Artificial Intelligence. The cause for concern is political. Who will control it?

A.I. is suddenly in the news as a tool for humanity, for good ends or bad.  I've been having lots of fun with my new mate "Bard", Google's own "Large Language Model" (L.L.M.).  Many pundits predict, rightly, that this new technology will be the mainstay aggregator of humankind’s collective wisdom for decades to come, exceeding the impact of other hyped tech fads of late, such as “virtual reality headsets", "space tourism", "the internet of things", “driverless cars” and “the Metaverse”.   Jordan Petersen predicts the university is doomed.  A friend of mine called Martin produced an 92 page tender for his company written by ChatGPT.

As some readers may know, my interest in these L.L.M.s comes from my development of Wisecrowd, a mobile app that aggregates online data, analyses it and adds some A.I., mechanically.  For Wisecrowd the data is collective judgements drawn from players of a online game, for L.L.M the data is pretty much everything accessible on the internet.  Both types of robot data interrogators face the same regulatory issues, specifically concerns about responsible ownership and control.  These concerns are part of a wider conflict between rulers and ruled, neatly described by Matthew Goodwin, in his Values, Voice and Virtue book.

The significance of  the new A.I. language bots to political debates quickly becomes clear when I started asking my new friend Bard some questions.  It seems to have really thought about the request, delivering a distinguished looking answer in seconds.  Now my daily intellectual company is transformed overnight, (no disrespect to Jo).  It's like having the brightest person in the world on your shoulder, always switched on.

 

This tech is clever and powerful as well as polite.  Cloud processing capacity seems no future bar on processing vast numbers of searches, using ever more complicated formulas across growing global datasets.  Presently, these thought robots are doubling their data search capabilities every few months, so Bard's not just a bright kid, its learning very quickly too.  Needless to say, Bard’s retentive memory is flawless.  

Within the new-found public focus on A.I. there has been insufficient discussion as to whether these powers and talents will be exercised responsibly?  Who will own the bots and how should they be regulated, if at all?   Eyelids flashing, blinking into the new dawn, it would be good if all humanity convened to agree how to react in our human-wide interest - very much in the spirit I hope of Elon Musk et al.'s recent request for a global moratorium on the subject.  There needs to be a global treaty probably, a sort of Geneva convention for a new type of warfare.  This stuff is just too important.

 

The current A.I. talk is largely about how helpful or irrelevant A.I. will be, set against human intelligence, and its potential impact on our society, productivity, art and lifestyles.  We are shocked that A.I. generated music is outselling human artists, although there is plenty of human creativity behind A.I. music.  Then there are the entertaining red-herrings about the machines taking over the onward march of “technological determinism”- an old idea bequeathed from stoned discussions in the 1960s.  The machines never did take over, which had been prophesied at regular intervals since the days of H.G. Wells.  Time may speed up or it may stop altogether as a result of technology, but the machine never seems to take over from the man, under any realistic examination.  The war never came either.  There was no Armageddon.

 

The issue is not the robots ruling us, but the transfer of power (information), via A.I,. from one group of humans to another, who end up controlling the technology.  Man devises the system, the system didn't devise him.  War isn't inevitable.  Man can prove remarkably resilient and has managed to organise sufficient supra-national governance such as NATO and the United Nations to stave off war..  He likes having control of the machine’s buttons. The buttons definitely work, he knows that, but for the benefit to all of us they must be kept working, and not sabotaged by the owners or controllers for their own private interests, or smashed up by Luddite regulators on the grounds of an impending mechanical apocalypse. 

 

Data aggregators like the Bard and ChatGPT are no different to the original internet search engine structurally: simple aggregators of our own humanity's collective wisdom turned into data packets, and then restrung in pretty, generally well-written English.  Who is responsible for what goes into the machine and what comes out the other end are the owners of the technology.  In principle, the closer the owners are to the general public, the better, because it's not fair on the general public if humanity's wisdom is controlled by a narrow, special elite, be that corporate, government or both.  It’s also dangerous.  For “the Wisdom of the Crowds" to be effective, a liberal media is essential.  If private interests can control the data, amounting to the entirety of our common knowledge base, and the output of the bots across every subject of humanity, they’re likely to frig it in their own interests, if their past form is to go by, looking their sanitation of first generation search engines and social media.  

 

This brings me to my biggest fear of all: A.I. can be given by the owners a political bias, easily.  That would threaten the machine's positive impact on our own breed’s survival and relegate the technology to just another channel for one group of humans to hector another...  I'm thinking in particular of Davos-types.  Toe-curlingly earnest middle-class elites taking control with missionary zeal; pushing forward globalism, political correctness, international labour markets and slightly tired Keynesian economics.  I fear most of these bots, given whose constructing them, will take this particular colour, packaged as ever as Universal Truth, no dissent tolerated.  

 

The primary job of A.I. will not to be establish a clearer idea of what Truth is, but support a particular view on the world from many.  It should be left to us for us to choose which version of the truth we prefer and there must always be choice.  Hopefully, thanks to competition between A.I. bots of different political hues, we can hope for some natural regulation through supply and demand, the good choices winning market competition and the relatively sane customer (crowd) would have a chunk of the power.  I also think we have not yet seen how the bots will develop short-term without any global leadership of the industry and universal rules.  

There are other approaches to aggregating collective wisdom which may differ from the L.L.M. bots methodology, but achieve similar results.  For example,  for many years now I have been associated with a mobile app called Wisecrowd (which has never been delivered yet).  It's part online social game, part opinion poll.  The product draws opinions and knowledge from the players of a game, applies some formulas or algorithms and then returns to the player with the A.I, which are rankings of comparable user submitted photographs of anything by category.  Eventually, this game will rate reliably pretty much any "people, places and things" stuff out there - based entirely on perceived public preferences and some theory that "the many are smarter than the few" (under certain conditions).  LLMs and Wisecrowd both exist to add intelligence to the world, mechanically, hence could be well-described as "Artificial Intelligence".  The process is exactly the same for both - 1) aggregate data, 2) analyse data, 3) report back to customer with his data, improved - with the added artificial intelligence.  

(For those interested (potential investors), I hear the Wisecrowd project is 'oven ready'.  The front and backends have been fully specified.  It will cost £750,000 to build apparently, and be launched and run for a three month trial.  So if you want your very own ChatGBP product, one can be yours for just £750,000!   If you would like to get in touch, please email albert@addlestonebowls.com.  You will be sent a presentation, including the business numbers.  This would be perfect for a gaming operator looking for some differentiation in the social gaming space, benefiting humanity.  It might suit the market-research industry because its a quick, cheap and easy polling mechanism which makes being a respondent, fun.  For the gaming industry Wisecrowd offers rigour and relavance.  For the polling industry, it offers the chance to make their opinion polling more interesting through gamification.  The emergence of talk about LLMs being successful has breathed a bit of fire into my belly about Wisecrowd and this is an  idea that really needs to happen now, defining the regulatory space as it goes.  I thought I had got Wisecrowd out of my head and was enjoying some lawn bowls.  But the prospect of greater forward momentum with wider A.I. bot development has bolstered my estimation about the likelihood of Wisecrowd getting launched and maybe some more work for me down the line.)

