Retarded Markets

 A couple more comments on the fixing discussion. Emp wrote:

Cassini is dead right. Especially about this sort of thing being proof of "good faith" amongst fixers.

Secondly, as Hawkins book notes, our markets are very robust and we don't allow bets on retarded trivia like "player x to be booked" or "number of passes made by player z to player y" and stuff like that. Asian markets focus on the main action, which is necessarily tougher to fix.

While Peter added this:

Has Ellis never heard of bookings markets or does he assume everyone bets with Ladbrokes and their £2 limits. I've never had problems getting relatively large bets thru the bookings markets in the past and I'm sure others haven't either due to the two way trade the spread firms used to take.

It's been shown plenty of times in the past with match fixing that very little 'trade' ever comes thru to the UK bookmakers and is usually centered around the illegal Asian betting markets where pretty much any bet can be accommodated.

It takes a very naive view to imagine players are paid to get a card where the perpetrators have no way of cashing in, but then again we'll always have people like Ellis and Sports Trading Life to fill the gap.

While I'm not sure the official, or politically correct, term for fringe / novelty / side markets is 'retarded', I do tend to agree with the sentiment. I joked about Betfair having 'approximately 972 markets' for a top football game, but I make it 81 with a quick count on Betfair's Manchester City v Arsenal game this weekend. 81 markets seems a little excessive with plenty of overlap, and a day before the match, just 8 of these markets on the world's leading exchange have seen more than four figures traded. 

Several markets have seen absolutely nothing traded, and one can't help but wonder if Betfair wouldn't be better served by focusing interest on the serious markets. A rough and ready calculation shows that about 92% of the money already traded on this match was on the Match Odds market - with £267k. Next market in liquidity? Correct Score with £7k, followed by the Draw No Bet with £5.8k. Not a scientific study by any means, and I actually expected the Under 2.5 market to be higher than its fifth place and £2k traded, but it does show where most of the money and interest is, and it is not in "retarded" markets.

For the edification of Ellis, there are actually quite a few markets related to cards offered by Betfair on this game- six in fact, with a grand total of £191 traded as I write, all of it on the "Sending Off?" market. Whether or not other markets, whether legal or illegal, offer more bets I have no idea, and unless I become a referee, it is highly unlikely that I will ever be interested. 

Interesting that Emp says "Asian markets focus on the main action", while Peter claims that "pretty much any bet can be accommodated in the illegal markets there".  

Any bet in terms of size, or any bet as in "will Player X get a yellow card in the nth minute?"