In fact, I will go so far as to say that it is obscene.
You can not be the exchange and also be a trader on it. The exchange has more information than anybody else, and the whole point of paying for the exchange through transaction costs is that it efficiently and fairly brings all of the market participants together.
Where the exchange, which has more information than anybody else, trades on its own account, it is simply an abuse of trust.
Thankfully, I am aware of advanced plans to counter this sort of behaviour, through the creation of “a punters exchange” that will be a non-profit organisation, and that will take enough profit in the first couple of years to set it up, but will pay all excess profits back in fees later.
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153 Comments to “New Betfair bet matching system is a step backwards.”
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I’m confused by your comment. I thought the
bet matching system found new matches between customers bets. I don’t remember reading that it was an automated trader that took positions by making bets. If its only role is to find new matches between offers made by traders, then it isn’t reasonable to characterize it as the exchange trading on its own account.
Just one point, Betfair have already hired a team of traders to bet into its own markets last year, and are increasing that. Andrew Black has insisted that these traders are betting without looking at who is betting on what. I can’t understand how if 98% of Betfair punters lose overall, how they are paying the hypothetical £25,000-£30,000 a year salaries of these traders. They not only have to break even, but also have to win at least £25k to £30k a year to justify the expense of actually employing them.
I have no idea how anyone could get a straight answer out of Betfair about this. They either mothball and as happened with this new case, not even bother announcing it, or they have a record of press statements which, to be frank, have mostly been the opposite of what has happened. Mark Davies went on Radio 5 at the end of 2007 claiming that they didn’t offer any markets on Davydenko or Arguello, when in fact Betfair had been offering loads on both, after the voided Davydenko v Arguello match. The Radio 5 presenter threw him an unexpected googly live on air, which Davies wasn’t prepared for, saying "well surely if you have deemed that one player (davydenko) is not someone that you see fit to run markets on, surely the other player involved in the suspicious match is also someone you don’t take bets on". Davies stuttered, saw that it seemed completely logical, and said something very close to ‘erm,…. yes,…… we don’t offer markets on arguello either’. It simply wasn’t true.
Betfair are exploiting a total lack of regulation in sports markets to beat the clock, bet into its own pool, take a huge scoop out of the pool unannounced, change their bet matching software unannounced, etcetera. All this would be completely illegal in any financial market. I think sports markets deserve the same level of protection, and its time the FSA were compelled to step in to stop them.
This is all about Betfair’s share price. They still have a massive price/earnings ratio, and they are gambling that if they scoop an extra £15 million from the pool by placing their own robot on the markets, they can boost the value of the company by say £500 million. The people who buy these shares looking solely at the headline growth in profits are going to be gobsmacked in 2 or 3 years time that Betfair is being run as a pyramid scheme, and will wonder why company profits growth actually went into reverse in 2009, 2010 and 2011. The markets cannot sustain this level of front-running, clock-beating, trap bets, and attrition of the userbase. I just pray that the people tempted to buy Betfair shares are able to understand why the headline profits figure is going to be completely misleading for 2008.
Ed, where did you see that BetFair had hired its own team of traders? I haven’t seen any other discussion of this online (but I don’t follow the BetFair forums closely). If I were a trader on BetFair’s exchange, it would make me a little nervous if the exchange had an in-house trading team.
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But like Chris Hibbert, I’m confused by Niall’s remarks. The new bet matching system appears to just expand the sophistication of BetFair’s system for accepting offers made by users. I could see that the new system could disadvantage some mildly sophisticated traders, who have profited by finding such arbitration matches themselves. But having the exchange automatically make such matches can improve liquidity and prices for other traders.
