Thursday 21 January 2016

Getting To The Point

Jon Wertheim: Either way, the integrity of competition is undermined and eroded. But do you have a sense of what is being fixed? Points? Sets? Games? Matches?
Scott Ferguson: Matches. There is precious little in betting on individual points, sets or matches. It can be done, but not via the big betting exchange, and thus any success on such markets will be very short-term as those accounts will be closed or restricted faster than a Sam Groth serve.
Regarding the above exchange, Marty has this opinion:
I think his [Scott's] comment should be interpreted differently:

"It can be done, but not via the big betting exchange, and thus any success on such markets will be very short-term as those accounts will be closed or restricted"

He's saying that because you can't fix+bet anything other than matches on the exchange (perhaps for liquidity reasons) you must do it elsewhere, and elsewhere the accounts will be "closed or restricted". I suspect you would not disagree with this.

Having said that I'm not sure he is even correct - I would still have thought betting at bookmakers would be a good source of liquidity. If you are able to fix a tennis game you should be able to get access to some unflagged bookmaker accounts. Also not all books follow the UK model of closing accounts at the first sign of a winner.
Reading the quotes again, it isn't clear exactly what was meant, and the "sets or matches" should presumably be "sets or games" which confuses things even more.

It's certainly not true that there is "precious little in betting on individual points".

As I mentioned yesterday, the syndicates behind court-siding are making plenty of money from the stay-at-home trader by flying "technicians" around the globe. As this informed website (DJ Sunset) explains:
It was the same thing with Betfair, once Gale decided to have 25 courtsiders flying around the world every week, you cant realistically compete against someone who is 5 to 15 seconds ahead, and betting 10k+ every point before you see a point won or lost.
£10k a point soon adds up to a lot of money, at least from my perspective. And where else is betting these kinds of sums possible other than on the "big betting exchange"? If there's an alternative I'm not aware of it, but certainly the sportsbooks would soon close you down if you were seen to be consistently winning in-play, though I doubt you'd be able to bet much at all in the first place.

James - author of the much praised Programming For Betfair, asked where the quote below was found. 
"i have been using the .01 no lose, but i cannot see how it is fraudulent strategy"
It's an archived forum post from 2011 located below - not really very interesting, but it at suggested that action is at least sometimes taken to punish this no-risk strategy. 

1 comment:

James said...

"And where else is betting these kinds of sums possible other than on the "big betting exchange"? If there's an alternative I'm not aware of it, but certainly the sportsbooks would soon close you down if you were seen to be consistently winning in-play, though I doubt you'd be able to bet much at all in the first place."

When I still had a LinkedIn account I had contacts from Asia wanting me to code for their syndicates on what can I only describe as "dark exchanges" and "dark books" so there are certainly alternatives. It's how to get on them that is the problem. A dark anything is primarily set up for one entity to shake down another so you won't be running it for the benefit of others. There are many Asian syndicates with low-latency operations in whichever sport is amenable to such trades. Western betting/trading is quite primitive compared to its Asian counterparts.