Yet I fear for the Wisecrowd bot that he may be throttled at birth or permanently censored one day, just like Bard could be emasculated on welfare and safeguarding grounds alone.  Regulation I predict will be subsumed under a wider debate about the culture wars and the role of the elite to protect the masses, speaking directly to the current debate between the rulers and the ruled.  

 

The alternative pluralist model sees each bot not as an arbiter of wisdom but a competing view from which we pick.  Unless we chose this pluralist model, we are left with the nightmarish Orwellian vision of the future where “the party is always right” so the A.I. too, must always be right.  

To this aim, as per 1984, “every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute", until the modern dream of ending all forms of “offence” in human discourse is ended, the ultimate goal of cultural Marxism, no longer economic equality but safe cultural spaces for all.  This apropos Orwell quote was splashed across a double-page spread in the Telegraph last week, prompting me to think about the links between PC debates, artificial intelligence and the Wisdom of the Crowd idea - and also Matt Goodwin's new book that examines emerging new conflicts between rulers and ruled.

 

In his 1940 review of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Orwell wrote that "the democratic principle has no meaning unless the common man is capable of thinking for himself." (Incidentally, Bard told me this quote, I think he likes referencing Orwell).  For man's healthy self esteem, A.I. will benefit as a tool to help him think for himself, not pretending it can replace the thought of us humans.  If we believe in the right to think for ourselves as pretty basic, we must ensure that we adopt sensible rules for the bot operators - i.e. support a pluralist, unfettered free media.  

 

"The problem are the bot operators!  Don't trust them with damn anything!  They don't want to operate the system for you but for themselves!  Cultural Marxism is their shaky ideology demanding heavy regulation to address inequity and unhealthy power relations written through our culture and civilisation as per Foucault.  And we have already been through this before with internet search and social media.  They don't trust you, anymore than we trust them...”

 

With perfect timing, Prof. Matt Goodwin has written his new book on this called "Values, Voice and Virtue"*.  The book is a clear exposition of new and emerging political conflicts between ruler v. ruled today.   Now is the key moment when the rules of the A.I. game are enshrined into law and precedent, dictating the management of our civilisation between rulers and ruled for decades to come.  Which side wins control of the A.I. language bots will be at a healthy advantage.  

 

See:  "Goodwin M.J (2023) .Values, Voice and Virtue, The New British Politics. Penguin.    Matt now has 12,000+ monthly paying Substack subscribers and I notice the book sold 2,535 copies in its first week, 2nd in the General Paperback chart.

Some Bowls Club - Addlestone Victory Park

 

Submission for the Runnymede Borough Council Civic Awards 

(Sports Club of the Year)

December 2022.

Secretary and Treasurer: Albert Tapper.

Headline Summary

·         From five members to over one hundred in 18 months.

·         Winner of the Bowls England “Story of the Year” Award. 

·         Over 1,000 locals attend Jubilee “Party in the Park” and Open Day (the largest in the Country).

·         A new community café opens attracting an average of 50 customer transactions and £150 sales a day for trial period 12.03.22-14.11.22.

·         Disabled and learning difficulties bowls started.

·         The largest Junior membership section in Surrey emerges.

·         New self-funded plans to reinvigorate Victory Park and boost local community.

Lawn bowls is a sport in crisis and communities built around local clubs are imploding.  Of 183 Surrey bowls clubs in 2001, only 118 remain.[i]  The number of English bowlers according to Bowls England has declined from 150,000 twenty years ago to just 80,000 today.  And the demise of Addlestone Victory Park’s Bowls Club had been dramatic too.  From over 100 members in 2001, it was reduced to just five by March 2021.

 

Before the 2021 Season started, the remaining members held an emergency meeting, voting 3-2 to stay open.  Here at least was a chance to try something new – the “gift of desperation” as the Club Secretary described it - to overcome five perceived barriers to recovery:

                              

1)      An old-fashioned club management that had made the Club inaccessible and excluding.

2)      Local borough councillors threatening “consolidation” of local council clubs.[ii]

3)      Declining public engagement in pubs and clubs as people “hunker down” at home.[iii]

4)      The negative public image of lawn bowls as “old”, “slow” and “boring” and an unappealing playing experience.[iv]

5)      Covid-19.   

 

The problem with bowls, if one is honest, is of its own making.  It is not the fault of the public, the Council[v] (most clubs think subsidy is a right[vi]) and Covid – or why were the golf clubs suddenly full post-lockdown? 

 

Victory Park, like so many one-hundred year old bowls clubs, was trammelled by sclerotic structures, out-dated and defeatist attitudes, a lack of hospitality, arcane dress-codes, and a phobia of modern technology, particularly social media.  The only aspects of the game that didn’t need changing were the flat green, the curving wood and the long standing, well-evolved rules.

 

Into Action

 

The Club did have £3,000 in the bank.  By June it had spent every penny on an all -or-nothing Open Day and rent to the Council.  The Open Day was heavily promoted in social media, especially local Facebook groups.  100 free cream teas were given away to bring in the crowds.  New members were encouraged to join with a £10 annual membership offer, reduced from £100.   

 

It worked.  Twenty-three new members joined up and fixtures that had previously been cancelled were reinstated. 

 

Unfortunately, some old attitudes remained, but one incidence of bullying by a Committee member precipitated change. On safeguarding grounds, a full meeting of the Club’s new membership was called in August 2021, which voted unanimously for a full Committee change.

At the same time the whole club voted by a margin of 87 per cent to adopt new guiding values of “Accessibility” (Opening the club up to all the public) and “Inclusivity” (making everyone feel welcome and at home within the Club).[vii]

 

A third value of “Financial Self-Sufficiency” was also adopted.  To be a community asset and not a burden on local taxpayers, it was felt the Club should be self-supporting.  Runnymede Council (R.B.C.) estimate it costs £16,000 to maintain the fine turf and Clubhouse every year.  The Club is committed to meeting these costs, becoming fully self-sufficient, paying commercial rents and all its own maintenance within five years.  In 2021 it paid a total of just £2,400 to R.B.C. 

 

By the end of the 2021 Season, the Club’s paid-up playing membership had grown from 23 to 36.  Via Bowls Surrey[viii] news of the goings on in Victory Park had now reached Leamington Spa, headquarters of Bowls England.  Here was a pioneering Club with reversed attitudes that offered new hope for the sport.  It was shortlisted from over 100 nominations to the final three for the “Bowls England Story of the Year Award”, and now subject to a national vote.  The Club placed park legend, the spur to change and now President, Barrie de Suys, 87, at the heart of its bid, not least for his Hannibal-like heroics walking 2,400 laps of the park in Lockdown, raising £10,000 for the RNIB. 

 

Campaigning successfully within the supportive local community, using social media, local BBC Radio Surrey and Sussex (twice), even broadcast television to get the public to vote for Addlestone’s very own Captain Tom and its amazing bowls club. 

 

It won the national award (see video evidence). 