"Ed, where did you see that BetFair had hired its own team of traders?"  Join http://www.bettingforum.co.uk where Andrew Black posts as "Bert". He himself confirmed on there that there are in-house Betfair traders, but insisted that these traders don\’t look at who is betting on what. The posts he made related to this were in February/March ish 2007. I made it clear that letting in house traders pick off/frontrun winning accounts would be absolutely disastrous for Betfair. What we do know now though is that even a change of the magnitude brought in with the new parasite robot, which may rake in over £10 million a year for Betfair, they won\’t announce it, they\’ll just sneak it in. The same will be the case if they make the decision to allow their in house traders to start looking at who is betting on what. The logic put forward originally was that Betfair started offering "multiples" bets, with prices derived from the main markets.  These are at prices with a very wide spread, and mostly poor value, but still popular nonetheless with Joe Public (fair enough). The in house traders were supposed to hedge these into the exchange to minimise risk. Betfair has a rush to make as much money as possible by whatever means, and I have no idea if the traders are looking at who is betting on what, and placing their \’hedges\’ of the multiples accordingly. I also know someone who has been interviewed and offered one of these (unadvertised) trading positions internally to Betfair. They have kept it pretty quiet. "I haven’t seen any other discussion of this online (but I don’t follow the BetFair forums closely). If I were a trader on BetFair’s exchange, it would make me a little nervous if the exchange had an in-house trading team." Tbh, I think its pathetic. Betfair are haemorrhaging cash again this week to people beating the clock on the tennis by up to 8 seconds. (The delay BF allow users is only 5 seconds, so anyone more than 5 seconds ahead of UK users can mop up huge value). Its like chucking water out of a sinking ship with a spoon, and congratulating yourself on how hard you are working with said spoon. Betfair really need to find a way to extract money from the hooverers, thats where their goldmine is. "But like Chris Hibbert, I’m confused by Niall’s remarks. The new bet matching system appears to just expand the sophistication of BetFair’s system for accepting offers made by users." It works just about ok on stable, non in-running markets, but with in-running markets, with violent swings in the odds, it is scooping out a much greater rake from the pool than was the case previously. One semi-official "whisper" is that its on course already to make £4m a year by mismatching people\’s bets. I\’d say that it would be worth telling people they were going to be raked for £4m more a year personally,….. There are many side effects of the Betfair robot. If you submit a bet to take a price off the screen, that price won\’t be there 5 seconds later, when your bet would have been matched without the robot, if the robot can find a way to arb that bet. Many people that would have been matched now won\’t be, and there orders will be left up on the board instead. With the in-running markets, there are huge swings in probabilities of different teams/players winning throughout a match or game, and these bets being left up are then ripe to be picked off by the people using fast pictures.  If I ask for a price, I am more likely to get it with this robot, BUT I am also more likely not to get it at the time I request it (because Betfair can queue jump in the period users have to wait 5 seconds), and it will often be matched only when the odds have swung against the user who has placed it up. Time is critical.  A back of a player at a price may be at a fair value, but if he goes love 15 down on his service game, and its only then that you get matched instead, because the Betfair robot jumped in the way and took the order you would have taken, you will be shortchanged as a result of the robot.  " I could see that the new system could disadvantage some mildly sophisticated traders, who have profited by finding such arbitration matches themselves." In running markets are really fast. I don\’t think its possible for someone to place arbs on both sides in an inrunning market. It is only possible for a robot that does not have to have the same 5 second delay that everyone else has.  I have no axe to grind at all, I really don\’t think it is possible to sit there with bets going through on both sides, and expect an \’arb\’ to be there, on an inrunning event. " But having the exchange automatically make such matches can improve liquidity and prices for other traders." If a match had £100,000 lost by the people who lost before the robot was activated, Betfair would rake a maximum of £5,000 and the winners would get £95,000 or more.  Now the robot can rake not a maximum of 5% of a transaction, but anything up to and over 99%.  If Betfair are taking £10,000 instead of £5,000, every single match, then there is less money in the pot, the average winner wins less, the rate of attrition is up. The people who lose out the most are the inexperienced users who don\’t really know what they are doing (the sophisticated users will be much more savvy and careful and adapt to the robot), and its these people that Betfair need to keep on the exchange to shuffle money back and forth. Betfair need to give the mugs a run for their money.  The sad thing is there are plenty of ways to rake lots of money from the snides, the courtsiders etcetera, but this robot, which does beat the clock, actually hammers the mugs, and probably actually helps the snides to get on, when they whack through thousands of pounds on out of date prices, and now the betfair robot will look to see if there is a way to help the snides get on not just by letting the sides hoover a back on a selection, but by auto-matching the money on lays on other selections.  Really, really silly.
