I have often wondered about this scenario, BF always has the best odds in the markets that interest me probably all markets? certainly better than sportsbet sportingbet UNITAB centrebet here in Oz etc

So if your a bookmaker of XYZ and offer your market 6-1 about a chance yet that same chance is 8-1 on BF, why wouldn't the bookie take the bet and lay it off on BF for a 2 unit margin??

Say he's holding $1000 on the 6-1 pop with a liabillity of 6K, he lays off on BF at 8-1 with a profit of 8K, pays his 6K liabillty and pockets the 2K as profit??

if I were a bookmaker that is how I would operate can't lose especially in th emarkets with high liquidy??

Is this the person BF is trying to get rid of????

mrcelebrity

I have a couple of easy solutions for you predicament. I will display my figures in english pounds father than aussie dollares.

Solution 1

Rent the accounts of serial losers on betfair for the fee that you would normally pay to betfair under the original premium charge scheme that you were resigned to pay anyway. This could be done on a weekly basis until their accounts gets to a stage whereby they move into profit and qualify for the premium charge. I'm sure serial losers will be queuing up to rent their accounts for an income of £3k a week or £150k a year.

This may involve you moving your location of where you log into betfair so they can't link the mrcelebrity account to the losers accounts each time you turn an account into profit. But the cost of renting a new facility is a small price to pay with the sums involved.

Solution 2

Rent your system to serial losers. again with the sums involved you can sit back and achieve a healthy income without having to lift a finger. Depending on the system your income could be potentially higher than it currently is if you balance the number of people you rent your system to.

theinvestor2 you wont see any difference.  losers will still lose and winners will still win.  prices on betfair wont change from what they are.  many of the 60%ers are small players who have been on befair since its early days making about £8 per race; its not going to make any difference to losing clients if the 60%ers leave.

Can't Betfair recognise betting patterns?

I have no idea how much work they put into linking accounts but I can only imagine it'll have gone up with this new charge

I won't be incurring in these super-charges still for a while but the news are definitely worrying...

@paulme - do you really not believe it is possible to win £100 on horses on any day regularly? Just to let you know, in one year I've made a bot from scratch that (at the current stage of development) makes me an average about £250 a day on horses, and I'm looking to make it better. I think that rather than doubting everyone you should take some inspiration: these things are possible.

@mrcelebrity - I agree that since you are putting in a lot of effort (10-12 hours a day), seeing a massive chunk of your profits being taken away for no apparent reason is quite annoying. Maybe you should consider automating your strategy so that you don't need to be in front of a pc all the time. In this case, let me know if I can help - maybe we can work something out that is convenient for the both of us. I'm always looking for smart partners.

Big Loser

I don't agree with these charges but they do make economical sense from Betfair's point of view.
Let's say we are two evenly matched punters: sometimes you win, sometimes I win. BF makes 5% profit every time we "exchange" money between us, so BF is slowly but steadily taking money out of the system.

If instead you are a much better punter than me, you win more often than I do and in the long run you will be accumulating money and taking it out of the system. Once this money is taken out and is not exchanged any more, BF lose their little steady profit. Hence they want a piece of it BEFORE you take it out, and they are estimating that in order for the trick to be fair you need to pay 12 times more commission (60% rather than 5%), which effectively means that they would have wanted that money to go be exchanged between me and you 12 more times. Since it is NOT going to be exchanged, their only way to get what they think they deserve is by applying this seemingly criminal charge...

In my opinion, this simply means that when they first came up with the whole BF exchange idea, they had miscalculated the average number of times that the money is likely to go around before it is accumulated by some people. Or, to state it another way, they had not realised that some punters (or traders) could actually be really good at this.

If by economical sense you mean greed than I agree with you... also a need to stop the share price bombing completely and help bolster figures in a year where there is no major summer football competition to inflate the figures for them...

Christ paul, how many times have you asked that question now?

The fact that Betfair have introduced this charge is proof that people can easily earn that in a day. End of conversation. That's all the proof you need.

