CALLING BEAT THE OVERROUND

No, he's OVER

Among other things the certain gentleman (again) explained (and argued to prove his point) a "winning" method he uses in detail on the forum and found ............. amazingly ........... somehow it stopped working and is a little annoyed.  Very surprising eh?  As if over 7000 views by rabid punters looking for an edge would matter or the odds would not move if some with real money or interest in the overround took a good look at it??

You mean somebody actually understood exactly what he did and went out and replicated it ?
Amazing and staggering.
Is there no honesty in this world anymore ?

Zoot - I was thinking the same thing. Strange how publicly explaining the strategy removed the edge.

I get the impression that BTO was slightly 'on tilt' after finding the 3% margin had been eroded and said some things regarding cross-matching and Betfair's staff that were not in the same thoughtful manner as his usual posts.

Shame, I'd like to see BTO's thoughts on adapting the approach. I already thought of a couple of tactics to at least reduce the variance, but it looks like a few other people also have!

A bit ott guys, BTO I'm sure is more than a one t(r)ick pony.

Hi guys,
I am officially gone, but stopped by to clarify.

The edge disappearing is not the issue, well actually it is.
But not as people might interpret.
The SP is made up of money matched in the live market, waiting to be matched in the live market and SP waiting to be matched, with extreme odds ignored over a certain percent.
There is no way to predict with accuracy what the final SP will be (within 5%) because the weighting is on the side of last traded price and volume in order to prevent manipulation.
So one would have to take very poor odds using a lot of money in the live market to drive the SP up or down and the liquidity in the SP market, means you would be betting against yourself (providing poor odds for yourself).

Given that I outlined my strategy, unless people are driving the live market, the impact of them on the SP is negligible unless there is a huge increase in volume, because it is spread out amongst the entire field and weighted to the last traded live price.

I won't go into conspiracy theories, as I've posted them before and had them removed.
So let's stick to the facts.

1. All of a sudden the edge went to 0%
Didn't slowly get worse, or fluctuate, it went to 0%.
But only on UK markets, other markets were unaffected.

2. An investigation of matched amounts on UK racing SP, showed no increase that could account for said erosion of value.

3. No one person or group of persons can get an edge to exactly 0% over any number of races, because it's impossible to calculate over any series of events.

So it's not a matter of my edge disappearing because I posted it here, it doesn't take much to realise that something automated, controlled, and amazingly accurate is going on.

Something that cannot be programmed externally, because the algorythm is unknown to external sources.

Couple this with some other strange things that have gone on with my account and a couple of phone calls which I can't go into, and it seems that the crossmatching bot is working overtime.

When I revealed the truth, my posts were deleted.

Enough said, the edge did not disappear because people started using it, it disappeared because it was engineered to.

The evidence is overwhelming.

if you find the ring of power or even just a thin vein of gold, some good advice for little Hobbits - keep it secret, keep it safe.  They are hard to find and hard to keep

Thanks for coming back to clarify. A couple of things don't make sense to me.

Firstly how can you claim that the edge has gone to zero in the two months since we looked at the stats? Even though the edge was positive in the long run there was a good deal of variation and we all agreed you could (in fact did) have negative/flat months. I re-ran the spreadsheet looking at the overround for UK horses since beginnng of September and I don't see a line of precisely 100% figures. On average it's 100.16% and ranges from 94% to 111%.

Secondly, the matching algorithm for SP is not a secret and determines precisely on the amount of money submitted on each side. If Betfair were doing anything strange we'd be hearing complaints from people who were not matched or matched at a price beyond what they requested, not hearing complaints about the overround.

I haven't looked at the matched amounts yet to see if there's a significant change but of course it could also be the case that money is moving to the lay side from the back side (pardon the expression).

I did see a couple of your posts before they were removed and it looked to me like you had misunderstood crossmatching rather than anything else.

Finally, you could try to run your strategy with an almost balanced book (rather than fixed liabilities on each runner) since you can make a good estimate of the BSP just before the start ofthe race by looking at the exchange prices as well as the weight of money submitted to BSP.