Oh well, time to burn some hard earned karma :)<p>I am currently teaching myself Python, going through the &quot;Learn Python the Hard Way&quot; book. About half way through I wanted to work on a real project, to get a feel for the limitations of the language, find the best resources etc.<p>I decided to make a football (soccer to my fellow Americans :) betting analyzer. It came to me after seeing a comment on HN from one user whose side income comes from a site he runs giving betting tips. After visiting his site, I read one of his betting strategies and decided it was something that could easily be automated with a Python script. Also, because I hate football with a passion, I saw it as something which would force me to use the data, strategy, analysis and empirical results instead of my &quot;intuition&quot;<p>Wow, what a rabbit hole I dived into. As a learning experience, I have to say it has been very enlightening. I&#x27;ve learned about:<p>-the awesomeness of iPython for &quot;code brainstorming&quot;<p>-the messiness and unreliability of web scraping. $DIETY bless try: except<p>-the absolute horror of dealing with unicode and names like D&#x27;Angelo in csv files.<p>-the joy of getting to experiment with Big Data! (19 million football matches in 1 year!)<p>-the deeper joy of bug hunting (hint: variable in the wrong part of an additive loop and 100K matches turn into 19 million)<p>-the ins and outs of various data structures.<p>-the pain of dumping MySQL for postgresql (only because I was trying -get this- to get postgres running under vagrant and accessing it via a Windows based graphic frontend)<p>And that is just the programming side.<p>On the motivational side, I though it would be a good idea to &quot;dog-food&quot; my software. So I started to wager real cash on the predictions my system was throwing up. Dog-food and throw up are a quite acceptable description of results to date. (BTW, for anyone worrying, I had a gambling problem as a teen which I licked, and I have kept to my original $100 bank to use, which is now down to about $20, was up to $150 at one point, but as another commenter said, a lot of gamblers only seem to remember the wins they have, not the re-buy-ins. Part of my system involves bankroll management, which includes cash-flow, PnL and other measures.)<p>But as this is HN I do have a startup idea!!!<p>I have already bought the domain betopian.com. I reached out the the CTO of quantopian.com as I want to make something similar. (He was gracious enough to reply, thanks Jean!) The reason for this is that as part of my research into betting strategies, I found a common theme: nobody backtests their strategies. In fact, quite a few times I have seen people berated for wanting to backtest because... reasons. Some of these reasons seem quite reasonable - eg you need domain knowledge not just data.<p>For me though, it seems the biggest reason for not backtesting is that the multitude of &quot;strategies&quot; fail, and testing would show that. But a lot of betting strategies rely on a &quot;feel&quot; for the bet. If it fails, &quot;Oh, unlucky&quot; if it wins &quot;Solid strategy dude!!&quot; I would like to create a place where people would have to prove that their strategy is just that - a thought out, long term plan of attack on how to bet on a sport.<p>Because I think that is what drives a gambling addiction - losses are just plain bad luck and wins are solid logical thinking.<p>Secondly, as I have seen through my &#x27;experiment&#x27; gambling isn&#x27;t just luck. If it was, we wouldn&#x27;t expect to see gambling companies being so profitable. When you find the sure winners, you find you can&#x27;t bet on them. The bookies spend money on their own form of &quot;betopian&quot; I think. Or basically raw math talent who really understand probability theory.<p>So I dream (and I have nowhere near the technical ability to make it happen - yet) of betopian.com being a site where gamblers can have their dreams safely dashed, and maybe open their eyes to the reality of the betting world. It&#x27;s stacked against you in ways you cannot imagine.<p>I&#x27;d be interested in your thoughts on this idea.<p>[edit: formatting]