My First Podcast Appearance

My Voice Sounds Nothing Like That in My Head

Back in 2022, I found myself in a conference centre in Aberdeen, teaching a room full of academics about the mathematics of bookmaking and the merits of Shin’s method.

This was my “reward” for winning that year’s Royal Statistical Society’s Statistics in Sport Section’s prediction competition (God what a mouthful). We’d been asked to submit predictions for all possible match-ups between the top 100 men and women tennis players at Wimbledon, a setup that should be familiar to anyone that’s filled out a March Madness bracket before. Some combination of my prior twelve years spent building statistical models for tennis, and my rare betting industry insight, carried the day and my predictions proved more accurate than the rest of my competitors.

Channelling my inner academic, I traded off that talk multiple times over the intervening years. I followed it up with a presentation to a meetup of professional gamblers hosted at Betfair HQ, and most recently gave an updated version for 2026 back in March at the London School of Economics (LSE) as part of the launch of this year’s competition, for which competitors have to predict the medals table for the Commonwealth Games.

I’d advertised the LSE talk here on Substack and remarkably a few dedicated - and London-based - readers turned up but I appreciated that the limits of spacetime would rule out attendance for most of my readership. To address this, I had intended to do a subsequent recording of the presentation myself but before I could get my shit together, I was serendipitously asked to present the material on The Corridor of Uncertainty podcast. Please enjoy: