Show-Me State

Another winner for the road 'dogs in the MLB play-offs this morning, as the Kansas City Royals beat the Baltimore Orioles in the first game of the ALCS. A little history for you non baseball fans, but the last time the Royals made it to the post-season was in 1985, when they won the World Series (their first, and so far only win). Their opponents in the World Series that year were their fellow Missourians from the National League - the St Louis Cardinals, and they are alive and well this season too, opening tonight in the NLCS v the San Francisco Giants.

And if that isn't exciting enough, I have more. That 1985 World Series wasn't the first 'All Missouri' World Series. That was in 1944, when the World Series was between two teams from one city - St Louis - the Browns and the Cardinals, who both shared the same stadium. The Cardinals won 4-2, but the quality wasn't that high due to the war. In fact, the Browns had a one-armed player (Pete Gray) on their team! One final twist is that the Browns later moved to become the Baltimore Orioles (the Royals' ALCS opponents this year).  The Giants don't have a Missouri past or present, having moved from New York in 1958, but this is their fourth NLCS series versus the Cardinals with the Giants winning the two most recent in 2002 and 2012.

Some interesting news from Peter Webb's Bet Angel Blog in regard to Betfair's plans for a November roll-out of "Cross market liquidity pooling". Basically an unmatched bet will appear in other markets. The simplest example used by Betfair is this:

Perhaps the simplest example would be the home team in Match Odds, and the same team -0.5 Asian Handicap. Currently if you place a bet on the Match Odds today, and if it’s unmatched we will only advertise the bet in Match Odds. The same is true of Asian Handicap. With the new bet matcher, if your bet is unmatched in Match Odds we’ll also show it in the Asian Handicap -0.5 line for customers to match there. The reverse will also be true: if your Asian Handicap -0.5 bet is unmatched, we’ll make it available for other customers to match not just there but in the Match Odds market too. Note that your bet will still only be matched once, with whoever requests the bet first.”

In my opinion, Betfair offer far too many markets, most of which see little to no money traded, and do not help themselves by having superfluous markets such as Under / Over 0.5 goals. While I understand that it costs Betfair nothing to put these markets up, I can't help but think they would be better served by concentrating interest on the major markets.