Neopets Food Club

 Here I do a recap of my sets' historical performances, as well as those of a couple other popular bettors. I use my statistical models, as well as the actual closing odds of the pirates every day, in order to simulate every day's results 1 million times, and see how each different strategy performs in the long term in all those simulations. The advantage of this simulation over simply tracking ROIs is that it shows us not only how much each strategy outperformed or underperformed expectations, but also exactly how much luck was involved, and to what degree that luck impacted the performance. For each strategy/bettor, I illustrate the results in three different ways. After all the individual strategy visualizations, I also do some distribution comparisons between similar strategies. Check  here  for instructions on how to read the data. To be clear, we only know all of these numbers in retrospect. It is therefore not correct to assume that if you follow any of my sets or ...

 Broadly speaking, my approach to Food Club is very similar to a Modern Portfolio Theory approach that you might encounter in an intro to Financial Economics. That is, we want to determine the sets that lie along the Efficient Frontier -- those that minimize variance for any given average return level. In order to achieve this, I wrote an algorithm that traverses the space of all sets and estimates the average return and variance of each. Measure of risk One important note here is that variance of returns is my measure of risk, which is different from most bettors, who instead look mostly at bust rate, partial rate, and profit rate to measure risk. Although the two measures of risk are often quite correlated, a variance-based risk measure tends to deprioritize bust/partial/profit rates on days with particularly bad or particularly good odds. For example, on bad days, you might have a very low-variance set that still has an exceedingly high partial rate, because a partial result may...

  Below are all of the pirates that are competing in Food Club. I may not update this every day. You can find the most current win/loss on Food Club under Pirates What is Food Club you ask? Food Club is an eating contest among 20 infamous pirates. There are 5 arenas and 1 pirate from each arena will win the match. To play you bet on a pirate or a series of pirates in different arenas. Every pirate in the bet must win for you to win the bet. There are odds for each pirate and those can change throughout the day. If you want to be conservative you might go with the odds and stay pretty safe. You will likely win but not in a big way. Or.... you can be like me and take risks. You will sometimes look at my bets and say what on earth is Cameila doing. I focus on getting the big wins. It is strategy which works for me. But then again if I lose I do not sweat it. But I have won big. My trophy proves that! How much can you bet? That depends on the age of your account. For each day of age th...

  General Terminology positive arena  - an arena where when you add up the odds, the total is less than one. eg. Shipwreck Young Sproggie (10:1) Orvinn the First Mate (9:1) Peg Leg Percival (5:1) Ned the Skipper (2:1) 1/10 + 1/9 + 1/5 + 1/2 = 0.91111111... What does this mean? Since the probabilities don't add up to one, you know that the pirates won't behave exactly like their posted odds dictate. So Ned has room to be 'better' than 2:1 odds (since odds can't go past 2:1 or 13:1), or 50% chance to win, for example. These arenas as a general rule make good primaries. The opposite would be negative arenas. negative arena  - an arena where that aforementioned total is greater than one, and generally have 2:1 pirates that perform worse than their posted odds. Negative arenas make decent boosters, since you are expecting the 2:1 pirate to lose more often than win. primary arena  - an arena where you will focus on the 2:1 pirate and place the majority of your bets on the...