Crowd Slide

The Crowd is certainly not getting any sharper, with another losing week of looking for value in the EPL. This brings the losing streak to five, and the overall loss so far to 5.81 from 100 bets.

Undaunted, the Crowd is back with their value picks for this weekend, with four Home win picks (Burnley, Sunderland, West Ham United and Swansea City) four Away wins for Chelsea, Manchester City, Stoke City and Newcastle United) with one Draw (a unanimous verdict on the Manchester United v Crystal Palace game) and a Lay of Southampton who host Leicester City.

Other highlights are that @ValueBankFooty's accumulators this weekend are:

Home Win Treble LEEDS - READING - FULHAM

Away Double ARSENAL - BRENTFORD

No entry again this week from Talkies Tips, and judging by his last blog post, enthusiasm for betting and blogging is at something of a low right now. I believe he is a Portsmouth fan too, so his enthusiasm for football is also probably pretty low right now. Other no-shows this week are Daily 25, who is still either changing nappies or breast-feeding, and TFA_Raz, who is on a luxury world cruise for a few weeks. Trend to end sits out this weekend, as do Gecko and Skeeve who has no Conference games this weekend anyway.

As I mentioned previously, I shall be taking three well-earned weeks off work (my primary job anyway) to spend time with family, both old (parents) and new (grand-baby due any minute now), with a first visit to the Emerald Isle thrown in because Mrs Cassini, along with 99.9% of Americans, thinks she is partly Irish.

FTL updates and "wisdom of the crowd" emails will probably take a hiatus. Keep the entries coming though, as the results will be caught up with on my return in December.

The blog will also be a little quiet, but there was one comment on the post about Betfair's share price and strategy from pop, who wrote:

Problem with Betfair exchange is that it is not peer to peer. Betfair bots lay a high percentage of the bets.

I'm not sure that it ultimately matters, or is a problem, if the exchange is purely peer-to-peer or not. Whether one is matched with another individual, several individuals, a Betfair bot, a customer's bot or a combination of these is irrelevant. The only thing we care about if we are price sensitive (i.e. serious about making money long-term) is the price we can obtain. Why do I care if it's a Betfair bot laying the bet rather than an individual?

The problem for the exchange is that Betfair were not making as much profit from the less sophisticated punters as they could have made, so they have now lured these people away to the Sportsbook where they lose their money a little faster, but apparently don't care, and the exchange sees a fall in liquidity.