Alliance Tournament Betting - Day 6

Today was finals day for the thirteenth EVE Alliance Tournament. I went into the day expecting to lose most of my bets. In retrospect I should have realised that the chances of me winning a good few were high. Given the teams playing today were the four top teams in this tournament there was probably as much guessing going on setting the odds as for people placing bets.

The Bets

Pandemic Legion to beat The Camel Empire (match 1)
Exodus. to beat Warlords of the Deep (match 1)
The Camel Empire to beat Pandemic Legion (match 2)
Exodus. to beat Warlords of the Deep (match 2)
Pandemic Legion to beat The Camel Empire (match 3)
Pandemic Legion to beat Warlords of the Deep (match 1)
Pandemic Legion to beat Warlords of the Deep (match 2)
Warlords of the Deep to beat The Camel Empire (match 1)
Warlords of the Deep to beat The Camel Empire (match 2)
Warlords of the Deep to beat The Camel Empire (match 3)
Warlords of the Deep to beat The Camel Empire (match 4)

As close to half the bets won against the odds as is possible when betting on an odd number of matches. I won back all bar 4.5 Millions ISK of the money I bet. More important than that, the quality of the matches I watched was outstanding. I thoroughly enjoyed watching today even if I did miss a couple of the fights at the start.

Finally Tally

Bet: 1350 Million ISK
Won: 1053 Million ISK
Overall: 297 Million ISK down

Thoughts

I came into this experiment with around 400 Million ISK in EVE Bet credit which was gifted to me from a couple of EVE meetups. My intention was to seed myself more interest in watching the Alliance Tournament than I've had in the past. The side intention was to see just how viable betting exclusively on the underdogs in each match was. I succeeded in the primary goal. In the past I've half-heartedly watched the AT but not really understood what was going on or cared enough to find out. In 2013 at Fanfest I told a CCP employee who worked on running the AT that I felt sorry for him as EVE is a terribly boring game to watch. This time around, however, I was yelling at the TV (I had twitch streaming on 40 glorious inches of LCD); I had my son watching some of the matches with me while I tried to explain what was going on; I even had one of the kids in my street hooked (he climbed in through my window to watch more when I didn't realise - I turned around from my PC to see him sitting on my sofa watching a match!). In fact my son (who's 6) was upset that he had to go to bed and miss the final three matches! I call that op success, particularly because I'll get to watch the final three matches again so he can see them.

As for betting against the odds, well as you can see that strategy cost me almost 300 Million ISK. To be fair that's only a quarter of everything I bet so it isn't as terrible as it may seem. Possibly by doing a bit more filtering on the teams I could have lowered the losses but really I don't think that would have worked too well. Funnily enough EVE Bet seem to know their stuff. The little ISK I have left shall be randomly blown on some silly bet to see if I can get lucky. Just now I can get 2.81 on Galway to beat Kilkenny as Hurling...

It's been a great three weekends watching these matches unfold. It was brilliant watching my friends in The Bastards do so well. It was good watching Ministry of Inappropriate Footwork doing well too as I've flown with some of them. I cheered for Glasgow Dunlop outsurviving the rest of his team in a Scary Wormhole People match. This has been the first year I've known people in the tournament and I'm sure that's helped with my enjoyment, but the betting sure added on top of that too. Now, with that over, I need to keep well away from watching anything of anykind otherwise I'm sure my wife would love to take me into an arena and punish me with rapid light missiles of any kind.

I can't wait for AT XIV!