You have a choice..

In advance, obviously.

1 day a year million pounds + will do me thanks, gives me time to feckin live bruv ! .

This is a good question... pity we will never know the true best answer.

I guess the technical issues are:
1 - Knowing a tissue would limit you to Kelly staking, but knowing the result would mean you could put your entire bankroll on
2 - Football suffers from lots of simultaneous games => decrease in optimal stakes
3 - I think football markets where you can get a bet on in decent size are priced close to the Exact tissue (so few value and limited size bets)

Lets take a simple example:
Just looking at the UK races for 18 Sep - if you had backed all winners at BSP with full bankroll staking you would have made a 177 fold increase in bank that day. 
Lets say you also bet ireland, Aus, US so it's 177*177*177*177 = 100m.  To make this much using the tissue we would have to be able to average 49% per week.  That doesn't seem too crazy for a perfect tissue.

But in reality it would all come down to capacity but even this is confusing:  If you know a result in advance you can back it down to 1.01 and get value, if you know a tissue you can only back it at better than that price.

Can I change the game?  Can I have the horses this year, and after I make a boatload off my small bank switch to the football tissue going forward?

What are your thoughts?

If you know the horse results in advance, you could take out maximum winnings (£1m in general?) from all the bookies (maybe several times over if you use a team of people and bet on differing races). A few small multiples bets would do it. You could also get a fair sum out of Betfair too.

If you just know the football true odds, you'd be stuck trying to make a few % profit on each match while subject to the normal ups and downs of chance. Over time you'd make more money, but it would be a lot of work getting the bets on. Some might argue that you can pretty much get the 'true' odds of a football match anyway, given the consistency of the betting markets on the sport.

So I'd definitely take the first option. Free money, certain profit, minimum work involved, and enough cash to live well for the rest of your life. You wouldn't even need to bother betting next year unless you were very greedy!

I would definitely plump for the later.

- Steady, stable daily profits generated through 12X & derivative markets [Asian HCaps included];
- Can trade-out of positions rather than standing same to reduce strain on bankroll;
- Excluding certain, ahem "known leagues", the pricing is objective, rather than subjectively insider-driven; liquidity greater as a result, thus higher turnover-generation a runner;
- The profitiablily potential of such an edge in the Asian markets is immense;
- "Once-a-year" brings all the problems associated with 'getting-on';
- Although not quite the same as the racing example, even Barney C is limited to what his potential winnings are from multiple touches due to the prior point;
- Football is the most popular sport in the world; there are simply ALWAYS betting opportunities, 24/7, if you have compiled/access to the 'perfect' tissue of pricing for each match;
- commerically tailoring the tissue to become the world's largest football market-maker will generate potential economies of scale [turnover-based lower commission, etc].

Thoughts?

Bayes, how much are you flogging these for?

Choose the horse racing, own all bookmakers at end of day, go into partnership with mate who chose the tissues, job done. Betfair with their 2-5% (+ 20-60%) finnish.

Sorry for using this thread but one choice has haunted me now for a long time. Situation: lets say you have hoovered some price and now you know you have a value position. Now market overreacts to the other side. What do you do? Do you trade out? Do you take opposite position? Or do you let it ride anyway knowing that you have taken value? Would love your opinions on that....

And to answer this topic's question I would also choose the horses choice. Because it is less work to just bet one day for certainty rather than monitor markets every day finding prices out of range...

Maybe I'm being too simplistic but why on Earth would anyone choose option two?  Granted, it has a more longer term appeal but knowing the results of every race for one day is surely the better choice here?  It requires no work and even if you start out with just £2 if you reinvested the winnings into each race and went all in every time you'd make enough money to retire.  Even if you didn't you'd make enough to last the year and could the do it again the year after.  Seems a no brainer but I'm willing to be called a mug if I've missed something glaringly obvious!

No but winning the lottery has ruined many a sane person.

Perhaps option 2 is useful that it gives you something worthwhile to do on a day to day basis rather than just sitting by a golf course in Spain snorting coke

With the horses option you'd make millions just on betfair and b'da q, particular if it was during Cheltenham, Ascot or Grand National day.

the problem with get max payout bets on with the bookies is that you'd have to use multiples so you might find the final one in some of the multiples gets a 'strange' ride and doesn't win! Choosing a busy day for betting and multiples that were completed in a short space of time would be the answer to get them under the radar.

You'd also have placepots, jackpots and pick6 bets landing for fun.