 

But the job was not finished.  In April at the start of the 2022 Season only 23 of the 36 members had paid the new membership fees, hiked to £100.  This was barely enough members to fulfil a now lengthy fixture list[ix] and the Club no longer had any funds to offer subsidised £10 memberships.  With the award won, and amazing community goodwill, something was needed to maintain momentum, uplift membership and thank the locals for voting for the Club. 

 

£3,000 of funds[x] were raised to hold an “Open Day” in May and a “Party in the Park” for the local Community to celebrate the Queen’s Jubilee in June (see video evidence).  The Club’s new Sponsor, the local Gingerbread Man Bakery, provided 600 boxed afternoon cream teas at a reduced rate.  Team England Commonwealth Games para lawn bowler Gill Platt hosted the Open Day with Disabled Bowls England, themed on the inclusivity of Bowls for disabled persons.[xi] 

 

200 attended the Open Day, making it the largest bowls club Open Day held in England in 2022.  Astonishingly a staggering 800 locals attended the free Party on Thursday 2^nd June (see video).  All the cream teas were given out within an hour, but everyone over 18 got a free glass of Prosecco or two.  The most exciting result was the number of children (160) who played bowls for the first time on the green. 

 

Before long the playing membership[xii] had quadrupled to over 100, including 18 Juniors and three additional needs bowlers[xiii].  On top of that, the Club now has 24 non-playing social members – in total it now has 128 members.[xiv]  A Club lottery registered with the Council raised a further £1,100 and funded five new sets of junior bowls for the new junior members, four of whom are now playing for Surrey Under 25s.  The Club has run for the last two years a weekly roll-up for Adults with Learning difficulties and this year offered a month of coaching for all its new bowlers, from a fully qualified Bowls England accredited coach, Carole Baker.

 

The Club continues to excel at online marketing and public relations.  It has over 750 friends and followers on Facebook, a presence on Twitter, TikTok, Instagram and a YouTube channel with videos attracting 24,000 individual views, currently 3,000 a month.[xv] It has a new website – addlestonebowls.com – and new branded merchandise with a logo designed by a 17 year-old member.  It engages in the science of bulk personalised text messaging to a database of over 1,000 local supporters.  However, the extraordinary growth in 2022 and transformation of the Club’s image has another cause – the new Clubhouse community café – a glowing example of being accessible. 

 

Clubhouse Café

 

Surveys of park-goers had shown a desire for food and beverage provision.  It was hoped that the Club could eventually draw more people into the park – and towards bowls – by opening a clubhouse café.  This was sanctioned by RBC as part of a trial to assess demand for further capital expenditure on facilities, in a bid to Surrey County Council’s “Your Fund Surrey” community development programme.  In thirty weeks of operation, it has gained a five-star food hygiene rating[xvi] and generated £9,000 in total weekend sales[xvii] of Gingerbread Man Bakery product, from an average of 46 customers a day[xviii] – nearly all of whom had never been inside the forbidding territory of a bowls club. 

 

Whilst Club turnover has grown from £5,000 to 2021 to £25,000 this year, little financial profit has been generated, but the exercise has proved the solution to the Bowls Clubs image problem.  For ninety years it had been trying to keep the public out.  Now they were being welcomed with open arms into the Club’s inner sanctum.  How many bowls clubs would tolerate this?  The high barriers between the public and the bowls club came crashing down – people saw with their own eyes that the Club was not intimidating, inaccessible, exclusive, old, slow and boring.

 

The Future

 

However, park footfall remains stubbornly low, and doubts remain that new hospitality by itself, and a thriving bowls club, is going to restore the fortunes of Victory Park – or will prove financially self-sufficient by themselves.  New non-bowling attractions are required, to cross-fertilise new hospitality facilities and the existing bowling.

 

In return for the promise for self-sufficiency within five years, the bowls club is now asking the Council for deregulation and planning permission for further development as part of a new park management plan.  In particular, the land adjacent to the Bowls Club - currently an underutilised croquet lawn area – could be developed as an 18-hole miniature golf course reflecting local history.  This will be a multi-sports bid, with a new clubhouse, café, licensed bar and changing rooms and tea facilities for park footballers.  £500,000 of capital expenditure will come from an expanded Your Fund Surrey bid.  The new facilities will be run commercially by a new Community Interest Company (CIC), constituted and regulated to serve local people, including supporting all park amenities, including the bowls club, serving school groups, local business hospitality customers, other community groups and residents of Runnymede of all ages and needs.   

 

---

 

[i] Bowls Surrey records.  A large proportion of these loses were Council owned clubs like Victory Park.

[ii] Peter Winfield, Runnymede Borough Council’s then “Head of Green Spaces” reported that the Community Services Committee were concerned at the levels of subsidy given to local council clubs (four within four miles) with “dwindling memberships” and “and little effort being made to open themselves up the local community”.

[iii] Putnam, Robert. 2001. “Bowling Alone”. London, England: Simon & Schuster.  This argument, otherwise known as “declining social capital”, reinforces defeatist attitudes within lawn bowls, that nothing can be done, and that the bowls product is not to blame – the public are for hunkering down at home and not going out.

[iv] Bowls England public research for “Fit for the Future Strategy”, 2021.

[v] In September 2022, Runnymede Borough Council was awarded the inaugural Barrie de Suys award for services to the Club, presented to Shaun Barnes.  See attached picture.

[vi] For two good examples being Luton West and Staniforth Bowls Club. See the depressing story of Luton West (notice the composition of its membership – all white, older and male) – see: https://www.lutontoday.co.uk/health/historic-luton-bowls-club-at-risk-as-council-pulls-funding-3509219 and also Staniforth here https://www.thetfordandbrandontimes.co.uk/news/23105366.relief-bowls-club-saved-closure-rent-hike-compromise/ .  Accessed 10.11.22

[vii] A safeguarding and welfare officer was subsequently appointed and took a Coach Bowls “Time to Listen” Safeguarding course.  See attached PDF file.

[viii] See attached letter from the Secretary of Bowls Surrey (S.C.B.A.) in word file format.

[ix] See attached PDF file.

[x] Particular thanks to local Addlestone County Councillor, John Furey, for a large donation from his Community Allocation Budget.  Funds were also raised via the Club’s new “Clubhouse Café”.

[xi] See Youtube video. https://youtu.be/dM28GWYpcE4 .  Many thanks to Egham Bowls Club who loaned Addlestone their Bowls Royce wheelchairs.

[xii] Not including 24 social members.

[xiii] See attached excel file.

[xiv] See attached excel file.

[xv] As of November 2022.

[xvi] See attached image file.

[xvii] See attached image file.

[xviii] See attached image file.

The wonderful story of Barrie de Suys and the revival of a local bowls club.

Winner of Bowls England's "Story of the Year" Award, 2022.

Watch Barrie pick up his award here:

Listen to Albert and Barrie on BBC Radio Surrey:

Many locals consider him the original Captain Tom.  Yet Barrie de Suys, 87, is little known beyond his hometown of Addlestone on the outskirts of London.  Now the winner of Bowls England's "Story of the Year 2022" his unsung achievements during Covid may become a morale booster to a wider audience.  Further, his revival of a flagging council-owned bowls club – from five members at the start of 2021 to forty by Season's end – could become a template for other struggling council clubs to follow. 

