Julian: sure, but the problem with that is getting enough of those matches in the time that you're there + picking a bunch of them right in a row (since some of them will be total coinflips)
every time i've gotten out of the mines, it's been big bets on real matches that sent me back down. i keep thinking i can play matchups with them like a real fighting game, but when it's CPU fights it just doesn't seem to work that way...
another issue i forgot to mention is that if there is a genuine matchup issue where a character with a worse W/L record could very well win, people know about that now and won't put a lot of money on it. you're only going to get 2:1-3:1 odds from those matches anymore, it seems
That's part of the reason why I no longer care as much about going back to the mines as I did before. Before I used to bet 1-10 at a time, but now I tend to bet 40-100, or even go all-in, because I realized I'm having more fun when lots of my fake money are on the line as opposed to "playing it safe". Then I get back to the mines with my $34 starting money and keep betting on the worse characters until I get an upset or a fair match, since betting on the better characters yields nearly nothing at such low bet ammounts.
I don't know about the character's W:L ratios or any of that fancy things. I mostly trust my own experience and have lots of fun whether my hunch ends up being right or not. To me, the betting isn't nearly as important as the hilarous SaltyChat and the crazy interactions between characters.
Even though I think it's nice to see some random broken character pop up every now and then to shake things up, close games are a lot more enjoyable, but we aren't getting too many of them, and when we do they often end up being matches where both characters have are abysmally bad, or are decent but use some atrocious AI that works poorly throughout the match.