Could you make £25k a day for the rest of your life using option2??? because that is what you would need to do to make it comparable

perhaps a more comparable choice would be.
1. All the horse racing results globally for a day once a year for the rest of your life
2. All sports results globally (except horse racing) for a day once a year for the rest of your life

So jonny reckons you can make £10m on one of the magic days.  Maybe first time around, but what about afterwards?

Its obviously a huge information asymmetry and if the person in possession of it had any sort of bankroll the market is going to evolve pretty quickly.  We'd see things like:
lower limits on accumulator sizes and bet sizes
increased spreads
increased price volatility in response to bets

for some people being in the market no longer makes a profit so they leave

I take the point the money has to come from somewhere, on Betfair i/r players would soon start running out of money if you were attacking both pre and i/r. And UK bookies would restrict if being hit by a big 'coup' each year.

However, year on year the following is surely achievable?

US Horse Racing Pools betting - easily have 100 races in a day and easily average £30k per race out of the pool with exotics (exacta, tri, super, pick 6 etc etc) = £3m
US Racing Betfair - Say 50 races at £15k per race = £750k
Australian Racing pools betting - Say 30 races at £15k per race = £450k
Australian racing Betfair - 30 races at £10k per race = £300k
South African racing combined - 12 races at £15k per race = £180k
UK and Ireland on betfair - say 50 races @ £75k £3.75m
Bookmakers - £2m each year on one day would be achievable out of all the bookmakers (online, shops, course)
French racing - £100k?

over £10m in total

first year you could probably take £5m in off the bookies?

Nice question.

I would choose the second and would fancy my chances building up profits steadily each day rather than concentrating all the execution risk on one day. There is enough liquidity in the football markets each day to catch the £10m magic day punters.

It would be handy if those football prices came in a nice XML formatted file along with the Betfair market ids.

Interestingly everyone immediately thinks about the betting/trading profits of the information rather than the potential to sell that information through a tipping service. If you don't have access to a decent starting bank this could actually be a good way to start off (although I'd like to see you convince customers that you have perfect information about a single day's results).

Johnny, why would you not just place a £1 accum every winner with every bookmaker? A million off each of them.

Knowing bookmakers as I do, I wd be fearful of their not paying out.

I value free time and don't think I wd be an addicted bettor w/ 5 million in the bank, so I'd be inclined to go for option 1).

Gambling debts are payable by law Askari. I daresay each large chain would'd attempt to claim the bets were all placed by the same person in different shops (even though you got others to place them for you) and that you were only entitled to £1 million for all the bets placed in their branches.

When was the case when the Koral punter scored a massive multiple and has yet to be paid out, with the book claiming that the ticket was never photographed?

I am on the verge of the Small Claims Court for something like 5-6 diff. bets w/. the same chain that have now virtually excluded me from their 7 local shops--diff. things like e.g. the cashier crossing my price out as well as limiting my stake, the price changing three secs. after I checked and took it, being told that the price was right when it wasn't etc.

I'll have to use the Gambling Act and Unfair Terms in Consumer Contract Regulations and Unfair Contract Terms Act, as I wd lose on the bookie's own rules.

Shocking stuff askari but the publicity would obviously be greater on the bets winning millions. Barney got paid.

If this was real and not academic, and a genie did offer me it tommorow:

2. If you do 2. you'd just be taking up the value between what people think are the odds and the odds, little more than being incredibly good at research, you still wouldn't know the results. If you didn't trade for the profit you'd still get piles of losers and if you did trade you'd be giving one half of the trade every time to create a winner and you wouldn't know which in advance, it's to a fair extent morally neutral.

If you did 1. however you would in effect be stealing from the horse's layers, so morally more than iffy.

You might hate the bookies enough to do it though but .. :)

If you think one is stealing, then surely the other is as well. Both are relying on magical information that no-one else could possibly have.

option 1 definately
could trade bf with no fear of a loss. The liquidity should appear if you start taking awful prices. Plus all the accumulators around the shops.

option 2 - people will leave the market if you constantly win off them

Bayes - you've mentioned before i think that you tend to put up these kind of threads when you've lost a bit that day and had too much to drink. So how much did you lose and how much did you drink before putting this one up.

