdigy said:
Salient point: the odds were over 7000:1 when Kakara walked up to the booth. They crashed to even as soon as she (the Scion) placed her bet, and rose only to five-to-one once the booth got somebody out to look at the challengers.
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PoptartProdigy said:
Yeah. Prior to Kakara's bet, they never actually had had anybody look at Cynthia. No time. There are a lot of amateurs in this tournament. They only had her history. Once they realized that something was up...
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Is it permitted to make bets on oneself? If so, how much money did Cynthia get for betting on herself?
 
Aranfan said:
Is it permitted to make bets on oneself? If so, how much money did Cynthia get for betting on herself?
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I see no reason it would not be allowed. Of course you can't bet against yourself, but betting on yourself is probably fine and even encouraged.

If you are betting on yourself it is less likely you are being paid to throw the fight. Whenever large amounts of money get involved corruption follows and so it must be fought against. I expect in most top circle matchs betting on yourself might even be required.
 
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