It seems they were serious.

LOL

No Jim Bowen for betfair SP

Greenwood (or whoever writes the article for him) is a complete mug for selecting something in the 1st Try Odds market sliced up into periods of 10 mins.

A genuine side market in a small betting sport that attracts feck all money.  Current book well over 200% and he is recommending a 5/4.  You couldn't make it up.......or maybe that is the whole point.

How much do we pay this goons?

Jim Bowen would be good. When the site crashes he could pop up and say

"Lets have a look at what you would've won...."

comingupthehill     16 Jul 11 06:27 

great news ,betfair have signed up jim bowen as their face of multoiplies,kile andy gray ,micheal vaughan,- jim will be the main guy and will be promoting the benefits of this great value bet.

why jim bowen


betfair spokesman - jim was poular in the 1970s/80s,and all our older customers remember him well,its also the time of micheal dickenson - where regulary every saturday ,silver buck,bregawn and wayward lad would win - but the starting price was - NO SP returned,as they were that big a cert.

as customers known ,betfair will and can trade out any risks/liabilties they have in the multiplies - so if you ve got 4 out of 5 - expect the betfair SP to be - 0.0 or no sp returned,

jim as knidly offered to phone up any multiple winners and when they see the industry sp 10/1 ,yet betfairs 0.0 - then jim will brighten up their day when he will utter is classic line .

:LETS SEE WHAT YOU WOULD OF WON.

LOL - BF making themselves look very silly - wasting on money on these guys and doing nothing to address that site is becoming less competitive by the day.

maybe they got the wrong jim.

"dear jim - please could you fix it for me to add australian events to my markets?"

:LETS SEE WHAT YOU WOULD OF WON.

It would have been £1000, but is only £400 thanks to the Premium Charge.

you've still got BFH

I thought the famous names making picks to help people lose more slowly was some sort of joke on the annual reports.

Lori, can you post where it says that. I'd like to have a look at the exact wording. I can't believe that the reason for doing this is to 'help people lose more slowly'.

.
http://corporate.betfair.com/investor-relations/~/media/Files/B/Betfair/pdf/fy11_analyst_presentation.pdf

Page 35/66

Keep money in ecosystem for longer
Make losing customers “better bettors”
Increase number of trades
More commission for Betfair

With arrow pointing to:

Customer Education
•More statistics
•More analytics
•More tips/pundits

http://corporate.betfair.com/investor-relations/~/media/Files/B/Betfair/pdf/fy11_analyst_presentation.pdf

SPORTS: IMPROVING MONETISATION

Two actions to improve monetisation of activity
– Ensure winning customers pay appropriately
– Keep money in ecosystem for longer

1. Make losing customers “better bettors”
2. Increase number of trades
3. More commission for Betfair

Customer Education
• More statistics
• More analytics
• More tips/pundits

freaky

Keep money in ecosystem for longer

Stop course-siding.
Stop court-siding.

Weird how often that happens Brendan, nobody replies for hours then two people reply at the same time.

the black swan of forum postings

PC2 was the black swan of betting.  I don't believe that any person with a reasonable understanding of the betting world could foresee a 60% tax on winnings.

There are thousands and thousands of users on here who have been paying over 100% tax on winnings since day 1.

Thanks Lori and Brendan.

I guess all the 'money makers' on here agree that tips/pundits will do absolutely nothing to help leisure punters lose  at a slower rate?

A more pragmatic approach would be to get customers to make optimal use of the exchange: educate people about delays and hoovering so they can avoid it, make sure they understand backing and laying and the risks involved with betting in an illiquid market with a huge overround.

Many leisure punters won't even care that much, but for those that are somewhat price sensitive it would help.

Maybe even explain the imperfect negative correlation between inverse odds [;)]

Some key points:

Statistics / analytics are completely useless for people who don't know what they're doing. Access to this won't magically make a losing punter smarter. I expect the effect to be zero. Providing these stats has been shown to increase the number of bets placed, but it certainly won't increase the 'cleverness' of the people acting on this information.

Tips/ pundits: Someone who is an expert in a sport has very little chance of actually being able to bet profitably on that sport, it's a completely unrelated skill.

I guess all the 'money makers' on here agree that tips/pundits will do absolutely nothing to help leisure punters lose  at a slower rate?

1.01 that it helps them lose at a faster rate.

how do you educate someone to avoid being hoovered?

When bf say they wan't customers to lose at a slower rate  I guess they mean they want them to lose less per £1 bet. So if they bet £100 a month and lose £6 and then go to betting £200 a month and losing £10, they'd actually be losing at a slower rate.

Looking at it like that do you think they will lose at a faster rate? I don't think so, but if you do I'd like to know why.

I think it'll be fractional but if there's weight of numbers on one side of a market, (which will almost certainly be the soft side to begin with) they'll move the odds enough to collectively take a worse price.

.
http://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/view/204889/Sporting-heroes-are-a-safe-bet-in-new-TV-ad/

also, lori, who's on the other side of the bets they recommend?

if it's a loser, then pointing people in the direction of their bargain prices will hasten the process of them losing.

if (more likely) it's a winner, the price is probably below true value.

who in their right mind would take Lee Dixons opinion about whats value in a single football match[smiley:crazy] Never mind thinking he is consistantly getting value across matches

Its pure nonsense, should be ashamed of themselves for being so rediculous

I get the impression the sporting geniuses will herd the mugs into the PC payers open arms.

Maybe the underlying idea is to steer the punters to liquid markets so all they lose is the commission+the spread.

They'll lose less than betting on something with say a 2.00-2.20 spread.

The last 3 paragraphs of that Star article:

Betfair’s Andy Lulham said: “Vaughan, Greenwood, Dixon and Nicholls are some of the most respected names in world sport, so it is really fantastic to welcome them to Betfair.


