the pc payers do not dispute that bf are entitled to a cut for providing a platform/service

This must be a recent development askari

Feck, they are all saying things like 'at 20% it was tolerable and even an incentive to churn money' but 'at 40% it is inequitable, bf have gone too far, where is the incentive to bet etc.?'

Some of them cannot go elsewhere and are trying it on, like someone haggling at the only market selling whatever they want to buy.

Rs1, they had a bet matching mechanism that could be construed as doing something like this, but were told by regulators to revise its operation to offer bettors something closer to best execution.

Sorry if this sounds stupid , but in the t&c's of the PC

- Bet in more than 1,000 markets

In what time period is this , weekly , monthly or from the start of your account to the present date?

thanks , that means more or less everyone will meet that criteria

how is it possible to find/work out if your commission generated is less than 40% of lifetime gross profits ?

Askari
Seemingly many of them on here don't think that BF is entitled to get any of their money.
Quite how that would work as a business model, I'm not too sure.

*of

Mr Anderson, I think they are a bookmaker.

My strategy depends on them being a worse price than the High St and this is a strategy that turns over a conservative 5 million a year.

They are happy for all these pc-paying winners to go and well shd they be. Of course many aren't going anywhere b/c their strategy depends on the liquidity of price-invariant punters on here.

Someone else will surely offer the same odds.

askari, I think you would be shocked how small a number of people provide a huge amount of liquidity. At the forum christmas party last year on my table alone you could account for 30% of all money matched in the place market. It is the case that mugs have a strong tendency to back rather than lay. If you remove the pros there will be a large imbalance between backing and laying. Now people will step in and start laying because they will see an opportunity, but liquidity would crash for a considerable length of time and in the end you would still have a new set of pros. You just cannot remove them. The nature of the exchange means its inevitable there will always be big winners.

pumpkinslayer, I understand (or can guess at) how few players there are in size on the lay side, but bf wd surely have done a check on the percentage of charges they pay in relation to profits and set the new pc at a rate that ensures some degree of liquidity for their markets.

The full-bookers i.e. people wanting minimal variance of results and consistent wins who have got over 250k may be genuine losses for bf--but the thinking here is that either they will adopt more up-and-down strategies from race to race, putting their edge to use some other way, or a new class of layers will rise up to replace them.

Or alternatively the exchange will slice and dice backs into lays of opposing runners, poss. on the enhanced sportsbook it will be offering.

As some indication of how few big players there are full stop, I saw that just after most of Glorious Goodwood I was in the top hundred of people collecting points on some half-arsed challenge to win a picnic hamper or a shinbone of Paul Nicholls's most disappointing horse. The top hundred! And I am a recreational player who doesn't bet most days and am almost never below 3.6%!

The suggestion to me is that there are only a handful (between 10 and 20) people who offer liquidity day in, day out on the horse markets (and of those, only three to four offering bets across the board) and that, further, bf wd be fools not to have canvassed those people's opinions carefully on the level of charges they can take in order to remain in the game.

I said nothing about there being or not being big winners or about any tendency for money to move from incontinent gamblers to careful, controlled players w/ a proven strategy.

The remarks in the the thread title are illogical as how can 0.01% of customers affected by the pc2
be classed as the traditional punter? whats traditional about using a fairly new platform with current
liquidity and fairness available to constantly make a large profit via auto-trading, complex prediction
betting or laying off considerable sums by bookies, if traditional is used in terms of average puter
than he/she will be unaffected!

if were all honest theres nothing wrong with the concept that a fair exchange will encourage winning and certainly go against the grain of traditional betting companies that refuse such people
but what do you do as a company when quite a large group make so much money beating all the other players and not giving betfair a chance to make repeated small commission charges from the placing of bets when huge chunks(millions) is withdrawn from the betting account pool.

Do you think the top bettors using advanced software or bookies laying off strong fancied winners
deserve to be supported forever at the expensive of all other customers and betfair, well done betfair for making what is in my view a correct adjustment to the charges of this group, I wouldnt have any problem paying my pc2 if I were as lucky and as lucrative as these information gurus that make a big living out of betfair!

bf_fantastic, a lot of the pros with pass on a decent chunk of the charge to average joes. You will be paying the premium charge too without ever knowing it. But you will be paying, so don't be so quick to think it's good for the majority.

I agree, it is. And I doubt they care if I pay the charge or generate enough commission to cover it. But there are people who are defending it who don't realise that it is bad for everyone.

I didn't honestly realize that Viva.
So what spin have they actually used to justify PC2 ?.
A money grab ?
No spin at all ?

You mean they haven't ever mentioned at all that these players are one way draining the pool of betting funds too quickly ?
I thought they had said something like this ?

no, their line is that PC1 addressed the issue of winners costing more than they paid in commission. PC2 is to make them profitable rather than breakeven.

if I can find it I'll cut and paste the quote.

Yes, they say that, it doesn't mean it's true.

actually, I'd say some of you cost them money and some of you make them money.

courtsiders and trap betters cost them money; market-makers and anyone pushing books towards 100% make them money.

this is why the terms in which they've couched the debate are meaningless. you can't judge the impact of a player on the bottom line just by their profitability.

pps suggesting top earners would leave a top exchange to not pay a charge and go into the desert looking for another lake to bathe in is like saying the Olympic shooting finalists at next years London Olympics are all going to shoot themselves in the foot after they receive there medals!

But Viva if any player is making consistently high earnings and paying very low charges relative to GP ( say less than 10%), wouldn't it be fair to say that it would be hard to see how BF are making any real money out of them and, furthermore, hard to imagine how they are good for the growth of the exchange.
They're just too skillfull for their own good, assuming they're not "cheaters ".
Unfortunate perhaps, but the majority rules as always ?