5 - Is This Bum Any Good?

Summary

Every morning at 2 A.M., as professors sleep and graduate students arrive to pull all-nighters, my computer diligently makes the rounds of the Websites of all major frontons, downloading the latest schedules and results and then running these files through Dario's parsing programs. After a few months of retrieval we had built a large-enough collection of jai alai data to justify some serious analysis. Our goal was to use all this data to measure the relative abilities of jai alai players and incorporate this information into our Monte Carlo simulation to make customized predictions for each match.

To get this job done, I had to bring another student on to the project, Meena Nagarajan. Meena was a different type of student than Dario. As a married woman with a young child, she realized that there are other things to life besides computers. She was returning to school to get her master's degree with the express goal of getting a lucrative job with a financial services company associated with Wall Street, as indeed she ultimately did. She realized that building a program-trading system for jai alai was a great way to learn how to build one for trading stocks, and she therefore signed on to work on the project.

Her undergraduate degree back in India was in applied mathematics; thus, she brought to the table an understanding of the meaning and limitations of statistics.