"Ed, where did you see that BetFair had hired its own team of traders?"
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Join <a href=\"http://www.bettingforum.co.uk/\">www.bettingforum.co.uk</a> where Andrew Black posts as "Bert". He himself confirmed on there that there are in-house Betfair traders, but insisted that these traders don\’t look at who is betting on what. The posts he made related to this were in February/March ish 2007. I made it clear that letting in house traders pick off/frontrun winning accounts would be absolutely disastrous for Betfair. What we do know now though is that even a change of the magnitude brought in with the new parasite robot, which may rake in over £10 million a year for Betfair, they won\’t announce it, they\’ll just sneak it in. The same will be the case if they make the decision to allow their in house traders to start looking at who is betting on what.Â
The logic put forward originally was that Betfair started offering "multiples" bets, with prices derived from the main markets.  These are at prices with a very wide spread, and mostly poor value, but still popular nonetheless with Joe Public (fair enough). The in house traders were supposed to hedge these into the exchange to minimise risk. Betfair has a rush to make as much money as possible by whatever means, and I have no idea if the traders are looking at who is betting on what, and placing their \’hedges\’ of the multiples accordingly. I also know someone who has been interviewed and offered one of these (unadvertised) trading positions internally to Betfair. They have kept it pretty quiet.Â
"I haven’t seen any other discussion of this online (but I don’t follow the BetFair forums closely). If I were a trader on BetFair’s exchange, it would make me a little nervous if the exchange had an in-house trading team."Tbh, I think its pathetic. Betfair are haemorrhaging cash again this week to people beating the clock on the tennis by up to 8 seconds. (The delay BF allow users is only 5 seconds, so anyone more than 5 seconds ahead of UK users can mop up huge value). Its like chucking water out of a sinking ship with a spoon, and congratulating yourself on how hard you are working with said spoon. Betfair really need to find a way to extract money from the hooverers, thats where their goldmine is.
"But like Chris Hibbert, I’m confused by Niall’s remarks. The new bet matching system appears to just expand the sophistication of BetFair’s system for accepting offers made by users."It works just about ok on stable, non in-running markets, but with in-running markets, with violent swings in the odds, it is scooping out a much greater rake from the pool than was the case previously. One semi-official "whisper" is that its on course already to make £4m a year by mismatching people\’s bets. I\’d say that it would be worth telling people they were going to be raked for £4m more a year personally,…..There are many side effects of the Betfair robot. If you submit a bet to take a price off the screen, that price won\’t be there 5 seconds later, when your bet would have been matched without the robot, if the robot can find a way to arb that bet. Many people that would have been matched now won\’t be, and there orders will be left up on the board instead. With the in-running markets, there are huge swings in probabilities of different teams/players winning throughout a match or game, and these bets being left up are then ripe to be picked off by the people using fast pictures.  If I ask for a price, I am more likely to get it with this robot, BUT I am also more likely not to get it at the time I request it (because Betfair can queue jump in the period users have to wait 5 seconds), and it will often be matched only when the odds have swung against the user who has placed it up. Time is critical.  A back of a player at a price may be at a fair value, but if he goes love 15 down on his service game, and its only then that you get matched instead, because the Betfair robot jumped in the way and took the order you would have taken, you will be shortchanged as a result of the robot. Â
" I could see that the new system could disadvantage some mildly sophisticated traders, who have profited by finding such arbitration matches themselves."In running markets are really fast. I don\’t think its possible for someone to place arbs on both sides in an inrunning market. It is only possible for a robot that does not have to have the same 5 second delay that everyone else has.  I have no axe to grind at all, I really don\’t think it is possible to sit there with bets going through on both sides, and expect an \’arb\’ to be there, on an inrunning event.Â