“Our customers are set to benefit from their valuable insight and experience over the coming months.”


Betfair was set up in 2009 and is said to have more than three million customers.

Didn't the rugby guy pick something that had 7k matched on the entire market or something?

You know if only more people spoke more sense more often like you Investor, then perhaps the likes of me would not feel the uncontrollable urge periodically to ridicule them so often.
So though I am going to try to post less from now on ( not doing too well thus far), I will remain a reader in the vain hope that things will get more balanced on here.
I will therefore perhaps from now on, just to acknowledge my reading presence if nothing else, occasionally just post up the acronym HACT.
I would not expect anybody to be able to translate that, as it is really just a private in-joke.
But it sums up my advice to the many small and petty minded personalities on here, too many in fact.

as their sportsbook's going to be expanding into the less liquid markets, it wouldn't be a shock to see punters being pointed in that direction lori.

That would make more sense viva, although out of line with their mission statement.

your reading to much into it imo. More likely someone in betfair towers is an Arsenal fan and wants a weekly chat about football with Dixon.

its rudderless, chaotic and makes no sense

Thanks FAFH.

Lori, I didn't actually look at the tips, I just assumed that would be the case. It's not really clear what Betfair are trying to accomplish these days.

http://betting.betfair.com/football/lee-dixon-q-and-a-030811.html

Lee Dixon Q and A

How did your interest in the restaurant business come about?

A friend of mine introduced me to super Chef and life-long Arsenal fan Heston Blumenthal and that kicked it all off.

I mean wtf! [smiley:crazy]

"...then after I'd spent two days on a drip spewing my ring he asked me if I fancied investing"

.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/osm/story/0,,1448085,00.html

So you wanted to use your money well?

Even when I was playing, I enjoyed going to fine restaurants and eating out. I love food and I love wine. I first became involved in a chain of Indian restaurants, in the Midlands, called Shimla Pink. They had one, then two, and then a friend of mine asked if I wanted to become involved as a shareholder. But it was disastrous. We grew too quickly. The growth was not controlled and there were too many people involved. In the end, the business went bankrupt.

Did you lose much?

Yes. And I vowed that I’d never become involved in a restaurant again.

Seems that this was before his the Heston adventure, never knew he owned a resturant, so suppose its kind of useful

the biggest piece of education betfair could provide would be stake management. plenty of easy functionality they could have as add-ons to the site to stop people blowing their nuts too quickly as well.

however, if people want to blow their nuts, they'll do it regardless.

What about the cash out feature? Betfair said they had seen an increase in the % of times customers successfully locked in a profit.

I have to ask, first of all, using the cash out feature will almost always mean you get crap odds as you're paying the spread, and if the spread widens it'll take whatever's there (I can't imagine more than a very tiny percentage of [misguided] winners using this).

Secondly, if more customers are sucessfully "locking in a profit" they are likely to be giving away twice as much value (first on the original bet, then on trading out). As they are trading, they will pay less commission too.

Can someone enlighten me on how this is good for Betfair?

look...betfair has 3000 people working at betfair..they have to bring new sh!t like this, to keep them self, in a f-cking Job

Can someone enlighten me on how this is good for Betfair

because, betfair is ab them....same as crossing matching

I'm still not sure nairda,

Here's the thing, although Betfair encourages trading, losers shoudn't be encouraged to trade.

The reason is obvious, if they trade instead of betting, a greater portion of the losses they generate goes to the winning trader than if they place straight bets.


it all becomes more complicated with PC though.

"But it was disastrous. We grew too quickly. The growth was not controlled and there were too many people involved. In the end, the business went bankrupt."

Sounds like Lee should be advising Betfair themselves rather than their customers.

this may or may not be..but one thing we know for sure, is that betfair only goal is to keep as much of the money as it can...anything new, betfair bring in is all about "to capture a greater share of wallet from existing customers"

Lori, one of Greenwood's rugby selections was too bad to be true.  It was in a market any sensible rugby punter would not touch on here as you just know you are getting cr*p odds in the side markets like that on a small betting sport.  When I read his piece and looked at the market it was well over 200% on the back book.  His selection was 2.54 and some money had been matched.........so somebody was following him in.

Bad news for the punter - even if it had won it was bad news as the odds were so dire.  Great news for the market maker.

I have another issue with the initial link (Which I got from another thread)

Where is it?

I've gone through most of the tabs on the page and I haven't seen anything that actually links into it. I realise that it obviously isn't that hard as someone else found it, but I don't recall ever going to a "betting.betfair" page on this site

There was a piece written a year ago on the betfair.betfair.com website on the Head to Head Leagues: Top London Club market. At the time, there was all of £40 matched, which was £20 on Chelsea @ 1.5, and the tip was Spurs at 3.1 "that look the most attractive option". Whoever suggested the writer was the  man with the lay in the market at that price should be ashamed of himself.

  http://green-all-over.blogspot.com/2010/07/one-team-in-london.html

lol cpfc4me, that's woeful

my god, i know it's only a bit of fun, but Vaughan's piece for the 4th test is terrible.

you would have hoped someone who actually understood betting markets read it first and helped him out, or that he just plagiarised some of the better stuff on the pre test thread on the cricket forum.

Looks ok to me.

Vaughan knows his stuff. says back Eng and expects a longer game than Edge. What's wrong with that?

weather, toss? when are you going to get the best price on england? the very fact that he suspects the game to be longer, for india to bat for longer, and guessing a five day finish, along with crazy draw backers means it's got all the legs to go short if given a chance.

Ralph Ellis' piece rightly highlights the only safest prematch bet which is a lay of india.

but far worse those bets on 5th day afternoon finished (massive spread £2 matched) and the back to lay strauss bit.