 

Addlestone Victory Park Bowls Club has endured a long and protracted demise since 2002 when it had a hundred members and Barrie last served on its Committee as a successful Captain.  By 2020 local Councillors began moves to end the subsidy of the Club (effectively closing it down).  They felt it was making little effort to recruit new members.  Increasingly, reports began to surface of unfriendliness at the club and members leaving as a result.  On one sad occasion a newcomer to bowls was turned away at the gates for wearing shorts.

 

Barrie himself had retired from outdoor bowling in 2016.  He had arthritis in both shoulders and lacked sufficient power to deliver the bowl more than half the required distance.  His medical record also included heart attacks and heart surgery.  In 2018 he had a replacement hip operation which left him with a pronounced limp.  

But his legs were generally sound and strong, as was his willingness to serve the local community.  At the start of lockdown in 2020, for everyone's mental and physical health, Barrie decided to draw people into the Park by walking around its 965 metres perimeter for charity.  

By October he had completed a staggering 2,400 circuits - stunning the local community who took to cheering him on.

Absent on only three days (due to heatstroke) he raised over £10,000 for the RNIB.  He took several falls on his way but waived away those who told him to stop.  In total, he covered 1,440 miles, far further than from Land’s End to John O’Groats.  The oldest person to complete that trip previously was aged 74 – yet Barrie received only minimal local press coverage for his accomplishment. 

Barrie en route, with police guard.

Barrie was deeply concerned about the state of his old club in the Park, of which he was still an honorary life member. The immediate problem in 2021 were the boards around the green which had become rotten and deemed a health and safety hazard by the Council.  They would fit new boards if he painted them with creosote.  This he did, single-handedly, twice over.  This involved two months pre-season work in March and April, working from 9am to dusk.

 

Meanwhile, the Club decided to invest all its remaining funds in recruiting new players via an Open Day, with free cream teas and subsidised annual memberships.  For advertising, it followed what proved wise advice from Bowls England: to market the occasion in local Facebook groups and use the stock Bowls’ Big Weekend digital images (both of which were free).

 

For the 25 new members who signed up at the Open Day, Barrie quickly became a totemic figure: the ‘Duracell Bunny’ was by now gardening around the green every day, also umpiring when called upon, and coaching a new Adults with Learning Difficulties bowling group he helped set up.  He was a figure of inspiration and awe.  He drew the new group of players together as the Club’s figurehead like a kind of glue.  All the new players were united by his tangible goodness and leadership.  He became the yardstick by which to measure decent behaviour, in short, he set the standards and they were high: ask not what you can take from the Club but what you can give.  Park-goers were drawn into the Club to see him and give him food and drink.  People joined up because of his local reputation.

 

Pressure mounted on him to play again, and his frustration grew at not being able to get his woods even the minimum length, right-handed or left-handed.  In recognition of his service to the Club, it gifted him a mechanical bowling arm. 

 

At first it seemed to be wasted precious money.  The bowls were fired off in a wide arc from mid-wicket to extra cover, and still nearly always too short.  But he never gave up and within a month, through hard practice and grit, he learned how to use his new tool with his wonky shoulders, even delivering running shots and the occasional drive.   For new bowlers and weaker bowlers in the Club, giving up had suddenly become more difficult.  If Barrie could play, so should they.  His spirit and encouragement kept them playing.  In July 2021, out of 34 playing members, 28 played, with the remaining six off games, injured.  Amazing numbers, considering over half the Club’s members were new to bowls that year.

 

Barrie’s most important contribution of all was to change the direction the Club was heading.  He was the spur to much needed change.  He embodied some new values that seemed to be emerging at the Club.  Inevitably there was some internal tension between old forces and the emergent new forces.  He led the later, looking to revive the still inward-looking club by opening up as a public service for all.  Measured by his high example, old behaviour began to look wrong and out of place, and change inevitable.

 

Barrie precipitated the creation of a new Committee with ten positions quickly filled by new members.  Perhaps uniquely, he helped push for the Club to adopt three new values, to guide it into the future, which were approved by 87 per cent of the membership in a vote: 

• “Accessibility - previously known as sport for all”.

• “Inclusivity - every player and spectator is made to feel at home inside the Club”.

• “Self-sufficiency – helping the Club become asset for the local community as a Council maintained club, not a burden on local tax-payers”. 

 

This was the makings of a successful strategy to survive and recover.  But tactically, the Club was still struggling to recruit local players.  It became apparent that endless videos of match highlights were not making the required impact in local Facebook groups.  People were not interested in bowls per se it seemed, perhaps due to its national image, perhaps due to the product the Club was offering, less likely because people were ‘hunkered down’ at home, an idea which smacked of defeatism.  If this was really true, why were the golf courses suddenly full post lockdown? 

 

Communications with the local community started to change.  Firstly, a suspected lost pet parrot filmed on the Clubhouse balcony hit the mark with locals.  A video of the Adults with Learning Difficulties was also well received.  Then it was decided that Barrie must be the best content, himself.  A tribute video to him went viral locally, seen by 15,000 locals and liked by nearly 200 in the town.  It was also kindly shared by Bowls Surrey, and Barrie finally got some recognition from a wider area and more members joined up.

 

Barrie de Suys working at the green, December 2021.

In conclusion, the Club has nominated Barrie for three reasons.  Firstly and most importantly - he deserves it.  Secondly, it’s felt his story and how he brought new players into the game is instructive for others.  And lastly, the Club is critically short of funds for marketing, and public relations like this is always free.  Winning this award would help generate more interest in the Club locally, both in online and offline media.  It would help relations with the Council, and the story will help the Club raise the funds we need to subsidise our memberships and develop in other areas.  In 2022, for every ‘over 60’ member the Club must pay £62.50 to the Council, and for every ‘Under 60’, £125.  These are precisely the same amounts the Club charges in membership fees, so the Club currently runs at a loss.  In future, Addlestone Victory Park must either charge more, difficult in a relatively deprived and predominately working-class area, permanently fund-raise or develop reliable new income streams such as providing food and beverages to local park-goers.

  

Donations to the club would be hugely appreciated by anyone who wants to support it, directly.  Please call Albert (Club Secretary) on 07427 664 600 or via email: albert@addlestonebowls.com.   Every pound given will subsidise the memberships of new bowlers to the game who cannot afford the fees.  

 

Barrie was elected as the new President of the Addlestone Bowls Club in August 2021, unopposed.

Barrie recieves his British Citizens Award, House of Lords, September 2021.

See also www.addlestonebowls.com

The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election and Political Prediction.

Pt.1. Failing to predict.

$3.7 billion was a lot to offer.  This was the amount Caesars Entertainment agreed to pay for William Hill this month.  The stated target of the Vegas-based gaming giant was the British bookmaker’s ‘trading expertise’, to expand their sports betting business during a post-prohibition, covid era, boom-time in American online sports gambling. 

