The Investor, please don't attempt to introduce facts into the debate, as feck will call you a city boy parasite no opinion worthless calimero non liquidity provider, thanks.

Please leave Feck alone.  He is basically a good man, who has made a wrong choice in life: Staying at home to try to make money on Betfair, when he could have been working.  All that stands between him and success are city boys, traders, parasites, queue jumpers, calimeros (whatever they are), ferengi (I've seen them in Star Trek), Tories, cheats and the fact that, when he puts up his bets, they are visible to everyone else.
Unfortunately for him, the fact that there are so many PC payers on here is evidence of how far down the food chain he actually is.  So please have some sympathy and show some respect to our Good Friend Feck, who is an honourable man.

marksman

If you removed all trader's trades from the market almost every gambler's bet would still be matched, in many cases at better odds. If you removed all gamblers bets from the market very few trader's trades would be matched. Get over yourselves, you no more supply liquidity than ticket touts generate extra seats at events. In all the time I've been on here not a single trader has ever been able to give me an example of a (market/queue based) two-way profitable trade where the true backers and layers, on either end of the trade, wouldn't have been matched in the traders absence. None of you jokers will be any different. Instead we'll get another tirade of smilies from the clueless TurtlesBrain and NoMark.

The suggestion that the purple site isn't short of gamblers and has no liquidity because it's short of traders is a classic. Traders would be paying up to 4 times less over there and have less competition but instead prefer to stick with a company they detest. Give me a break.

Feck, I'll address some of the points you make:

If the market spread is 4.8 - 5.4 what makes you think the next gambler up isn't going to decrease the spread? Do you think we're all into staring contests? If the clueless punter sticks a pin into a 100% market it's totally irrelevant whether the market's efficient or not, his expected pre-commission loss is zero regardless. So how do traders make him lose at a slower rate? Competition between profitable gamblers will make the market efficient in any case.

In theory a trader/market maker could price a market to 1.99-2.00, a gambler can't compete with that.

If you removed all trader's trades from the market almost every gambler's bet would still be matched, in many cases at better odds. If you removed all gamblers bets from the market very few trader's trades would be matched.

I agree with that. Gamblers as a group would be better off without traders. The fact that traders can operate to lower margins, means that they are effectively taking money out of the pockets of profitable gamblers, giving most of it back to the losers (by way of a smaller spread), and making a small profit (which explains why as a group gamblers would be worse off, but the losing gamblers taken in isolation will be better off). The commission received by Betfair stays the same for the market in question, but as the losers have lost less, his funds will churn more, leading to a higher level of total commission paid in the future.

I agree. It's strange therefore that the large majority of winners on betfair are dependent on betfair sanctioned rules and quirks of the interface.

I also wonder about that sometimes. I've made a signifcant amount of money due to this myself. One of these is quirks is the assymmetric nature of odds intervals. The problem seems to be that rather than address these issues and create a level playing field, betfair just step in and take the profits resulting from these discrepancies for themselves. This is marginally better than customers profiting from these quirks, but the best solution would be for Betfair to provide a platform that is as free from flaws as possible, rather than profiting form them, which creates a serious conflict of interest.

In theory a trader/market maker could price a market to 1.99-2.00, a gambler can't compete with that

The market maker here is still open to a hit by someone with a more indepth knowledge of the event & able to identify which side of this bet was wrong.

Mistakes happen with pricing all the time. Even in the events where people traditionally believe that there is perfect knowledge and that no advantage exists, i.e. pre-kick off football prices.

Dave / coach, that has to be factored in.

To give an example, I frequently (almost all of the time) bet on football matches, without following them live. This leaves me open to risks such as dangerous free kicks on the edge of the box, or even the pre kick-off estimates of relative strength of teams being severely altered by the actual play in the game.

Someone with good betting skills would be able to consistently pick off my value bets. Despite this I know that most of the bets matched will end up giving me a positive expectancy. If I was to follow all the games I bet on live, I would have to limit what I bet on, which I believe would result in lower profit, with more risk (more money tied to fewer outcomes).

In a highly liquid market (such as a world cup match or a CL final) it is possible to make money offering such tight spreads. Essentially you are betting against volatility.

Investor, luckily for you most of the people matching your bets are sports fans!

This situation will continue. The chances of the average punter changing their outlook is of course very slim.

"The books would still be 100% on a gamblers only exchange"






































































































































HE ACTUALLY BELIEVES THAT

Splitting all players into "Gamblers" or "Traders" fails to take into account the full spectrum of Betfair players. There are many other ways to play, my own activities don't fit either description. A more meaningful separation may be between those who have an interest in the event who factor their opinion of the likely performance of the players/horses/whatever into their betting decisions and those who's interest is purely in market dynamics. Even this is too simple though as there are surely many people who consider both. All the same, when Feck et al refer to "Gamblers" I think they usually mean the former group, what you might call "opinion based gamblers". We are all Gamblers here, so I'm going to refer to this group as "opinion Gamblers".

The best and most illuminating separation though is simply between losers and winners. The only way to win is to place positive expected value bets, though there are many ways you may achieve this. All winners take their money from the losers (obviously), but how they do this does make a difference to those losers. Within the winners camp we can put all players on a spectrum of how much margin they need to be viable, in the case of traders this margin is minimal, whereas the opinion gambler needs a much more substantial margin to overcome the commission barrier. Ultimately low margin winners pass value from would be high margin winners to overall losers (keeping a small cut). The net effect is that high margin winners miss out, whereas losers loose more gradually. So the question of whether traders are good for opinion gamblers is simply dependent on whether the opinion gamblers in question are overall winners or losers. If they are winners then traders are bad news as they lessen the value available to them to the point where operating can become non-viable. However if the opinion gamblers are losers then trading (and other low margin activity) does keep them in the game longer, losing opinion gamblers would lose quicker if they were matched against high margin opinion gamblers because for the winning opinion gambler to match your bet it has to be a worse value bet (to you) than a trader would be prepared to take. Low margin players of all kinds are basically good for losers and bad for other winners, in this respect they are a bit like the X-matcher, except that that takes much more of your money (not that I'm bitter or anything).