" But having the exchange automatically make such matches can improve liquidity and prices for other traders."If a match had £100,000 lost by the people who lost before the robot was activated, Betfair would rake a maximum of £5,000 and the winners would get £95,000 or more.  Now the robot can rake not a maximum of 5% of a transaction, but anything up to and over 99%.  If Betfair are taking £10,000 instead of £5,000, every single match, then there is less money in the pot, the average winner wins less, the rate of attrition is up. The people who lose out the most are the inexperienced users who don\’t really know what they are doing (the sophisticated users will be much more savvy and careful and adapt to the robot), and its these people that Betfair need to keep on the exchange to shuffle money back and forth. Betfair need to give the mugs a run for their money.  The sad thing is there are plenty of ways to rake lots of money from the snides, the courtsiders etcetera, but this robot, which does beat the clock, actually hammers the mugs, and probably actually helps the snides to get on, when they whack through thousands of pounds on out of date prices, and now the betfair robot will look to see if there is a way to help the snides get on not just by letting the sides hoover a back on a selection, but by auto-matching the money on lays on other selections.  Really, really silly.
see this thread on the bf forum. The betfair board are just bonkers. This is where they are losing money hand over fist – to the person/people beating the clock who looks to actually be betting from the US.
jme17 Mar 00:52obviously betting is taking place in the USA this week it is 99.99999% a certain. Therefore i ask why do betfair not look at the accounts who r 7 secs ahead of sky and 4 infront of Raw feeds? To my knowledge it is the broadcasters who r responsible – (the company that cover the MASTERS events), they are using 200k per trade and are probably making an absolute killing whilst discouraging new comers and the average joe punter who trades on here.
Now we all know it is illegal to use betfair from the USA so betfair can you go ahead and investigate these crooks and fine them heavily – $2million or more you could make from it and then you can pocket the money meaning you can scrap your silly super cheating bot and the world will be a happier place the guy has it spot on. shame the betfair board just cannot see why losing money hand over fist, wondering why they aren’t making as much money as they would like to, then retaliating by sneaking in a £10million bet mismatching robot, really is just woefully incompetent.
Some anonymous person posting on a betting forum with the "Bert" byline is not necessarily Andrew Black. If BetFair were to hire traders to operate on its own exchange, their P.R. department would have disclosed it. Furthermore, they could be asked whether it’s true. I will ask them, or somebody will ask them. HammerSmith is not the KGB. They are open people.
Rab,
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I have send an e-mail to a PR guy at BetFair, giving him 2 MO links, and asking whether BetFair does employ internal traders to operate on its markets. I have told him that I will republish here the Q&A they will post on their forum. Let’s wait and see.
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To tell you frankly, this info sounds like an unfounded rumor… but we will see…
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Also, it were to be true, we would investigate this issue scientifically and legally… without passion.
"If BetFair were to hire traders to operate on its own exchange, their P.R. department would have disclosed it."
They didn’t disclose the new bet matching system, whereby they are taking a significant rake from each market before they charge commission. Their robot has an advantage that no normal user has – it does not have to wait 5 seconds to try to arb any out of date prices.
"Furthermore, they could be asked whether it’s true. I will ask them, or somebody will ask them. HammerSmith is not the KGB. They are open people."
Their record for accuracy with what they say to the press is lamentable. Be careful how you phrase a question to them. They could be employing 100 people to bet into Betfair markets, but if you asked them if they employ traders to bet into Betfair markets, they could easily tell you no they don’t (because the people they employ are given the job title "hedging operatives" rather than traders). Be blunt and say to them "are there any staff who place bets on Betfair’s behalf into the Betfair markets, yes or no".
