…the next pick to the people who saw you pick the “winner”. Now half of those people see one team, the other half see you pick the other team, and whoever saw you pick the winner thinks you’ve got a 100% accuracy rate over two games. You could do that for a while and then offer to sell your pick for the Superbowl. Starting with a big enough group in the beginning, this might be really lucrative.

But is it legal?

  • nooneescapesthelaw@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Well it’s not mathematically possible

    The formula is p/(2^n)

    P would be the number of people you start with, and n is the number of games.

    If you start with the population of the US, 350 million people, you can only do this for about 28 matches before you run out of people.

  • Nakedmole@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Who cares if it’s legal - doing it makes you an asshole, that’s what really matters.

    • PoliticalAgitator@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      There’s demonstrably millions of people who are absolutely fine with being assholes, especially if it’s profitable. It doesn’t matter to them in the slightest.

      • Nakedmole@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        So when fraud happens, the victim is at fault and not the scammer? Mental gymnastics much? You sound like you’re a scammer yourself tbh …

  • ericbomb@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Mathematically, there are not enough people on the planet to do this with every us football game for an NFL season. Could do it for just the final games, but guessing 5 isn’t impressive.

    Just to do this for one team, you would need hundreds of thousands of people to get just one person. Assuming they even read your emails.

  • jbrains@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    Search YouTube for “derren brown horse racing system” and learn from someone who did it. I believe it includes a discussion of the legality of it, at least in the UK.

    • Melatonin@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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      1 year ago

      Of course he did. This idea can up when we were discussing street psychics (magicians, hypnotists) like him and David Blaine.

  • kromem@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The better way to do this is to ahead of time predict the number of games you’ll do in a row (n), and then create 2^n pseudonyms from which you post picks on a public site.

    After each, abandon the pseudonyms that guessed wrong.

    At the end, you’ll have one pseudonym that correctly predicted n games in a row, and especially if the public site you uploaded to has records of the times each pick was posted (or you used something like the web archive), you have a verifiable 3rd party record of getting it right that you can market to your full contact list, rather than cutting out your contacts in each round.

    P.S. You could probably automate this.

  • sock@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    youd still have to be stupid enough to think he wasnt just getting lucky

    which a lot of people are stupid enough so good luck

  • EuroNutellaMan@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Let’s assume 1000 people, who are as real as the people you see around you. And Let’s also assume these people who are in the room with us right now can’t communicate with each other. You email “Team Crab will win” to 500 and “Team Monkey will win” to the other 500.

    Team Monkey wins, so you send the 500 ones that saw it win another email for the next match. 250 get “Team Horse wins” and the other 250 get “Team Mr Hands wins”.

    Team Horse wins, so now you have: ¼ of the people who think you have a 100% success rate over only two games so they won’t necessarily be convinced but may look at you with interest, ¼ which see you at 50% but come on it’ only 2 games, and ½ who didn’t receive your mail and are wondering what is up with that.

    So let’s assume all the double-winners subscribe and so does 150 of the one-time winners. That’s 400 subscribers. However, you, being a big brained individual, only send an email to the 250 winners, 125 will have received “Team George W Bush will win” and the other 125 “Team Twin Towers will win”.

    After George W Bush smashes the Twin Towers you will have 125 happy people, 125 sad people and 150 angry people, some of whom will sue you because you didn’t deliver the service they paid for, the other ones learn from the news of your scam and you are charged for fraud, losing all the money you made and then some, as well as go to jail where you will drop the soap and wake up in the psych ward with a funny jacket because it turns out you were hallucinating the whole time.

    • KISSmyOS@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      You realize what you’ve just done here?
      To stay true, rule 34 now has to include George W Bush smashing the Twin Towers.

  • Num10ck@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    this is the life of an old school financial advisor, but with stock picks instead of sports outcomes. you often have to replace the group that got bad advice. nowadays they just push diversification and funds.

  • Etterra@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I actually met somebody who had better luck predicting the winners of football games by literally throwing darts at a board than anybody else in the pool.

  • BOMBS@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I’ve thought about this with the stock market and predicting that it would go up or down. After enough predictions, one would have an email list of people that saw one accurately predict the stock market after n times. This could then be used to request payment for future predictions.

    While I can’t state that this breaks any laws, it is possible it might somehow. However, even if it doesn’t, it’s a really fucked up thing to do because it’s conning people out of money using a scam. I highly recommend against it and responding to emails of people predicting future outcomes of events that vary wildly with any certainty.

  • IntentionallyAnon@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Deception is tricking people into paying or paying more for a service by lying. And I’m pretty sure a lawyer could say that that is lying UNLESS you never mentioned your last picks and how you have good choices. Just say I’m not giving my prediction for Super Bowl unless you pay $5