Every month seems to deliver a new record level of sports betting in America. $3 billion was staked in September 2020, with new-blood Yankee sports bettors providing healthy trading margins of 5-10 per cent.  But just after the purchase of William Hill, Caesars should have got the message that British bookmaking practices may not be ones to trust, long term; and the bookmakers themselves, not worth the money. 

Bookmakers manage political prediction markets badly

Hill’s much vaunted market-making and public relations abilities were put to test this month, on the hardest of all betting markets to manage, but the blue ribbon market: the U.S. Presidential Election.  Over £200m has been staked by bettors on British Betfair alone, on the contest decided next Tuesday night. And this is the market which the rest of us are actually interested in, especially now, and I imagine Caesars were too, although as yet, political betting is curiously illegal in America.  

But over in England, where the practice is legal but where the spectre of safeguarding regulation looms like the Sword of Damocles, at times during October, not a single British bookie was brave enough to stand above the parapet and offer his services, including William Hill.  Betting on the Presidential Election had been suspended.[i]

The bookies’ reason for existence is managing predictions, or rather adding up and averaging the predictions of its customers, the general betting public.  That is where their wisdom comes from.  The crest on their Coat of Arms could read: ”The Voice of the People is the voice of God."  If the bookie takes on the public, thinking he knows more than they do, in the long run he will lose.  That is a short history of British political betting over the last thirty years.

As Sporting Index’s political trader in the 1990s, I used to get regular rollickings from Alistair Hunter, the venerable head trader, for conducting too much academic research, running insightful novelty markets and losing money. When the limey bookies get cock-sure, they always get skewered by the punters who know more.  

Less insightfully, we took bets on how many sips of whisky the Chancellor would take, in the House of Commons, during his budget speech, as well as how long he would talk.  When the dour Scottish Presbyterian Gordon Brown gave his first speech, he had us reaching for the Johnnie Walker's.  We had based our 'expert' prediction on the form of Brown’s predecessor, the clubby, genial, wide-smiling, Kenneth Clarke.  We knew Clarke drank heavily, as many as 6 or 7 sips during his speeches at the Dispatch Box.  But Gordon Brown was a teetotaller and we didn’t know it.  In the end he didn’t even touch his glass of water.  Needless to say, the crowd of punters knew. They sold the market heavily, i.e. went low on his sips.  For ever sip he didn’t take, it cost Sporting Index £20,000, and we had originally estimated four.      

The best political bookies hoover up information from their customers.  They know who the long term winners are, so they give disproportionate attention to their behaviour.  They listen to their customers.  If they listen to the wrong people, such as academics and journalists, they lose.  And the good bookmaker talks up his losses and never issues tips on his own markets.

Ladbrokes lost an estimated £2m on the 2015 election, and William Hill reported a £1m loss in their official results, eye-swivelling amounts when you consider how much is staked on politics today,[ii] and the fat margin built into bookmakers’ prices.  It’s not so much what they lost, but what they should have won. 

The bookmakers own stewards’ inquiry in 2015 was brief: “We trusted the polls and the expert analysis. The customers got lucky.”  But yet more was lost on Brexit and Trump in 2016, doing the same thing, i.e. swallowing the media and the academic account of the referendum or election, rather than understanding what their customers were saying with their bets.

As documented in this blog ad nauseam, when managed correctly, the betting market is a more reliable guide to what will happen in politics than: a) fast-whirring academic models of many breakable parts, b) voter intention opinion polls – a snapshot of opinion, not a prediction in any case - and c) the views of political pundits, i.e. tipsters, the most unreliable source of all.  

A market price prediction, particularly on a matter of public interest, often draws up more relevant information from a wider range of varied sources than expert opinion can, essentially because it has more tentacles. The market, as Hayek put it, is a vast information storage system.  Its tentacles are the bettors, now motivated by winning a game, to think harder about what will happen, largely ignoring emotion and their own prejudices - if they are good and going to win.  

In this regard, Dominic Cummings was right when he said: “political news makes you dumber.”  Right now, we need political betting like never before, as an alternative to polling and the pundits, to answer questions like: What was the impact of the first televised debate on the race?  What is the effect of Donald Trump catching covid on the outcome of the Presidential Election?  Indeed what will be the effect of covid on the result?  At the time of writing, all I have heard is conjecture on that last question, and a resounding silence from political scientists who prefer to start their work, after the event.  

But multivariate analysis of opinion poll data would reveal rigorous conclusions, especially in ‘time-series’, modelling the shock of covid on the American electorate over time, rather than at a snapshot of time.  British political science doesn't have the will or the skill to do it - with a few notable exceptions - to understand what will happen in politics using Bayesian methods, although it would have predicted the result of the Brexit referendum.  Understanding how support for E.U. membership moved over time was what my PhD was about. 

I found the dedicated study of political prediction is largely confined to a small 'prediction unit' hidden away in a dirty peeble-dash bungalow cum Nissen hut, at some obscure university in South Wales.  

Meanwhile, in the gleaming towers of the City, these difficult skills of Bayesian analysis are the norm.  They are used to predict economic outcomes, such as the movement of interest rates over-time, currency price fluctuations, as well as the effect of shocks like covid on everything economic, and how these effects will dissipate into the future.

Political correctness infects accurate insight 

I listened to the Today programme the morning after Trump's covid diagnosis, hoping to find out about its impact on the election.  Even the sports news is about politics on the Today programme, even the insulting racing tips at the end are somehow selected for the topicality of the horse’s names, so the ghastly little toad who does the sports news can share a political joke with Nick Robinson, the main presenter, thus reducing them to a segue to another item.  

Unsurprisingly, I was none the wiser about the election after a miserable three-hour long ordeal.  Now I will revert to checking the odds instead, for a numerical ready-reckoner of the impact of news on the predicted result, as I have always done, particularly at a time of crisis and seismic fast-moving events, should the prices be made available.

I shouldn’t be the one saying bookmaking works, that it should be a rival to mainstream media in educating us about politics. The bookmakers should be saying it. Their job is to represent the magical mechanic of the market - the soothsayer of probabilities, i.e. their product - and their customers - the two things that make the wisdom of crowds work.  They have to believe in their product and defend it to the hilt.  I don't think they have that fight in them.  They don't understand of what their sometimes socially useful trade can deliver, instead they descend to where only frivolity lies: cheap product sold with cheap TV adverts.  

It should also be the public’s choice whether they bet on political affairs, even on an election when the pale cast of death hangs overhead.  It shouldn't be taken away from them by their bookmaker.  The element of death must be calculated in too, we can't be squeamish about this.  Incapacitation from fighting the election is about a 10 per cent chance I would think, but this is the component of the betting decision which the bookmakers say is distasteful.  

Then there are the regulators at home to consider for the bookmaker, and a perverse desire to play up a sort of virtue in not doing their job – a new and unlovely feature of British bookmaking. Bookies now flock to the scent of progress, smelly little orthodoxies really, like blue-bottles to a dead cat.  

