[daveguy]

The derby has 20 horses in the competition. Winning the superfecta requires picking the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th places in correct order.

The possible ways to choose that ordering are 20 * 19 * 18 * 17 or 116,280 combinations. So, a 1 in 116,280 chance of winning (which is why it pays about 11,000x -- bookies get to keep the rest!). If this crowd-sourced horse pickin' works twice that would be about 1 in 13.521 billion odds. So, if it can do it twice there might be something to it. Doing it once isn't really that big of odds. If the favorite gets upset (Nyquist this time) then the crowdsource probably loses. Not sure how often that happens, but it probably isn't particularly rare.

[ChuckMcM]

Ah but as linkbait for a SaaS company? Priceless :-) As I recall there have been other efforts at this, generally using professional handicappers, and while crowds can silence otherwise compelling outliers they are certainly not infallible. I was reading where someone did something similar to the NCAA bracket, taking a source of many thousand user supplied brackets and trying to normalize them to a "golden" bracket, it was wrong in a couple of major ways.

[archerdaedelus]

Well, your math points out that doing it once is pretty big odds. Obviously not as big as doing it twice, but if it was easy them lots of people would have won the Superfecta. Only people I've heard of winning are UNU and those people who bet UNU's picks. As someone else pointed out, the swarm intelligence approach doesn't have to hit every time to be impressive. Just better than an average bettor. Look at their site. They've been successful with the Oscars, Super Bowl and College football.