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How is this news? Have they not heard of Betfair, which has been allowing this kind of thing since 2000? The only thing required to make betting like a market
by cletus 16y ago
How is this news? Have they not heard of Betfair, which has been allowing this kind of thing since 2000?
The only thing required to make betting like a market is for the gambler to be able to take the bookie's side as well. Many bookie's use Betfair to hedge their positions in fact.
In financial markets terms, a gambler is much like a prop trader. They're betting on a particular position. That position, unlike a more traditional financial instrument, will be the outcome of a race, game, etc. But this isn't really all that different to, say, betting on oil futures.
A bookie on the other hand operates much like a spread trader. They (try to) take a neutral position and just make money on the spread as the difference in the odds between taking and making a bet is really a bid-ask spread.
- praxxis 16y agoAmerican sports wagering - Vegas in particular - has been pretty behind the times until recently. Vegas betting has been limited, partly due to software, partly due to it being "the way", to pretty basic betting. Handicap, head to head, totals, basic propositions. In run betting is huge in Asia, especially on football (soccer). As the article mentions, sports betting has never been a focus of the casinos. New kinds of betting will hopefully change that.
- gwern 16y ago> Have they not heard of Betfair, which has been allowing this kind of thing since 2000? Is Betfair really the same thing? Everything I heard about it while reading about prediction markets made it sound like the Vegas bookies that Cantor is being contrasted against - a limited set of bets run at specific times. Not arbitrary dynamically-generated bets at arbitrary times in the game. To me, that's quite different. Like the difference between a video game which is a shooter on rails, and _Halo_ with decent AI bots fighting you.
- praxxis 16y agoIn running and peer to peer betting (Betfair style) are indeed different. You can place in run (live) bets on Betfair. Interesting anecdote, apparently Betfair had one of the busiest Oracle installs on the planet. They were (are?) creating some pretty neat infrastructure to get away from it: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/matt-youill-betfair-flywheel-tradefair http://www.infoq.com/presentations/matt-youill-betfair-flywh...
- corin_ 16y agoIn addition to that, it also seems to be a big thing that people can place any sort of bets mid-game, rather than stopping all betting as soon as the game kicks off. That's old news in Europe, not just thanks to a single site like Betfair - nearly every company offers in-game betting, both online and in shops.