With the Premium Charge, Betfair can no longer claim the moral high ground of giving punters the best deal and welcoming winners. Mocking people who don't use Betfair could easily provoke a response highlighting the record of Betfair moving the goal-posts and charging (up to) 60% commission.

the PC is not 60% anymore, by putting the work in to put prices up, you show your hand, and they derive sportsbook prices from that. so we generate the prices, and they cherry pick the fish who aren't smart enough to get a better price on the exchange.

This is disgraceful.The premium charge must be scrapped.

Lifetime gross profit is where it's totally wrong. You could make 30k in 10 years or 30k in 1 month and still be in the same boat. It's a bit bizarre really.

The problem is enough people must carry on betting with them and pay the PC for them not to make it more reasonable. If everyone left they'd be forced to take a look at it.

that is not a realistic scenario frog2.

Have an x year gross profit period but only accounts with a positive life time gross profit included for PC. You need the PC to counter courtsiders/people using fast pictures with an unfair advantage and also general big players who take too much out compared to the commission they pay.

so glad the fast pic merchants have been put to sleep

site is so much better for it

like me ?

The premium charge is a joke because even small/medium players will get caught up in it.

mousaka I've been using Matchbook exchange for the past month and I've got no complaints, worth checking it out. 2nd best exchange for me at the moment. I joined through a promotion via skrill/moneybookers and I get 0% commission for 2 months.

I've said before a weekly allowance would be simple way of making it more fair- it's ridiculous that there's no minimum weekly win before supertax kicks in.  I once rounded off my weekly win to exactly 1p and they rounded up their 60% and took the entire penny.  Laughable.

They banned all the north americans so all that's left now is the pinnacle prices

They only banned north americans because of a change in the law.

5k a year   pc 5 %
10k a year  pc 10%
25k a year pc 20%
50k a year pc 25%
100k a year pc 30%

250k a year pc 40%
1 million a year 50%


sound fair

I have spent months emailing them about this , i have paid £2500 in premium charges, and i havnt been doing well for 2-3 years , yet i am paying for the money i made in the 1st 2 years, so i am going to give **** another go , anyone no anywhere else? , they are going to fold in the end (betfair) such a shame.

#B e..T D a Q

Whether BF like it or not, many full time punters view their winnings as "income" as it it is what they spend most of their time working on. It is obviously in BF's interest to have punters putting in the hours on their site, seeding markets (especially laying) and promptly taking the bets that are put up. Accordingly, those full-timers view the PC as a tax of sorts.
To be perceived as fair, a tax system needs to be incremental - i.e. the higher the earnings, the higher the percentage paid and vice versa.  Although there is some logic in basing the percentage on win rate, it only makes sense when viewed from BF's perspective. When viewed from the punters' side, it boils to being taxed, not on how much you earn but how good you are at your job. Not only is this a disincentive to being efficient it also encourages the lower earning punters to seek income elsewhere, so spending less time on here.
I like chriblues' scale above but also acceptable, given that BF will be extremely reluctant to let go of this free money, is the idea of the 1st £500 or £1000 a week being exempt of PC. This allows the full-timer to earn a reasonable "wage" (£200 a day is common for skilled labour these days), while still giving BF the same percentage beyond that figure.  BF could even refine this by only granting the exemption if a customer is active on the site for a given number of hours a week, or has bet in a certain number of markets, for example.

They have been saying for nearly a year, as far as I am aware, that the PC needs an overhaul, so as not to tax the smaller players as much as it does.  While they dither and further reduce the exchange's falling liquidity, I fear it is now nearing the tipping point, beyond which the damage to their exchange and their reputation is irreparable.

I agree 1.01.
It's quite clear looking at the markets and comments that people have had enough.
When betfair brought this charge in (although excessive) the product was top notch.
But now the product and user experience is nowhere near as good as it was. Yet there is no allowance for this.
It wont be long before the fast pic merchants are hoovering empty screens.

I have just finished reading Colin Cameron's 'You Bet' about Betfair published in 2008. Looking at Betfair since then is like watching a car crash from the top of hill. So depressing to see what uninspired management has done to a once revolutionary idea.

The writes seems to have had access to Ed Wray, Andrew Black and other members of the founding team.


Obviously for the book the Premium Charge has only just come in. This is how it is was described....

'An even more catastrophic public relations episode was the introduction in 2008 of 'premium charges'. According to Betfair [for the quotes in the book its odd he doesnt quote a person here] this punishing commission, above normal commission rate of up to 5 per cent, was aimed largely at countering 'Robots', computer systems set up to identifity moments of arbitrage then automatically take market positions of guarenteed profit [really? I thought the cross matcher had already dealt with this].......

So why was the Premium Charge needed? The cross matcher was already inplace. The exchange had just seen growth the previous 12 months that has never been repeated since the charge came in.

This is not what the Premium Charge is about. Its a short term land grab at any punter who achieves a long term margin of over 2.5% on turnover. It is a massive put off to any punter aspiring to achieve a return higher than that.

It has opened to door to the professional bookmakers to fight back offering a better deal. It has already happened in football although their inrunning offering needs alot of work. The day someone does it for horseracing the UK/IRL strategy will be in serious trouble. Without decent staking position players there is no Betfair.

The reality is Betfair has messed about with countless rubbish ideas since Andrew Black came up with the p2p betting concept in the form of an exchange where bets could be split and liabilities offset. In fact since the initial concept what has Betfair actually come up with that is new and innovative? Obviously they have MOUs etc but in terms of product I can think of preciously nothing.

But this is the point. It never needed anything else. It doesnt need to be a massive company in terms of employees and running sportsbooks, poker rooms, casinos etc. It just needs to focus on the area most of its revenue comes from and do that well. Stop pedding skilless games and concentrate on the job in hand. Betting on live sport is not a fad. Everything else potentially is.

In 2008 it had already started diluting the brand. But the company was still well respected up until the point the first Premium Charge came in.


On a positive note it talks about the end of Stephen Hill's time as CEO when the float didnt go ahead in the mid 2000s...

'This was a period when the company seemed to lose sight of its founders' ambitions. Jojo Primrose, head of marketing in Betfair's early days, recalls a phone call from Andrew Black letting her know that a 'coup' was being hatched. This was intended to restore much of the old philosophy eroded by Hill'

Is there any chance of another coup at some stage before the whole concept that Bert dreamed up is lost forever?

The failure of the bid last spring and continued sale of equity but the exchange believers makes me very pessimistic about a second 'coup' happening anytime soon.