exchange games - my ideas

All 3 options are impossible.

Betfair's bots maintain a certain spread between back and lay prices. It is other peoples' bots that bring the prices so close together - it is them that you will compete against or do business with most of the time, not betfair.

Take an evens shot. You'll often see it priced-up as 1.99 - 2.01
Imagine that it was you offering those prices and do the maths. You lose due to the 3% commission. Seems impossible to win offering such prices.

In order to win at such prices you need to have multiple matched bets and/or trades on each game in order to reduce the effect of commission (ie green up).

So now imagine offering your prices, faster bots will be ahead of you in the queue most of the time so you'll get matched infrequently, and when you do get matched you'll be in a net losing position unless you can get one or more further bets matched on the same game, you might have to undercut other bots to achieve that or to just break even. After doing all that your edge will be minuscule.

On very low prices the commission is a smaller problem, e.g. start of HiLo game card 1 or further, priced 1.29 - 1.31, real price 1.3. There's a small edge available even with commission - and you can see this reflected by the thousands in cash waiting at those prices. A large bank, patience, and exceptionally fast bot is required to play.

It's certainly a challenge - a bot writing challenge. A custom bot is the way to make it pay, anything else is just playing games.

Good luck!

Why is it necessarily other non-BF bots that bring the prices together so closely ?.
BF wins even at the close spreads long term, without any need for matching or greening up, as it pays no commission effectively ( or rather it pays the commission to itself ).
Non BF market making bots cannot ever compete with BF market making bots, can they ?.

BF's official stance is that they are not actively involved in market making, but merely provide additional liquidity at the poorer price levels. However, there is no way of establishing the truth of this and I doubt if anyone believes it anymore. I must say it seems very unfair that it is impossible to get any bets matched when trying to back at lay price and lay at back price and only those with a direct cable connection to Malta can achieve this.

The question is do the games REALLY need their liquidity?
If not then they could do themselves a favour and NOT get involved. As long as they ARE involved then they will fuel the FIXED conspiracies.

OK Grunweld, let's for argument sake assume that the close spread prices are being made by non BF bots.
Thus it should therefore be simply a question of speed as to who gets their bets matched at these prices.
Do you know what it would take iin a technical speed sense to get to the head of the queue ?.
If you do know ( and I certainly don't), then what is stopping you from creating an appropriate bot to do it ?
It's a free and fair market in this sense , isn't it ?
Remember there is only ever one true and correct value price for any and all bets at any and all stages of any and all games.

The strongest and the fittest will always win in the end.
Xgames is perhaps no different from anything else in this sense.
Painful but true ?

Yet again I agree Jazza, most of the games would run fine without BF putting in any liquidity. But I suppose they would claim they need to keep that option, to ensure the games will operate 24/7 if some of the mm bots went down for whatever reason.

Frog, I have no idea what is required to get cash at the front of the queue. Clearly a commercial bot and a fast internet connection is not good enough.

when ex.games first started only poker av....30k a game ....now lots of games dif.speeds 2-3k per game.

Perhaps being overly naive here, but I really do think that the exchange games are being as honest as they need to be. Clearly, there are reasons that losses are happening, but...


Commish - it's an honest percentage, there are no cashing out fees or hidden charges etc.
The Odds - they're not rounded or approximate, and because of the liquidity that (purportedly) betfair puts in.
Dodgy rules - infinite blackjack decks, 4 hands going through to the river in poker etc.

Just a couple of reasons that losses are easily found here. With rules like this - winning is much more difficult, and there's no need for shouts of "fixed". It's publicly, openly, blatantly fixed - but that's fine because we know.

For example, why are people so surprised "OH MY GOD WOULD YOU KNOW IT A MUTH FLUPPIN THREE CAME UP AND SHAFTED ME!!!!".
Just think how many times you fold cards in a poker game that you wish you'd held onto!

For example, you go to a coconut shy at a funfair - and you can tell that the balls are too light and too small. This is a fair disadvantage, because you're aware of it.
When you discover that the coconuts are nailed down, then you get**ed off.

So yes, I agree that the games are 'fixed', all games are in some way, but I feel like this is fixed in a relatively honest way.



Anyway, none of this is new, I just thought since people were throwing their 2quids in, I'd give you mine.