@paulme - do you really not believe it is possible to win £100 on horses on any day regularly? Just to let you know, in one year I've made a bot from scratch that (at the current stage of development) makes me an average about £250 a day on horses, and I'm looking to make it better. I think that rather than doubting everyone you should take some inspiration: these things are possible.

that's all very nice but pass my challenge and do it without aftertiming. should be easy for you Oprah,

480 divided by a small number is hard to guess, but it's "a lot" more than 480.

erm... really?

How can you make 500AUD on every Aussie race?

Seems like mrcelebrity and his alias KC are out to spam the world. Yes sell your mystery system.

go to imageshack and post a screenshot of your last 3 months P and L or stop time wasting ydfs spamming c.

I should too what? Spam the forum. OKAY. Send me £25,000 paulme and I will sell you my SUPERSYTEM. Double the price and I will sell you my SUPERDUPERSYSTEM.

I have no interest in selling a system of any kind. I'm not gonna post in this thread as I'm looking to chat about the premium charge and not anything else

http://img825.imageshack.us/img825/7906/threemonths.jpg

I wish people would stop throwing around the word 'greedy' so flippantly and emotively in this conversation.  The fact is everybody is, to a greater or lesser extent, greedy.

Betfair are greedy in that they want to increase their already large profits by imposing an increased tax on their highest winners.

The big winners are greedy in that they want to keep all of their extortionate levels of personal income and not give any more than necessary back to betfair.

Even the small winners and losers who are pleased with the premium tax are greedy in that they sense that the PC will drive some of the bigger players out of the market and allow them to increase their own profits.

So really all you have is a bunch of people out there on all sides of the fence looking after their own interests, crying 'unfair' and trying to bring people round to their point of view with emotive arguments.  But the fact is, there is nothing inherently 'fair' or 'unfair' about the PC.  The big traders affected can make the choice to either carry on using Betfair or quit.  If they choose the former then they are admitting that even with the new charges, Betfair is still a worthwhile enterprise for them, hence proving Betfair's point for them.  If they decide to quit then either Betfair will suffer as a result (probably forcing them to rescind their charges) or they won't, showing them they are right to tax heavily the players who do nothing positive for the site, just remove money from it.  Betfair on the other hand have to balance generating increased profits with pissing off too many players or they'll lose their dominant market position.

Everyone is just playing the game, doing them best for themselves and their families.  Sometimes the rules change and you can either adapt or quit.

If you want credibility, you should have done your maths better mrcelebrity.
You are talking about 30k a week profit on Australian markets, NEVER laying.  So your strike rate is over 90-95% winning markets, by ONLY BACKING, on markets with liquidity during the week of 50k a market.
The only way this is possible, is by either having green across the board, or knowing which horse will win beforehand.

What should you do now?  Become a comedian.

Exactly

The reason it was so successful is because of exchange concept and person to person betting. Now it thinks it can do whatever it can and still successful. Now it is creating a gap in the market by changing its strategy and new companies will certainly grab this opportunity.

You have to realise, as should everyone, that Betfair are simply bookmakers who have found a different way to take money off punters, which in the early days enabled them to boast that unlike bookmakers winners on Betfair were welcome no matter how much they won, then when they found that punters winning too much does affect them they reverted to "bookmaker" type but instead of banning as bookmakers would, because of their different way of taking money off punters they are simply able to increase their commission.

Much has been said about the Premium Charge since it was introduced but no one has challenged it in court:- the likely gronds would seem to be abusing their domminant market position, because no other betting exchange does this or could do it. If you make the profits that you say surely you could afford to look at this, or at least get Councel's Opinion? and Councel might see other grounds.

harechaser6 14 Jul 11 18:19 
i think that currently betfair is feeling the pinch on the stock market and this new asset stripping operation on all betfair high rollers co-incides with a recent announcement that they are putting some of there profits back into the stock market to bouy up the price, after all now they are floating they have too swim or sink!

a recent upsurge in there stock market value comes as no surprise


Er... exactly what recent upsurge are you blathering on about. They're trading at their lowest week ending level ever (yet again).

Have a look at their stock chart, you won't see a gradient decline of that magnitude even on a double black diamond downhill ski slope ffs.