Ultimately the overwhelming bulk of Betfair customers are losers, most opinion players, most traders- probably even most bot players. All of these people benefit from low margin winners, it's only other winners who miss out.

Ultimately low margin winners pass value from would be high margin winners to overall losers (keeping a small cut).

What you (and Investor before you) are saying only holds up if, in the absence of traders, gamblers indulge in staring contests. They wouldn't. They'd fill in the gaps in the spread in order to get matched. Do you really think if all the shrewdies make something evens the market's going to be 1.9 - 2.1 and all the mugs are going to roll up to either lay at 2.1 or back at 1.9 while the shrewdies all pile up behind each other at the same price?

Do you really think if all the shrewdies make something evens the market's going to be 1.9 - 2.1

If a selection's true price is 2 and you want to make money laying it outright then if you're on 5% you need to get matched at 1.9 just to break even- so for outright gambling to be profitable you would either need an even bigger spread than that or you'd need the price to be WAY out of line. Obviously if you're on a lower comm rate the spread can be narrower but the principal is the same.

In all the time I've been on here not a single trader has ever been able to give me an example of a (market/queue based) two-way profitable trade where the true backers and layers, on either end of the trade, wouldn't have been matched in the traders absence. None of you jokers will be any different. Instead we'll get another tirade of smilies from the clueless TurtlesBrain and NoMark.

The Smilie Sisters replies say it all imo.

He seriously thinks that an outright gambler would be happy to back an even money chance at evens, and then pay commission on top

Where did I say that? If the trader matches his back with a layer at 2.0 and matches his lay with a backer at 1.99 then, in the traders absence, the layer and backer would match each other at an average of 1.995. I can understand how you fail to understand that though.

They take money out of the pot by leeching off the work of others.

They only take money out of the pot if they win, which most don't. The myth that trading is a p1ss easy way of printing money is just that; a myth. The overwhelming bulk of traders are doomed to failure as are almost all gamblers, if you buy into the idea that it's just a matter of watching the weight of money for a simple  click and win then I'm afraid I must disabuse you. Would that it were that simple, if it was I'd bot it up and make a killing, it would take me all of 5 minutes to code and then I could just retire. No such luck I'm afraid, instead I have to spend days on end working on devious ploys, complex models and some things I don't even understand to make my money. Don't believe the Bet Angel hype, for the most part traders are no better at knowing which way the price is going to go than most punters are at knowing which horse is going to win- it's just not that easy

Yes, one of Feck's little fantasies is that anyone, anyone at all, can just become a "trader" and as if by magic countless sums of money just flow into their account with no effort or skill whatsover

Which begs the question, why doesn't he do it

I know you will all know this already, but I will say it anyway. Essentially I feel I am agreeing with Feck on this issue of differing opinions of bettors, but here is my take.

The whole range of ability is in the market place and the market makers, especially the main crew take advantage of the fact that many price takers/opinion bettors don't quite know what they are doing.

Some will bet into a 1.99-2.0 market because they want a bet, others will see that this resembles what they expect to see (especially having been conditioned over time to the apparent good price), others will have a standard pricing model to which they work helping them to decide whether or not to bet. Others still will be off at a tangent and be working to their own take on pricing. The size of each group would decrease of course.

What the price/opinion taker is able to do is pass on an event where the odds on offer are not what they should be. Realistically, however, not many are able to reach these conclusions.

The inability of the punter to understand the dynamics at play in sports plays into the hands of the market makers. This doesn't concern me at all, in fact I welcome it. The playing field is transparent for those who can see.

& one final point. You sometimes see references by people claiming to be getting the odds on sports they know nothing about etc, effectively taking the p!ss out of the people who have matched their bet. Occasionally everyone needs a little reminder with a losing bet not to get too carried away.

This isn't directed at anyone here particularly, I know most on this thread know the time of day. But you do see some nonsense on the forums.

DaveEdwards, have you finished making all of your final points yet?

Where did I say he would be matching another (price sensitive) gambler?

TurtlesBrain, where did I say it?



They only take money out of the pot if they win, which most don't. The myth that trading is a p1ss easy way of printing money is just that; a myth. The overwhelming bulk of traders are doomed to failure as are almost all gamblers, if you buy into the idea that it's just a matter of watching the weight of money for a simple  click and win then I'm afraid I must disabuse you.

Aye, as said earlier, why do losing traders stick at it? Many gamblers do it for the excitement and the odd winner will give them that but it's hard to see how the odd price going the right way and securing the price of a toblerone would keep a losing trader trading. Additionally, a gambler's activities won't necessitate sitting at a computer all day. The winning traders will obviously be using much higher stakes so overall I'd say traders certainly take out of the pot. Regardless of how difficult it is, the ones I'm talking about are reliant on the queue info supplied by betfair.



know you're referring to a particular subset of traders, but their leeching leads to a better deal for the guy on the other side of your bet. Your bet doesn't get matched, because someone else is offering a better deal.

Who says this is about MY bet Investor. You've already accepted that the gamblers on either end of the traders trades would be matched with each other so one of them is getting a worse price because of the trader's presence.