Political progress used to be about the steady empowerment of the people, such as giving everyone the vote, including women and the working class. But modern political progress - cultural correctness - is a swindle.  The end is never reached, conflict will go on and on, there will always be something more to vanquish, until the scythe of progress comes down on the bookmaker himself, in the form of an outright ban, on safeguarding grounds. 

Or the British bookmaker succumbs to the heat of Vegas.  An old colleague and friend of mine called Humid, who sweat a lot, found even the more temperate climes of Gibraltar too much.  He was a gigantic man, as so many bookmakers are, and we were all heavy drinkers on the Rock, where a litre of Smirnoff was a fiver and more expensive than the Red Bull we mixed it with.  One steaming morning, seperated from the air-conditioning, on a cigarette break outside, Humid keeled over in the sun. He was successfully medevacked back to the U.K. - but was never to return to Gib.  

I simply offer this as a warning to any bookmaker who may be Vegas-bound.  The problem with the place is the problem for the bookmaker.  The best bookmakers in my experience, like the best players, are addicts, it takes one to know one, but, increasingly, they must practice their trade in some of the most dangerous places in the world for them.  With Vegas, top of the list.

***

The old code of the bookmaker, once his only code, was “not to bet on human suffering”.  It used to only apply on bets about someone actually dying.[iii]  A betting market on Trump dying, would, I suppose, be unacceptable, rightly.  But now the rule seems to apply to any factor involving suffering, within the betting calculation of a wider, more important, and different outcome: i.e. he may die – and that will affect the result - so the whole innocent election market gets written off.  

Of course the market’s importance goes way beyond the health of one individual, even if it’s the President.  I’m sure he didn't mind too much, he knew the stockbrokers were doing the same thing, just not downing tools. It’s major ground to concede by the bookmakers, not assessing Trump’s survival rate, but I am a hard liner who thinks we should be firing all our guns at a time of crisis. The biggest guns are the crowd.  The covid tracing app is another good example of employing the crowd, to police covid, using new technology.  The government, either sabotaged it or didn't give it the support it needed, not trusting the behaviour of the crowd and fearing the reaction of the civil libertarians at The Telegraph.  

We should be betting on covid rates of infection in my opinion, because that will give us the best idea of what is going to happen to covid numbers – better than any single epidemiologist’s view, based on another expert algorithm of many breakable parts.  Never mind the new middle-class morality of not causing offence. Let’s save lives, we are in a crisis like a war with five-hundred people being killed a day.  Imagine them, in a field, like the fifty at the end of The Great Escape: and then they are all mowed down. Sometimes, I needs the horrific mental image, of something we can manage, to knock myself out of denial and easy sweet talk about civil liberties. 

And where exactly does all this new found sensitivity about politicians end up?  There is animal suffering involved in horse-racing.  Horses are killed regularly.  Does that apply any less than human suffering?  And if hunting is wrong because human pleasure is derived from killing a fox, why not ban horse-racing, which is also for our entertainment?  

I fear the bookmakers have opened a door here that will not be easy to close.  But the real problem is this. They have never properly made a case for political betting as a tool of insight.  Having social value is the best bulwark against regulation, as well as hooking the government into a share of your profits.

Even Betfair, not really a bookie but the facilitator of exchange betting between players, suspended its market on the result this week, announcing: “We do not feel it is right to provide a market, given the circumstances,” continuing either piously or deceitfully, probably deceitfully: “our thoughts are with the President and First Lady at this time.”  

This after matching £100m in bets, with the company Political Analyst and PR man, Paul Krishnamurty, telling all its customers Biden was a great bet throughout the campaign.  Report the market, it is more interesting.  Tell the world what you are finding out about politics from your customers. If not, public expectations on the election cease to find expression.  We are left with the experts view only.  

One thing we do not want more of is the expert view.  In any case, lines from political pundits jump into place like iron fillings obeying the magnet.  If the expert view on the election turns out to be the correct one, we already know what that view is.  

If you aren’t already aware of the British mainstream media view on the 2020 U.S. Election, I think at least my American readers will find it interesting.  What the limey British media thinks of you, my friends. It's one ginormous sneer after another I’m afraid.  I promise you, many of the British public like you a great deal, certainly more than the French or the Germans. They would like Trump too, because he’s an entertainer and best appreciated as such, particularly when he is making an otherwise dry political point, - I liked his joke about the North Korean leader, “Rocketman” - perfect - but I’m afraid the British public has been ‘got at’ by the British broadcasters. No one says anything too positive about Trump on social media, out of fear. The elite view is largely synonymous with the B.B.C. view.

Here it is, I heard it on the Today Programme:

It’s just too downright uncertain to get involved with political predictions, at all.  American politics right now is too turbulent nay chaotic.  It’s ill-tempered divisive and now ‘polarised’ (i.e. extreme).  Accurate information is in short supply and the Russians and the Chinese are trying swing the election with misinformation.  The public are for one conspiracy theory or another, and generally not very well informed on the details of the debate. But this is a unique election where the usually strong incumbency advantages do not apply. Covid has created a new and dominant issue of competency tackling the virus. Given what is going on over there, this can only be bad for Trump.  

Over 200,000 Americans have died from Covid in six wearisome months, over seven million have been infected, and now the President has gone down with it, four weeks before the poll on 3^rd November and is in and out of hospital. Jon Sopel, the BBC’s North America Correspondent,[iv] says "the White House are scrambling like crazy to work out what to do” – a bit like the Telegraph newspaper: “the power cord has been yanked out of his campaign” (02/10/20) – i.e. you lot are rudderless and without a plan. 

Meanwhile, U.S. GDP has tanked 30 per cent; a third of California has been incinerated, and the country is on the verge of a constitutional crisis, if not a well-armed civil war.  

Unsurprisingly, whilst a prediction is never made explicit by the BBC, against such a backdrop any listener would call it as a Biden win by default, backed up to some degree by his lead in the voting intention polls.  

The British punters, following it’s pundits, under a sustained barrage of undisguised English sneers about Trump, the President you voted for, forget the average American - the voters - cares less about politics than is made out, they are not either for Antifa or the Pretty Boys, and not all America is rioting.  

An alternative academic view of American public opinion

American public opinion is generally moderate, conservative and authoritarian, as my favourite political scientist put it, an American himself, called Morris P. Fiorina.  He is no fan of Trump.

The American public have been like that for some time, political change is over-egged at the public level, only the political elites have become significantly more radical, and this is merely a reflection of how political choice is working in America.  

It is how policies are packaged together and sold to the public in the American two-party system. Given the circumstances, it’s quite rational for the two rival candidates to move apart - usually it is rational for them to move together, like two ice cream vendors on a long beach will both position themselves together in the middle, assuming sun-bathers are evenly distributed along the length of the beach.

However, American politics is changing currently in this respect, with a realignment of policies around ‘identity politics’, and away from economics.  The Democrats are now more pro-free markets in their economics than the Republicans on questions of global trade.  

