Feck you really are a tiresome old fool.

If all else fails resort to abuse.

Information is either in the public domain or it isn't. If it is non public information then you cannot use it to benefit from. A closed board meeting with one member of the public would not mean that the info was in the public domain. If the minutes of the meeting were published then as soon as publication is available to the wider masses then it is in the public domain.

I didn't say it was a closed board meeting, in fact quite the opposite. I'll try and put it in terms that a slow like yourself might be able to fathom. A racecourse has a capacity crowd of 100. 90 of the crowd will be staff. Is the information in the public domain? If it is keep adding 1 to the number of staff and tell me at what point it's no longer in the public domain. If you say it isn't in the public domain then play about with the capacity, number of staff, number of non-staff and pictures delay until you consider it is in the public domain.


I'm sorry but you really are clueless and because you can't see this you just keep spouting ridiculous rhetoric. It's like sitting next to the pub bore.

If all else fails resort to abuse.

At what? Getting Banks to actually answer a question?

Good morning all you fine people.  Blue whales: very therapeutic.

Feck by your reckoning nothing is ever in the public domain umless every single person has the information. Is a plc report in the public domain if it is published online despite there being people without access to the internet?

Yor arguments appear to have been constructed by a child.

Have you asked Gibraltar what their view is or did you not like their answer either?  At what point do you accept that there is a possibility that everyone else is right and you are wrong?

I see a close analogy between the laying of fallers and betting on voting markets based on definitive inside information.

In both cases, one party is taking a bet that is 'sure to win'. The only reason any legitimate betting market has not been voided is that too little time has elapsed in which to stop offering it.

A sentimental public outcry meant that bf now void stakes on SP markets where horses have died and cannot win a future race. I can't see the difference in principle (certain winning bets, asymmetrical information) between this and fallers. The only diff. seems to me that one practice is publicly unacceptable to sporting bettors and the other acceptable to the kind of people who want to turn a penny IR.

fwiw I think people are crazy to bet in those live unmanaged markets where they are at a significant disadvantage, but the rules do highlight the delay and if they still want to bet that's their choice.  The fact that they are still ignorant of either the delay or their chances of winning against those odds is their issue.

As for whether voiding faller bets is poss., bets are timestamped and a precise time can be assigned for any fall.

I do think if you ban automated software you reduce the time advantage options of the ir fast pic merchant who also has automated software in his armoury.

Innocent parties laying the faller unknowingly wdn't have won--but equally they wdn't lose. The presumption wd be that bets struck in these circs are just bad luc****il there's enough of them to make bf suppose that someone has an 'on-course strategy'. It wd be useless anyway, unless the player started betting more on genuine chances based on judgement.

Let's take a case where the Virgin employees were not working for a company counting all bets ... they only had access to the entirely of the bets submitted on an event by one of many telephone providers. Let's assume that they knew about an estimated 25% of the votes and were extrapolating that this 25% were representative to a degree that made their bets good value.

Wd you void these bets? My inclination wd be 'no', as in principle the bettors wd be doing no different than other winning players--extending their information into a judgment likely to make them money.

'Materially significant' changes shd not affect whether bets are 'unfair'; unfairness shd be a matter of whether something is absolutely impossible.

Eh?

The fact that they submitted these wagers at such an inopportune moment would not be taken to support any inference that they were accepting money on an impossibility...

There is 'impossible' meaning 'extraordinarily unlikely' and 'impossible' meaning impossible on the rules, and I wd void in the case of the second.

Bookmakers anyway void in a wide variety of circs. to keep custom e.g. the recent Wolves (?) race where there was a pile-up, so if we are thinking about the commercial hit to a bookmaker of the rule, we shd be agreed that it wd be minimal.

On the wider 'where would you draw the line' question, I have said surely more times than anyone else needs to hear what principle my argument wd make operative. 'If a bet can't win, it hasn't been struck'. Void these bets. Bets which have been struck in circs when something has happened unbeknownst to the bettor wh/ materially affect the outcome shd not make the bet legally 'unfair'.

