4 ms·
This has pretty much always been standard, and barring some sort of change in regulation, very likely always will be. As a bettor, your recourse is likely cutt
by splonk 8y ago
This has pretty much always been standard, and barring some sort of change in regulation, very likely always will be. As a bettor, your recourse is likely cutting down your bets/farming smaller bets out to your employees, finding a bookie with some gamble/opinion to them, or finding bets with less edge but more volume.
The basic idea with bookmaking without risk is that you want your books balanced - since you get a percentage of the total amount wagered, if your bets on both sides are approximately equal, you can't lose. The risk the "sharps" represent is that they may come in with a large bet on a small market which won't have enough volume to take the other side. Historically it's always been possible to get an edge on these small markets - the canonical example I've always heard is lower division college basketball in the US. The problem is that these lines are so thinly bet than even low 4-figure bets are out of the ordinary, and you need to make an awful lot of them at a single digit percentage advantage to make any real money. Maybe you can come in one day to bet $1000 on Middlebury to beat Lebanon Valley, but good luck coming the next day with a sudden interest in laying down similar amounts of money on Whitman vs. Claremont/Mudd/Scripps. Basically, in general the beatable lines are in areas that nobody really cares about. If you want to come in every week and bet $10k on every NFL point spread, you'll have no problem getting action.
> "I had bet $8,400 to win $4,000 on a tennis match and $2,000 on a [first-five-innings] total on baseball..."
I'm not sure about the baseball bet, but depending on the level of the tennis match, this seems almost guaranteed to raise red flags. Tennis has a somewhat sordid history of suspected fixed matches in lower level competition, and short of major events like Grand Slam late round matches, I'd guess that this kind of action is wildly anomalous.
- Animats 8y agoThis has pretty much always been standard, and barring some sort of change in regulation, very likely always will be. Horse racing has been pari-mutuel for a century, ever since the invention of the totalizator. The odds change as bets are placed, the bettors are betting against each other, and the house takes a cut. The track operator takes no financial risk. Sports betting, for some reason, usually doesn't work that way. Except, for some reason, golf and jai alai, which have pari-mutuel betting. It's surprising that the online betting world didn't go pari-mutuel. Probably nobody would trust the service to compute the odds honestly.
- adw 8y agoNot in the UK; the Tote has always been a minority player. The action was divided between on-course and off-course bookmakers, then the Internet happened, then Betfair happened.
- ISL 8y agoA transparent bet exchange seems, at least at first blush, to be relatively straightforward. Heck, it is the sort of thing for which smart contracts were made.
- repsilat 8y ago> This has pretty much always been standard As someone who has worked in the industry, I agree with one caveat: > The basic idea with bookmaking without risk is that you want your books balanced This is not the business model of every bookie. In the UK the standard retail bookies will set wide spreads and aggressively ban accounts that appear savvy (or appear to be automated.) The big betting venue in Europe (at least back when I knew things) is an exchange, though. They take no outcome risk and make money either way, though typically more if the underdog wins. In Asia some of the top bookies have yet another business model: they are really just institutional gamblers whose business is to know the outcome statistics better than anyone else. They employ shitloads of data scientists and they will take large bets from smart punters. They run gambling websites because it's better to gamble "on their own terms". When they want to bet against another large gambling shop, they move the odds so the spreads overlap the right way and wait for arbitrageurs to match-make.
- ars 8y ago> and aggressively ban accounts that appear savvy (or appear to be automated.) Isn't this literally saying "We cheat, if you bet with us you are guaranteed to lose money?" Why would anyone bet with a firm like that? By the very fact that they took your bet you know that your bet was a losing one. It's something I've never understood - how they can publicly say that, and yet still have customers.
- Buge 8y agoI wouldn't consider it cheating. It's refusing to play against good players. It doesn't sound like they'll cancel a bet that you make because it's good. It sounds like they'll see you make a good bet, then ban you any future bets, while still fulfilling that good bet.
- tpm 8y ago> Why would anyone bet with a firm like that? Most customers are in the long run in the red (they are not in it for the money, just want to have fun), so this is not something they care about or will encounter.
- 8y ago
- zhoujianfu 8y ago> laying down similar amounts of money on Whitman vs. Claremont/Mudd/Scripps. As a former Stag, I'll take that bet!