In short, what is happening in American politics is natural change, it is not so mad, bad and sad, if you want to analyse it honestly and dispassionately.  The American political system is more likely to produce more leaders like Trump these days, leaders that play on the new political divide, because it is a more convenient way to package themselves - successfully.  If he loses, it will be because of the coronavirus, not his populism.

I follow Morris P. Fiorina who says the culture war thesis is over-egged at the public-level. It’s the politicians and the media who have moved apart to the point of conflict.  Culture wars aren’t emanating from the public as the writers in the Telegraph tell us, or as Douglas Murray argues in his infuriatingly entitled book, "The Madness of Crowds".  The mass of the American public is not that interested.  It’s in the middle and could go left or right.  Will they buy the liberal package to the left, or the populist package to the right?  We will know after this election whether the challenger liberal package of Biden will take the crown. 

I do not however, underestimate how important questions of competency are as drivers of vote choice.  But there must be some uncertainty of how much covid will provoke change in the ballot box, beyond a referendum on populism and liberal packages.  Covid is surely a big ‘shock to the system’ and the more Trump moves the debate onto the territory of culture wars, the better for him.  He has a built-in majority on that front in the U.S.A.  

State of the prediction market

As of Monday 5^th October at 21:30, Trump had just 33 chances in 100 of winning in November, according to Betdaq, Betfair’s smaller rival.  Currently, on the 29^th October, the prediction is similar.  The expert models predict that Trump has smaller chances, the most celebrated expert being Nate Silver, who gives Trump just 13 chances in a 100. Either the experts or the markets have got it wrong.  

For William Hill, Biden’s chances leapt from 56 / 100 before the first T.V. debate, to 63 / 100 after it.[v]  When the news about Trump’s covid diagnosis came in, and then he was hospitalised, they suspended the market, but Biden’s win probability rose to a high of 67 / 100 on Betdaq who bravely didn’t suspend their market.  It fell back slightly to 64 / 100 when Trump announced he was leaving hospital and has fluctuated around that mark since.  In betting terms he is a 2-1 on shot.  Stake £200 to be returned £300, or lose it all if Trump wins, as of 29^th October 2020, less than a week from the Election on 3^rd November.

Betfair suspends it market on the Presidential Election, 02/10/2020.

Part 2. A silver lining...  alternatives and an opportunity.

Since leaving Betfair in 2009, I have been engaged mainly in political science and attending rehabs, doing an MSc and then the unfinished PhD.  

However, academia did stoke my interest in prediction games.  I became increasingly disenchanted in academic approaches to prediction, ones that didn't acknowledge the crowd’s wisdom and relied too heavily on expert assumptions, and also the internet polling industry, upon which the academics relied, who refuse to gamify their product because they felt it was below them.   

Pollsters are already fully occupied bodging their online polling data to correct for chronic biases in their self-selecting internet panels of respondents.  There is only one vote intention opinion poll that is ‘gold standard’ and that is a random-probability survey, where every single voter has an equal chance of being selected for an interview – like the British Election Study.  

But these more representative surveys of opinion are extremely rare and expensive.  They involve canvassers visiting most postcodes, leaping over garden fences, and avoiding dangerous dogs to access the randomly selected interviewees.  So we only get the gold standard very rarely, and the opinion polls currently showing wide-margin leads for Biden over Trump, are nearly all internet polls.  Not only is the polling and market research industry not moving forwards with new products, it is moving backwards with its existing offering. 

The problem, specifically relating to the U.S. Election, is that it takes a particular type of person to even contemplate filling in a twenty minute survey for fifty cents, by signing up for one of the panels.  This type of person tends to be either conscientious (middle-class) or a penny-pincher – they tend to be of a type that likes voting Remain or supporting Joe Biden.  On the other hand, Brexiteers and Trump supporters are generally 'risk-takers' in profile -and if anything, more likely to have a bet - which can also create biases in political betting, but not such serious ones. 

The pollsters admit the problem now, after it was the primary conclusion of the highly credible Sturgis Report on why the opinion polls have been failing in the last five years.  So they have to correct for this, by giving greater weight to working class respondents they are under-sampling, but the amount of correction is pure guesswork and assumption on the part of the expert psephologists.  

The problem is exacerbated by the new cleavage in British and U.S. politics which causes disturbance to their assumptions about which groups of voters support which candidates on which criteria.  More working class people up North are supporting Boris Johnson and Brexit, and more middle-class voters, who voted Remain, are supporting Labour.  Brexit sped up this realignment in Britain, as has Trump in America.  

Believing internet polls requires trust in the abilities of these experts to be omniscient about the scales of these changes, and also to know the likelihood of each new competing group to turnout and vote – ‘differential turnout’ is another reason why polls aren’t predictions and shouldn’t be treated as such.  

Maybe low-risk taking Democrats will be less likely to vote than red-neck Trump supporters, at a time of covid, we just don't know.  We really don't know why turnout in this election is so high, already, before polling day, and whether this favours Biden or Trump, it either suggests the wind of change is blowing, or it's because of a positive effect from Trump's livelier campaign, on his more passionate supporters.  

But the dilemma of political prediction today is really this: the bookies know or care little about insight, and the polling people know little about customer engagement and fun.  The future is the Yin and the Yang – gamified polling. I am confident that neither industry has the capacity to deliver that; a missing mechanism needs inventing, probably by someone with a missing mechanism himself, that both gamifies polling yet still delivers accurate and reliable insight.  

Consider how pollsters and bookmakers get on together.  Pollsters are particularly snooty about bookmakers, who in return revere pollsters in a fawning way.  I remember on some high floor at the L.S.E, at the big academic prediction conference on the 2015 English General Election, a nervous bookmaker from Ladbrokes pitched up and was told by the academics, in a form or a question, that the betting public were biased on politics weren’t they, and the bookmaker, with a weak embarrassed smile, meekly agreed: "political markets are not a good guide to what may happen", he said.  I noted his words down at the time.  There is nothing easier for bookmakers to desert their trade and make peace with the British Establishment, and nothing more sickening. 

They are running from the fair representation of their customers, who they think are stupid.  They even publically pronounce during this campaign that too many of their customers have backed Trump and the price is wrong, and jobs are on the line if he wins.  And that is their PR man!

It was at that L.S.E. conference that the scales fell from my eyes about expert prediction, and I saw how the assumption-laden models were in reality as toothless as carp.  But worse was the distain in the room at the alternative: asking the public what they think will happen. 

I sat next to an esteemed American professor called Michael Lewis-Beck, and he looked slightly stunned too.  Of the twelve academic models on display that day, all attempting to predict the 2015 election – the only non-expert ‘crowd wisdom’ prediction came from a German called Andreas Murr.  Andreas' model turned out to be the second most accurate of the twelve when the results came in.  

I left my PhD to look at social gaming product, in the belief that I had a way to improve on what Andreas Murr was doing, aiming to rectify the maladies of social scientists, market-researchers, pollsters, bookmakers and of course the media, with an alternative.  A compelling game is required, which aggregates crowd wisdom but does not involve players losing money and ruining lives, and delivers the insight to make it truly social. It’s not an easy nut to crack.  