I also disagree w/ you re the law. Here, my reading is that the Gambling Act prohibits bets that are unfair--tho' no working description of this has as yet been generated by the Courts. Judgments of unfairness are deferred to judges, who will make reference to Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts legislation. Part of the reason for the absence of case law is that the major books have an interest in preventing any disputes coming to be heard by a County or court of higher instance. If you brought a case before a magistrate arguing that a bet which could not win at the time it was struck was ‘unfair’, I am sure (in the absence of categorical legal certainty) you wd get a v. sympathetic hearing.

They do that because it is in the t's and c's of a managed market.

It would be virtually impossible in an unmanged market. You could also argue that their stance in the scenario you describe above is a bit arbitary too. If you voided on fallers why not on horses that nearly fall and then have no chance?

The whole idea of managed markets is to improve liquidity. If you tried to do a similar thing with horse racing it would have the opposite effect as the decision making regarding voiding would be so subjective that people would have no confidence in the market and their positions due to the dangers of retrospective voiding.

Again you need to consider the principle that it is not degrees of advantage that is the issue. Either all IR bets are inherently unfair or none of them are (ignoring genuine inside info for the purposes of the example). From a legal standpoint there is no middle ground.

The only way bf's terms for an unmanaged market are as they are is b/c the balance of opinion (by betting volume) on football matches is against being able to lay imposs. outcomes and the balance of opinion on horses presumably in favour.

Not sure I agree. Any managed market is going to get greater liquidity as it offeres customer protection. Some sports such as football lend themselves well to being managed, others such as racing don't.

I do not see what is subjective about the time a horse falls any more than when a goal is scored. Yr point about managing markets to improve liquidity is pragmatically correct but I don't see how it speaks to the principle that an unfair bet shd be allowed to stand.


The difference is that unless you have a inbuilt bet acceptance delay and then accept that you are effectively suspending before the fall as happens with football (albeit only fractionally) it is impossible. The problem then is that with racing all this would have to happen retrospectively unlike football.

Would you continue to trade a football match if the market was unmanaged and you had various bets taken when a goal was scored but knew that some may be voided at the end of 90 mins? The same would happen with IR horse racing. You would end up sweating on which bets were going to be voided. What if a horse is trading at 2.0 and you put a lay at 2.02 which is taken just as it falls? You would have no way of knowing if the bet was taken "fairly" due to market fluctuations or "unfairly" due to the fall.


Let's say that I know that a horse has schooled notably better. Why wd i wait for him to do it in public--I wd get on before the event!

If it is in the public domain albeit not everyone knows then good luck to you. If it is inside info then the bet would be questionable.

Banks, on the broad issue, then, I think that laying impossible outcomes shd be imposs. and you don't. I see an absolute distinction between impossible outcomes (wh/ shd not be the subject of betting) and merely very remote outcomes, and you don't.

On more particular points, are you not contradicting y/s on managed markets? First, you say the management of horse markets wd discourage players (because of the risk of the unpredictable voiding of bets), then that the management of a market conduces to greater player participation (liquidity), because people don't want to leave up bets that are hoovered. If this is true of football, why is it not true of racing?

On the issue of calculating liabilities in the event of its being unclear whether a bet has been taken or not, I do not see it being the big deal you suggest. Either you have got lucky (laid a horse just prior to falling) or your position is the same as before. This is because the only market in doubt is the faller sub-market; since all other outcomes are absolutely possible in my terms (tho' almost all much more likely), they are not affected by the fall incident.

Imv Clydebank makes more of a point against voiding fallers in saying that bettors might want to free up capital by getting matched at 1000. However, so long as any voiding was post-race, they cd do this anyway and dip into their 'winnings' before the race in question was settled. These people wd in effect be in a better position w/ voiding fallers since they wd be refunded the 'transaction charge' of the tiny back bet at 1000.