"I hope you do ask them, and I look forward to seeing their reply…."
Me too
"I have told him that I will republish here the Q&A they will post on their forum. Let’s wait and see."
"To tell you frankly, this info sounds like an unfounded rumor… but we will see…"
"Also, it were to be true, we would investigate this issue scientifically and legally… without passion."
Without looking at who is betting on what it is still bringing in an inefficiency because the cross elasticity of demand for different markets (multiples and single events) vary. If (/when?) they do start peeking at who is betting on what, then not only do winning accounts pay 5% commission, if they leave bets up they can then be undercut by a trader making the decision to undercut them (commission free because its on Betfair’s own account) safe in the knowledge that they are getting a good run for Betfair’s money. A mug punter will find that had they left the same bet up at the same price as the shrewd one did, then instead of being undercut, Betfair might actually take that bet.
I’m not sure that the question of Betfair traiding in its own markets is news;
"19. The Joint Committee will be aware that Betfair sees its business as being no different—other than in the provision of choice, control, and better value—from a traditional bookmaker (who will now fall under the category "general betting operator"). Betfair is concerned that creating a separate licensing category for betting exchanges will merely create a political football which traditional bookmakers will continue to abuse by lobbying for unnecessary regulation in order to impede or undermine betting exchanges in any way possible. Betfair understands however the desire of government to maintain flexibility going forwards in case the betting exchange business model generates regulatory advantages or disadvantages which genuinely do merit differences in treatment. For example, the fact that a "pure" betting exchange operator takes no risk, means that an applicant should not have to prove an ability to manage risk positions. A betting exchange operator who does want to start taking risk will have to obtain a general betting operating licence as well and, as part of the application procedure, prove that it can manage the risk positions it intends to take. Most betting exchanges will no doubt apply for both licences so that they can participate in their markets as and when they see fit. This accords with the principle that betting exchanges should merely be viewed as traditional bookmakers who have taken the decision to minimise risk (as any traditional bookmaker can and often will do) by only taking one bet when they know they can find another punter to take the other side of that bet, locking in a profit by effectively adjusting down the odds offered to each punter by charging a small commission."
Second, what is the purpose of the Malta based Betfair Counterparty Limited?
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Ed Murraywrote “They didn’t disclose the new bet matching system, whereby they are taking a significant rake from each market before they charge commission. Their robot has an advantage that no normal user has – it does not have to wait 5 seconds to try to arb any out of date prices.”
If the description of the bet matching robot that was previously provided here was accurate, there is no “advantage” for the robot to take. It’s matching bets among customers. If it takes a bigger commission, that would be a change, but they haven’t said that they are doing anything other than matching bets. Speaking of it as arbitraging is also not called for from this description. They aren’t taking advantage of the matching (perhaps overmatching) bets, they’re settling them against each other.
(The description was repeated in their response to CFM: “Where there is no opposing bet to match on the same selection, rather than just leaving a customer’s bet request unmatched, we will now attempt to match the bet request against unmatched bets on other runners.”)
" I did e-mail them and ask them whether there are instances where BetFair acts as a bookmaker, besides the multiples."
They definitely have traders hedging positions from the multiples into the Betfair exchange. Where this is a serious problem, is if say Betfair’s exposure is heavily towards say Birmingham City winning a football match (a Birmingham victory would be a big win for Betfair, a draw/loss would be bad news for Betfair). They could if they wanted check the match odds, and if they saw that a large number of shrewdies were all backing Birmingham to win, they could steer clear of laying Birmingham in the match odds to offset their risk. However, if they saw that the shrewdies were near uniformly laying Birmingham, they could then decide to lay Birmingham to get rid of their own position. Further to this, they could potentially nip in front of orders already up on the exchange, forcing people who would have been matched at the price requested to either request a lower price, or go unmatched. It isn’t a free exchange market.
