That would be interesting though and I bet you’d see others try to make money in similar ways from the data as PicksPal is doing. I wouldn’t be surprised if the service takes off if you don’t have people scraping the site for that kind of data anyway.

As for those group of people being any more “lucky” than the rest? Some might have the benefit of being more knowledgable about the specifics of certain matches. There is something to playing by the numbers versus simply guessing but then you can’t count on the freak accidents and injuries during matches or stupid managerial moves.

Bottom line: those people who got lucky five weeks in a row could just as easily go 0-5 the next five weeks while the dude who guessed on games by flipping a coin went 5-0.

Interesting discussion.

Yes, it’s a little harsh.

But it does work the same way as a common investment newsletter scam.

You send out 100,000 letters saying a stock is going is going up, and 100,000 letters saying the same stock is going down.

The next week, you take the 100,000 that you happened right and divide them in half. To 50,000 you send a letter saying another stock is going up, and 50,000 saying the same stock is going down.

Repeat for a few weeks.

After six weeks you’re still left with over 3,000 people who you’ve picked stock winners for six weeks in a row.

You then market these people a very expensive newsletter, based on your past ‘performance’.

It’s no different than what PicksPal is doing by marketing the picks of the top thirty guys over the past five weeks as ‘geniuses.’ And offering those ‘genius’ picks for sale strongly implies to me that they’re looking to attract people looking to make a quick buck off the sale – just like people who fall for investment newsletter scams.

I’d need a heck of a lot more data about the performance of the average participant and the size of PicksPal’s user pool before I could determine whether someone was good enough to be more than lucky. We’re talking high degrees of statistical significance.

http://www.frankston.com/Public/Default.aspx?zz=xcs&Script_name=/default.aspx&name=Opportunity

I wish Bob Frankston could find a PR team for his spiel on the FCC, the telcos and Net Neutrality. He’s too hard to parse on his own.

Google should have hired Bob along with Vint Cert and put their PAC money behind this battle.

People don’t have to click on ads or buy those PicksPal picks if they don’t want. The flipside is for people who would like to play in a pool at the office for fun (or to wager something harmless like who buy’s lunch) these sites have a target market.

And maybe they’ll pull away a few folks who are doing real gambling online and could get into trouble.

There are some real “scams” out there to target and vent on but I don’t think PicksPal is a fair target for this type of scorn.

I agree with the rest of your rant about the government angle, though.