As the final, really hair-splitting point about whether a horse schooling is in the public domain or not (how high was the hedge around the field? was the trainer's cousin's wife present?), I think this makes feck's earlier point that there can be no categorical definition of 'inside' or 'the public domain'. In practice, of course, huge numbers of people bet on what they think is inside info.

Instead of trying to outlaw it, we shd have a hard-and-fast rule about impossible outcomes.

What if you have laid it just as it was falling and don't know whether it was matched? You may use the freed up funds to trade further and then find that your profitable bet is voided.

But you know that you won't lose money--you've either won in much shorter order than you've been expecting (and will be paid out on settlement) or just tied up some of yr cash. Should you use freed-up funds (perhaps b/c you have positions on other runners), you will just owe bf a small debit.


I'm more old-fashioned than you--I don't see what's wrong in taking positions based on a perception of value throughout a race. This is independent of any reference to your market position or need to green up. Why shd a bettor need to know his prospective p&l before firing in bets in every instance? It wd make a lot of laying strategies cripplingly slow.

Anyway, the number of cases where it's possible to bet w/ freed-up funds after a faller (that will later be clawed back after voiding) but not poss. otherwise must be very small. How many IT traders are there w/ so small a float?

I have said that I'm not sure that the law allows you to bet when you are sure to lose. The issue of a bet's fairness is left to a judge.

As for the impossibility of a definition of 'impossible', this is much more angels dancing on a pinhead stuff than my claim that it is impossible to draw a line around the 'public sphere'. Imv the prob. w/ yr line about voiding fallers is that you are thinking like a bookmaker--looking for a reason to void when your judgment has been off, not when the bet you have offered has been categorically unfair.

I have said that I'm not sure that the law allows you to bet when you are sure to lose.

Section 9 of the gambling act allows this.

In all honesty there isnt much difference between laying a faller and backing a darts player to win the match having watched him go 7-5 up in a first to 8 match live whilst those watching on tv still think he needs 170 to check out.  Trying to make an example of people laying fallers is the thin edge of the wood.

I don't disagree with that Clydebank. It's the GC (set up to supposedly ensure fairness in betting) abandoning the written in stone principle (can't lose can't win) to accomodate betfair I'm going on about.

My opening post on this thread was this

"While I welcome this, it's a bit of a joke when you consider betfair originally claimed it was fair to allow betting right up to the announcement of the result until DJ reported them to the sc.um-of-the-world (insiders were cleaning up at the time).  The GC's stance is also funny given they think laying fallers is just like two people betting down the pub on who won the 1980 cup final. You get the impression they'll say anything betfair wants them to in exchange for a bit of 'wining and dining'."

All I'm saying is, I'm not going to get bowled over because a prile of defrauding clowns used their own names and got caught doing something that's probably rife. Nor am I going to give betfair and the GC any respect for uncovering something they so blatantly don't particularly care about. Betfair I'd let off if they at least tried to inform punters of the disadvantages they were up against but their insurance type small print warning ("Transmissions described as “live” by some broadcasters may actually be delayed") suggests they don't really want the idiots to know the truth.

Banks: Section 9 of the gambling act allows this.

Doesn't this depend on a reading of 'may'?--as either 'is questionable as a valid bet' or 'can legitimately be counted as a valid bet'? Why is there no case law testing a definition of fairness in the matter of bets that are sure to lose? I'd guess it's because books have settled on an exceptional basis.

Anyway, I can see why you think as you do on the law. I can also see the opportunities for market manipulation (and moreover winning from the house overround skimmer) if there was a rule that all bets on fallen horses wd be voided.

As for the inconsistent voiding of losing bets, IBAS (hardly known as punters' friends) have stepped in to stop this and award a 'goodwill' refund on at least two occasions I know of.

Maybe I'll read the law more closely and get back if I am confident in an interpretation that differs from yours.