Be careful giving Betfair any open ended questions – "are there instances where Betfair acts as a bookmaker, besides multiples" already has big grey areas, as highlighted above. There is a strong reason to run a multiples position if the accounts of shrewdies are all trying to get the same way that Betfair’s multiples position is already pointing. This does distort market dynamics, and there are internal Betfair traders appointed to bet into the Betfair markets. Any chance of wriggling that anyone gives Betfair will be used if they want to. A blunt question – "do you employ a team of inhouse traders to bet into the Betfair pool for whatever reason, yes or no" will leave them forced to either give an honest answer, or try to deflect it.
"If the description of the bet matching robot that was previously provided here was accurate, there is no "advantage" for the robot to take".
It instantly matches overbroke orders risk free to take significant sums of money out of all markets it operates on. If a user spotted an overbroke book, they would have to submit two bets on both sides, in the hope that 5 seconds later, both bets would still be available. That won’t be the case 99% of the time. The robot doesn’t have to wait 5 seconds, it can match one person’s bet against its own, whilst matching another person’s bet also against a 2nd bet from the robot, locking in the spread. This isn’t what Betfair advertises on television – in the UK betfair claims that punters bet against each other, now they bet against the robot, if the robot can find another punter who it can arb with instantly.
If you submit a bet to take an unfilled order on the screen, where previously you would have been able to match it, now the Betfair robot still has 5 seconds during which time it will take the unmatched order already up if it can find a way to arb it, leaving your order unmatched (and vulnerable to be picked off in many cases).
If there is no advantage to being able to fill two orders instantly if there is an overrround, then there are many users who would pay fortunes for said advantage if it was offered to them on a commercial basis.
"It’s matching bets among customers."
Not quite – its scooping a lot more money out of the pot, and increasing the customer churn rate, putting people off in the long term. Your chances of getting a match are reduced in the long term dependent on how big the scoop is. People need to consider that time is a critical factor in in-running markets, and this bot helps hooverers sweep both players/teams in a two way market. If you put in a bet where you would have been matched before, but now you aren’t (which will happen many, many times) you have to leave the bet up to try to get matched, and you are more vulnerable to being picked off as a wicket falls/point is won. There is no point requesting 2.1 on a player, then get picked off as the real probability swings ten clicks against you. That isn’t an improvement.
"If it takes a bigger commission, that would be a change, but they haven\’t said that they are doing anything other than matching bets. Speaking of it as arbitraging is also not called for from this description."
Plenty of examples have been posted on the Betfair forum confirming exactly this. Read this on page 33 of this thread ("Curious about some odd activity at Betfair" on the Betfair general betting forum)
Ed Murray,
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After I asked my main question, I added that there was that rumor about BetFair having hired traders, and I did put up the Midas Oracle URL where you mentioned this.
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We will see whether the Q&A is satisfying. If it is not, we would ask questions more directly to some higher-ups at BetFair, but there is no need for that at this point.
I know someone who was interviewed for a job as a Betfair internal trader, but who happened not to take the job at that moment in time. Another poster on the BF forum has claimed he was also interviewed for one of these positions, was talked through it all, and came to the conclusion that BF were heavily involved in their own markets. I can put you in touch with the first of these two people via facebook if you would like to chat with him.
that’s my facebook profile – will put you in touch with the first person through there if you want to speak to him.
you may find other people who know about this by posting on the bf general betting forum as well. i don’t know if Betfair will answer any direct question about it.
I don’t comfortably read odds in that style (under/over; back & lay), but if I understood the example correctly, BetFair’s description of their bot’s behavior doesn’t match what they’re doing.
Yes, that would be costly to traders, rather than an advantage to them. While BetFair’s description made it seem that they were adding liquidity to the markets in the way I have described, this sounds like they’re allowing customers to place overmatched bets, and then pocketing the overage as they cross-match the bets.
