Last week, Cheltenham hosted one of the largest horse racing events in the UK. Gambling plays a significant role at the festival, so I plotted the outcome of 4 different strategies that a gambler may implement during the event. They are:

• Favourite only: Bet £10 on the pre-race favourite of every race
• 2nd to 5th: Bet £2.50 on the 2nd to 5th pre-race favourite of every race
• All horses except Top 5: Split £10 across the horses that are not in the top 5 and bet on all of them equally (So if there are 10 horses, bet £2.00 on the 6th to 10th pre-race favourite)
• All horses: Split £10 across all horses and bet on all of them equally (If there are 10 horses, bet £1.00 on each of them)

The empirical expected values of the strategies are 73.5%, 76.3%, 61.8%, 70.2% respectively.

A few notes:

• Odds are calculated with Industry Starting Price, which is close to the median price of all major bookmakers in the UK
• If there is a tie between 1st and 2nd, the stake is split evenly among the two horses. No other tie in prices relevant to this calculation occurs.
• Gambling is a scam. You are expected to loss around £3 to the bookmaker for every £10 you gamble, which is far worse than most slots (they tend to have EV of at least 90%)

Source: https://www.timeform.com/cheltenham-festival/odds

Tools: Python's matplotlib, Excel

E. When i goddamn good and well FEEL like taking them down.

Days don't start to get longer until the end of January. (In the USA.) Tree lights make waking up in the dark winter mornings, and relaxing in the dark winter evenings, so much better. So nothing comes down until early to mid- February.

Here in Florida they stay up all year

This isn't beautiful data....its just a screenshot from some random article...

Take it down at 00:01 the 26th of December you damn heathens

In which case, I get why you might be able to take down your stuff long before spring.

[removed]

A lot of us don't have snow, or not before february.

I left my lights up all year. My Christmas lights were behind the eaves, protected from the elements and invisible to passers-by. When turned on, the lights reflected off my light-colored house. It was like an inferential Christmas. If I was expecting company during the year I would turn the lights on to aid my visitors in finding my house.

If it's still snowing two months after Christmas you can bet I'm leaving the tree up lol

There is literally a rule, isn’t there? It’s supposed to be down by Jan 6th, unless you’re orthodox.

Wait, they are green. I could have turned them on yesterday!

I still have lights lining the border of my front shutters.

It's not that they're hard to reach, I can comfortably stand on my porch and remove them.

I'm just that lazy this year.

Really just a survey of how many people don’t live somewhere with ice on their roof.

I feel fine with them until Jan 5th. That’s the official end of the holidays for me

Does this mean there is going to be another big financial/economic crisis fairly soon?

[removed]

Epiphany. That is the only correct answer.

I wonder whst could have happened between 2008 and 2022 that would have possibly lead to banks between 100 billion and 250 billion to fail

This year I got a big stand of mutucoloured lights and I put them around the top corner of my living room.

Definitely makes me feel happier and I enjoy the dimmer lights while watching stuff or playing games. I got a bunch of fairy lights that are AA powered so I got a bunch of rechargeables for them and I'm gonna put those up cause they use alot less power

Whats up with 80 year olds and testicular cancer? Is there some kinda manopause that happens at 80 that causes testicles to vanish?

[removed]

When we were in high school, one of my friends fell off a ladder putting Xmas lights up on his parents two story house. He didn’t break any bones thx to snow but he did staple himself in the forehead with the staple gun as he landed and it left a dent in his skull too. Could have been so much worse but he still was teased mercilessly by everyone (he was one of 13 kids ) for a while thx to the dent.

I'll only take it down on the first day temps are above 2 degrees Celcius in January or February.