aye robot you're obviously very shrewd if you gave yourself no chance of ever failing at this when you started, i would even say you're "one in a million", but i'm affraid that is the exception to the rule

Of course people will start losing and for what i know they should be glad for that, not the other way around, why?, because if you start winning you'll soon think you have the midas touch and you increase the stakes and your risk and when the inevitable comes you'll have no mental structure to cope with the downturn and it is at that fase that the big problems start to happen

It takes a lot of time of fine tunning your strategies, mental structure and attitude towards all the aspects of gambling to make it pay, its not a matter of if you have it or not, its a matter of if you're willing to give it all, to go against some of your basic instincts, in other words are you willing to change in order to adapt?

You need this first then you can start to increase your bank, its a hard to road but if have to right attitude you'll eventually get there

The early losses you have to think of them as tuition fees

[;)]

Could somebody explain to me how the cross matching actually or potentially adversely affects my betting, which is purely positional, all executed well before the off and at my basic choice of prices.
Maybe it does, but I'm not seeing any impact at all on my profitability.
Is it really only an IR concern thus ?
I want, no I need , to be angry about all this, just like Aye Robot and the Mgt.

No maybe they have a vaid point on this, particularly on the IR side.
I would really like to know exactly if and how it impacts all and sundry though.
And it's about time I got angry about something BF related.
I'm feeling left out in all these tirades about how unfiar it is of BF to have come along as an alternative to the greedy, one-way bookies, and let us all have a fair chance of winning and not be banned. That's all.

That I do agree with.
Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth. Amazing really when you think about it.
Of course BF is not perfect. Both you and I and many others have never claimed that.
But to insinuate, as the Mgt. does over and over again, that BF has a deliberate corporate policy to bleed their customers dry at every opportunity they get, is just plain ridiculous.

The Management - my bank is currently 0. i am not on this level of know-how about gambling. to be honest, the last page or so is a foriegn language. at least i admit that.

In fairness Jimmy, most people on here only see things from their own perspective hence their own agenda.  Its horses for course and I think  Aye Robot thinks that what affects him affects others.  As frames has alluded to this is not necessarily the case. More then one way to skin a cat, and I personally have no problem with Betfair

aye robot - correct me if I'm wrong but it sounds as though you've been successful in the past from taking advantage of rapid price movements that have over-reacted during in-running contests and have managed to do so via your bots before the market has had time to adjust.

E.g if Price A shortens by x% then price B will lengthen by x% etc so get in before anyone notices.

If I'm more or less in the right ball park, surely you must have known that Betfair would clamp down on people like yourself at some point and end up taking the share for themselves?

This post isn't meant to be a dig, it just appears that your edge has been based on being technically more efficient than those running the site.

[smiley:crazy]this conversation (on my thread) is a totall mystery to 99% of the british population. what happened to traditional straight betting on whether something will win lose or draw.

it's my thread, i want him here

Bottom line the Mgt. is that what I do, and hopefully you also I think, on here from a money making perspective would get me banned permanently from all other traditional bookies in the world.
So I am eternally grateful for the founders of BF coming up with and developing their tremendous alternative to my having nothing to show from my successful gambling skills.
Btw I'm still hoping to learn why cross matching is detrimental to my financial health.

and what is it you DO frog man?

I gamble manually in the old fashioned way on the result of whatever sporting event I'm looking at, before the event starts and never during it.
Revealing eh ?

And I'm not that old either.

..bugger...that's 4 more than me

and what have you done instead for 25 years?

You'll never catch me then Jimmy.

Yeah but you've given it back to them the next day and more.
They love your type.

Nope.
Never claimed a benefit of any type any where any time.

Now you're talking.

Right, I've been out enjoying myself and now I'm a little bit drunk but hopefully not too drunk to answer some of the questions on this thread. So here goes:

Investor, I took a holiday over the last couple of months... I kept betting whilst I was away but didn't post much, now I'm back in the thick of it though, fighting the bad fight.
I think you're completely right that most people don't notice the x-matcher because it only negatively impacts winners and they are a small group. The x-matcher is not like PC, you don't see a big chunk of money disappear every wednesday, instead it gets you bit by bit- a slightly worse price here, an unmatched bet there, but it all adds up to much, much more.

Marky Sparky,you're right that I make money by looking for over reactions in fast moving markets (that's no secret) although you're not right about the detail. That puts me right in the firing line for the X-matcher as it's job is to prevent the market from over-reacting and thereby showing value. This effects me more markedly than most, but it still effects everyone whether they realise it or not because it means that fewer value prices are available. The effect of the x-matcher is always to move prices closer to true value and that's bad for all winning players (but good for losing ones). Again - whether they know, understand or can quantify this is neither here nor there, it gets you whether you realise it or not. Even if you're winning, you're still not winning as much as you would be without it. Although it effects different players to different degrees it does effect all players who play in x-matched markets, even pre-off position takers don't get quite the price they would have done without it, the difference may seem extremely small but it adds up.

On complaining about Betfair - although I'm not delighted about the x-matcher I can well understand why they've done it, it must be making them an absolute killing and if I was them I would have done it ages ago. I don't like it, but it's fair enough. I've always been a defender of Betfair and I still am, but at a rough guess I'd say the x-matcher has cost me 40k of lost winning so far so you can understand why I'm not too chuffed about that.

On a related note - has anyone else noticed a marked decrease in PC winging threads since the introduction of the x-matcher? Personally I haven't paid a penny of PC since it came in and I have a feeling I'm not alone. For me this confirms what I've always said - the only thing worse than paying PC is NOT paying PC.