In France, horse races happen every day of the year and you can bet on horses through the PMU, the "Pari Mutuel Urbain". Nowadays, you can bet through the Internet, but back in the eighties, there was no Internet. But you could use a device called the "Minitel".
The Minitel was a small terminal with a modem on your telephone line. 1200 bauds download and 75 bauds upload.
So, in the eighties, I decided to bet on horses. I did not know anything about horses, but I had a plan. I bought every day a newspaper named Paris-Turf. In it, there was for each race of the day prognoses by various horse tipsters that were supposed to know what they were doing.
I wrote a program to compute statistics about the different races, the prognoses and the results of the different races. After a month of getting these data, my program started to indicate when there was a good chance that I would make money on some bets.
So, I started to follow the instructions from my program. I did that for one full year. Sometimes I would win, sometimes I would lose. As I remember, I have bet around 60,000 francs, but I was down only 3,000 francs. It was in fact cheap entertainment.
No comments:
Post a Comment