I will see odds on people winning elections as 5/1 etc, but have no idea how to figure out if that means they are likely to win or not, other than through context. I have looked it up but never quite ‘get’ it. Please explain to me how it works in a way so simply that a child would understand!
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Betting odds are just an extension of statistics, and there are a couple ways of getting those statistics.
For something like Roulette or Craps, you can calculate the odds purely mathematically to determine the odds of success.
For some things where the math is really hard, you could just simulate it and run millions or billions of tests and look at the results.
But for things that you can’t calculate, and you don’t know enough to prerun, you try and collect as much data as you can. You can then statistically calculate odds with a certain amount of room for error.
That room for error is very important. While you can say the odds of a coin flipping heads is 50%, you would also say that the odds of someone winning an election is 51% +/- 4% (or something similar). That means if you repeated the same experiment over and over, you would expect to see values between 47% and 55% come back (and to have an error range that covers the 51% as well).
Betting odds are just taking these odds and giving the betting agency an extra edge. You won’t get 1:1 odds on a coin flip. You might get 9:10 odds, ensuring that the betting agency gets an amount on average.
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