Gambling companies’ disingenuous social gaming developments

This - changing the product - if you have the time and the effort to think about it, would be the honest and socially responsible thing for bookmakers to do themselves.  

Consider how Philip Morris has got surprisingly honest about the dangers of smoking, and is investing heavily in vape technology. Or the oil majors, Shell and Co, they really are investing in renewable energy.  But social games to the bookmakers are nothing to do with social responsibility.  Rather their games are designed as a wolf in sheep's clothing to the unsuspecting players. Witness the iTV Seven and Sky’s Saturday Super Six – both built by Sky Bet, a British bookmaker now owned by the Canadian The Stars Group, owned in turn by Flutter, who also own Paddy Power and Betfair.  

Somewhat astonishingly, jaw-droppingly really, they are a funnel for customers in the other direction to the one Philip Morris is taking, i.e. from vaping to smoking.  In this form of social gaming, the player starts off in a harmless world, a bit like being safe in a clean white walled vape room, rather than down the pub, with free entrance, free liquid, and all legally promoted on the TV by Jeff Stelling.  

Then he finds himself, all of a sudden, in the betting green forest of the wolf, via the back door, lured in with a free bet.  I know revenues of £800+ per player are an average for an effective online sports betting and gaming site - once you have rinsed the same players through the casino (the really hard stuff) and then fed them to the Swedes in the online poker room.  That's like chucking chunks of red meat to lions. 

Apart from the bogus commitment to social responsibility, the big problem with the bookmakers version of social gaming is the same problem with fixed odds betting, the industry ignore the potential of their games to provide insight as well as entertainment.  As ever, the games are frivolous.  

I'm not so interested in synchronous video game play counting as social gaming, nor eSports, 'skill gaming' or Fortnite - because these games generate no socially useful insight. Puerile social casinos are the same, along with fantasy sports. 

The Dream11 fantasy game has its merits, currently operating on the IPL – to you Americans that is the Indian Premier League cricket tournament. Players pick a team before an individual match starts, from which players on both sides will perform best, with points for wickets, catches and runs and double for your Captain, a sort of tie-breaker.  Dream11 are clever because the IPL is principally about player performance, not team performance, among the public.  The territory of fixed odds - “who will win?” - still of course has a value, but the gap between when the bet is struck and the result being known is yawning, which makes it less compelling.  

There are more exciting games to play, too.  What we need now in sport is a new creation to re-engage the crowd who have been locked out of the live sporting venues, that is healthy and represents the public in sport in a new way.  Something better is needed than the insult of artificial crowd noise, controlled by a single sound mixer technician; who has a habit of sending the viewer the wrong way by pushing the ‘loud cheer’ button when the batsman has drilled it straight to the fielder.  Every time it happens, we are reminded that the expert is no substitute for the real crowd who know more, collectively.

The Indians are getting their kicks out of sport in a new way.  They love the Dream11 game, it has well over 100 million users (that's 7 per cent of all Indians), and had enough cash to buy the IPL's lead sponsorship in 2020.  

However, Dream11 play the same trick on the regulators as Sky Bet, having been classified as 'games of skill' rather than gambling by the Indian courts. The free play tournaments get promoted in the broadcast, including directly by IPL commentators as part of their deal. But the prizes are tiny with the free play games.  Players soon want to move onto the cash tourneys where you can lose real money but the bigger returns make the whole exercise worthwhile.  Of course, that all happens away from the eyes of the broadcasting regulator.

Where it ends for the punter

When the player is under the cosh of the bookmaker, in some dark place, then finally accepts that the online casino has beaten him, he is rendered powerless as the bookmaker puts £1,000 cash into his casino account, a few days later, on non-withdrawable terms.  

Mechanically, he returns to the laptop to play, and then cannot stop.  I know this used to happen, I used to issue the money myself. We simply had to keep the best players playing.  In an online casino 90 per cent of the profits come from just 10 per cent of the customers, and they only last two months on average until they know they are beaten, stop playing and maybe try online poker because it’s a game a skill – and all gamblers think they are skilful.  Shower these lapsing players in cash and they will give you more cash back. If you give an alcoholic a bottle of scotch, after he has stopped drinking for a month, he is sure to buy a crate from you in less than a week.  

This is the duplicitous theory that lies behind the player reactivation strategies of online casinos.  It sits uneasily next to the fine words of the Betting and Gaming Company spokesman announcing political betting market shutdowns out of ‘respect’.  Respect your customers first.  Bookmakers are best off staying out of the morality game altogether, unless it is to change their product.  

A fixed odds bet on the U.S. election?

If the market is infected with the mainstream view, their view-taking is there to be punished by you - if you agree with me - although of course it’s still a dangerous course of action, something I no longer advocate - having a bet. There are safer ways to draw socially useful information from a prediction market, which will be more entertaining.  The something missing is coming my friends, but in the meantime, if I were to bet, my rationale on the 2020 Presidential Election is similar to my tip to back Brexit at 11/4: the odds reflect the established view of the media and academics, it's not one hundred per cent punter sourced.  The result will probably be closer to the betting market forecast than what the pundits are saying, and the academics and the pollsters.

This does not mean I support Trump, I have my sneaking, and weak sympathies for anglo-philia which may help Britain. I like the way he never looks down on the public. He is flawed like I am flawed, like miserable little egotisms together.  There is a certain realism and honesty about that, in a back-handed way.  But a populist government is a contradiction in terms.  

What I mean by this, is that real populism, if we are heading in that direction, is about people governing themselves, a vision of the future if you like, not a boot stamping on a human face.  New technology and good science can empower the people to govern themselves, without recourse to coercive government, even lockdowns.  Any government needed in such a State would be truly old-fashioned liberal, crediting the public with good sense.  This is an English tradition laid down by John Locke, and before that Aristotle the Greek at the dawn of Western civilisation. It is what made our civilisation, and how we survive in hard times.   

Notes to reader:

• I will give you more thoughts about social gaming and my version of it - i.e. engagement + fun + insight + safety, in 2021.
   
• If you are interested in my approach to social gaming, or have any thoughts or would like to get involved, please contact me at albert_tapper@hotmail.com. 
  
  
• For more discussion on the U.S. Election story and political prediction, please listen to my interview on the excellent "Gamble on" U.S. podcast, on political prediction and the U.S. General election - here: https://soundcloud.com/gambleonpodcast/episode-114-betting-handle-records-alexander-westgate-dispute-election-betting-with-albert-tapper - 25 minutes and 30 seconds into it.

Ends / 6,100 words / edited, 30/10/20. 

---

[i] With the exception of Betdaq, which has continued trading.
[ii] Over £100m was matched on the Betfair exchange before it was suspended.  Eventually, over £550m would be matched.
[iii] It still goes on, but underground.  I know a private group who run a ten-to-follow game, if one of your selections dies in the calendar year, you win 100 points minus their age. 
[iv] BBC Radio 4.  Friday 2^nd October 2020.
[v] See Las Vegas Review Journal: https://www.reviewjournal.com/sports/betting/election-odds-taken-down-after-trumps-positive-coronavirus-test-2135622/.  Accessed 05/10/2020.