Metabets

You can find the Metabets here.

Bellow I have made a guide of how to play it. The further you read the more advanced it gets.

Introduction

The Metabets is a betting system for betting on weather or not different things will happen in BattleMaster. It is very simple to get in on, you just create an account and you are fit for fight. As in all betting the goal is of course to make a profit. The higher the better.

Once you are in then the frustrations starts! How do you play you ask. Well it is pretty simple to you way around the pages but at first it looks very complicated and hard to understand. What are all these percentages and shares? What should you buy or sell and at what price?

Well the latter you will have to figure out yourself. But I will try to explain the first. It is actually not that complicated. Originally the Delphi Method, or Information Aggregation Mechanism as the system used is called, was build as a technique aimed at building an agreement, or consensus about an opinion or view, without necessarily having people meet face to face, such as through surveys, questionaires, emails etc. (look here for more info).

It can also be seen as such here but in order to succeed at Metabets you do not need to understand the theory behind. You can enjoy it fully on a much more simple level. You can simply see it as a trade of shares between players!

Beginners

You start out with 100 dollars (an imaginary currency) and for this you can buy and sell shares. The shares belong to different claims. A claim could fx be: “TOM will burn the BattleMaster server before Christmas 2005”. Each share has the value of 1 dollar that will be paid when the claim ends (Christmas Eve) if the claim turns out to be true. If not then they are worthless. You can not even use them at the loo.

These shares you can trade like normal goods. This is where the percentage comes in to play. You have to evaluate how much you think a share on a claim is worth. This you do by estimating the likeliness of the claim to be true. If you think the chance is 40-50%, buying shares sold as 90% would be to paying too much. (When I say “sold as 90%” then it is someone saying: “I think there is 90% chance of the claim happening (TOM burning the servers) and therefore I want 0.90 dollars per share when selling you the shares.”). From what you think, you would not likely pay much more than 40% of the shares potential value (1 dollar) when buying it.

When you now have bought your shares you have two options to profit from them:

• You can keep them and cash-in on them when the claim expires (given it is true)
• Or you can try to make a profit selling them at a higher price.

The latter is probably the way you should make your money. Buy at a really low price and sell again at a much higher one. This is what all trading is basically about. Optimally you would buy at 0% of the value and sell at a 100%. But you are very lucky if you find some stupid enough to get in on that deal!

Experienced

The part that is hardest to understand is the concept of negative shares! It is possible for you to sell shares without having any. This is how the shares are made. It costs you 1 dollar per share to make before you can sell it, and is called negative shares. Then of course you will get something in return when you sell it. Say you sell it at 50% then you will loose 0.50 dollars selling a share. Therefore you would like to sell “new” shares as high as possible.

“What are the benefit then of selling shares you do not have?” you might ask. Well you see if the claim turns out to be false (most likely in the given example) you will gain 1 dollar per negative share you have. If you have sold them at 50% then you would have made a nice profit of 0.50 dollars (or 50%) per share. So basically when you think a claim is not going to happen you would sell shares to people that think it is going to happen (or at least is willing to pay a little per share in case it did happen).

Masters

There could also be a more speculative reason to sell negative shares. You could also buy them back at a lower price than you originally sold them and then sell them again with a profit. If you do this enough times you will in the end have compensated for the expenses you had when you made the shares. This of course is the hard way to make a profit and should only be attempted if you really know what you are doing.