To answer your question though I would go for option 1. There would be something quite satisfying in coming in quite late on betfair, backing a horse down to 1.01 and keeping there until after the race has started or for as long as possible just to completely freak out all those people trying to trade it beforehand. Think of all the fun you could just doing stupid things to the markets and freaking people out knowing that you are safe with a profit. Ah you could drive people crazy.

And then you could go on the forum and show people a print out of your profit for the day. I'd have to have a bet on something else as well just to confuse people so it would say Horse Racing: £1,863,953 or whatever, Mixed Martial Arts: £-1.75.

^^^ this is right.  Both options lead to unlimited wealth, but the sheer fun you could have taking every price on a horse down to 1.01 , without trading even a penny back - that can't be bought with any amount of money.

and the shop accumulators - the pleasure of breaking a bookmaker, to see him reduced to a gibbering wreck : can that be bought? nope. option 1 it is.

Feck, has Barney now got paid off Fred?

Up until the RP putting out a tablet edition at 8pm, and the books tightening up with the govt. taxing FOBTs a bit more, I used to be able to get on around 2.5k through me and two or three other placers, people who were unreliable but were the last you'd expect, every televised betting day.

It was a hugely valuable cushion for arbing and trading and increasingly for outright betting, with strong fancies that happened to steam never even hitting the exchanges.

Now none of the chains are laying anything, though--unless you get someone just taken on who gets a scolding from the manager the moment they see the slips (the books' t&c s are so bad their staff turnover is fairly high).

Does everyone that picked option 1 really have the bank to make their millions in one day? Especially after all of the fun of backing the known winners down to 1.01?

Maybe I'm missing the point worrying about bank balance during a discussion about having perfect information about future events...

He did askari.

Re bookmakers, I've long since given up on them although I'd love to be able to get my bets on before the insider poison hits the markets on last5minutes.com.

DivideByZero - just how much bank do you need to make millions when you know all the horse racing results globally for one day? I'd happily have a good go on a £5 bank.

How many horse races are there on an averagely busy day? If you could move the winnings fast enough from one to the other you could make an absolute fortune starting with £2 - the old pennies doubling on a chessboard. The biggest threat to world domination would be BF being slow to settle

It is getting harder and harder to get bets on, feck.

In terms of placing yesterday was exceptionally good with more than 3k going across the counter, though stakes were heavily restricted on the PW horses. I then laid all three of them at worse than bf and in two cases worse than bookie sp and had a really foul losing day. Only Alben Star and Ramius cd have cost me in the Ayr Gold Cup.

By the time that a 'signal' has been established on the funny betting yards, I find the value has gone. Different owners also seem to have diff. operating methods for horses in the same yard e.g. Carroll, Osborne, Ellison, Jenkins etc.

By the time that a 'signal' has been established on the funny betting yards, I find the value has gone.

That's the big problem with this place askari. I sometimes feel I'm betting on races without the winner. Since getting automated I have managed to get in on a few gambles by drip feeding small amounts in early. Those were winners I couldn't possibly have bet waiting for last5minutes.com to busy up. I do believe I could make a fair living drip feeding early and closing the bets nearer the off. The long losing runs involved in backing "value" horses that no one seems interested in (drifters in other words) are soul destroying (to say nothing of the fact that a lot of the time I'm subsidising corrupt feckers).

Bayes, so what would you chose then?

The football option is worth almost infinitely more long term. The markets (and particularly the bookies) would soon adjust if someone had the horse information.

I can think of at least one reason why someone might opt fot the horse racing option though. Not having much capital or not being able to raise much capital would make the football option a lengthy process. If you were old/couldn't be bothered with the hassle, the other route might be more attractive.

Good points, I have a question for you now.

How different do you think football (match odds) prices are from the True Tissue prices?

For say English professional football anywhere between 0 and 30% out. Bigger discrepencies the lower the league. I bet there are people out there who average over 3% ROI on huge turnover markets, but more than 10% on lower leagues.

Bayes you seem rather intelligent, what do/did you do?

I'd go for the horse racing just because it's virtually no work where as doing every football market every day would be very tedious. Also, it would be enormous fun causing carnage in the betfair markets and walking into a bookies with 10p when they open and see when they finally kick you out :-D

Walofs

what exactly is the point of a discussion of a hypothetical happening?

What exactly is the point questioning a discussion of a hypothetical happening?

What exactly is the point of questioning the questioning a discussion of a hypothetical happening?

Nothing better to do.

What is the meaning of life? :http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXH_12QWWg8

Good movie on the same theme: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fext_q7VvY