The customers get the price they asked for, but BetFair knew at the time that they accepted the offers that a better price was available. Brokers in the US often offer "price improvement" as a competitive advantage to their customers in situations like this. This is a trading advantage larger brokerages can offer that smaller ones can’t match because they don’t see the trading volume. Not offering price improvement isn’t stealing–the customer got the price she asked for–but it’s considered better customer service to do it when you can.
Efficient markets work where supply and demand are met at a point most beneficial to both parties. If I buy a CD of my favourite artist for $10, the reality is I may have been happy to pay $15 or $20 for it, but at $10, suppliers and buyers meet up at a common price where there is no deadweight loss. The new Betfair robot ensures that a deadweight loss to Pareto optimality is introduced, and the people that are most disadvantaged by this will be inexperienced users. These are the ones that any company looking at its own long term health would try to nurture over the long run, not shaft in the short run to provide glittering (but fake) headline profits growth.
The most important thing I think is not to think about "traders", but to think about the gormless mugs. If for every dollar they bet on Betfair they used to get back 95 cents, and now they get back only 90 cents, then that’s no good. The Betfair take out from each market they run this robot on is higher, and the ones who are paying this increased takeout will be mostly the inexperienced users. Shame.
I think the robot is fairly close to neutral in markets before the match has started, but during matches there are wild swings in odds throughout the match, and taking a say 5% wedge between two users, plus charging the winner 2 to 5% commission, will reduce long term churn in the markets.
The problems are (1) is this sustainable? (2) is it targetting the right people? (3) did they bother announcing it? (4) what else have they got up their sleeve? (5) would this be legal on any financial market (6) if it indeed would be illegal on established financial markets, what in reality makes sports markets so different that people don’t deserve the same protection? .
Chris , if you have any questions regarding traders on Betfair you’d need to email them direct info@betfair.com or maybe email Michael Robb direct if you have his email. The livechat@betfair.com has only been set up to put forward questions relating directly to the bet matching . Anything else even though the issues may be connected will be ignored.
Dave,
Micheal Robb of BetFair told me to address the "in-house traders" question to the LiveChat. Which I did. He said that BetFair’s market design specialists are gathering all questions, and will try to answer all questions.
If we are not satisfied by the answers provided by this LiveForum, we will ask this question thru other channels, later on.
Here are some facts about what is going on in Betfair for the doubters. These are facts and not supositions.
1. Betfair are skimming a variety of markets which is creating a windfall profit amounting to SEVEN figures per week
2. Betfair are ‘beating the clock’
3. Betfair staff are able to look at clients accounts and bet accordingly
4. It is Betfair’s intention to bring skimming to the horse racing in-running markets effectively killing off the 1.01 merchants
Betfair have recently moved their operations into a murky area and, imo, significantly changing their ethics.
Personally I believe much of what they do now is effectively illegal and they should be reported to the GC and brought to heel. Eventually of course they will shoot themselves in the foot but by then it will be too late. The wider their unethical practices can be broadcast the better as it may make potential investors think twice about future investments.
It would seem that the debate is spreading, with a reference to somebody having reported Betfair to the Gambling Commission, and a reference from ED to his postings on here;
" 4. [to Betfair] You state that "most betting exchange operators will no doubt apply for both [betting exchange operator and general betting operator] licences so that they can participate in their markets as and when they see fit". Do you currently participate in your own markets and, if so, is it really true to say that you have "`no interest in the outcome of the event"?
"We do not, and have never participated in any of the markets on mainstream UK sport, such as horseracing, football, cricket, etc. Occasionally we do stand as counterparty to bets in more obscure foreign markets to kick-start them by adding some liquidity. In that instance, the cost is part of our marketing spend and it therefore has no bearing at all on our impartiality in the market or our willingness to give up information to relevant sporting bodies. It is also declared to Customs and Excise in the event that it shows a profit."
"It should be noted that our relative impartiality to results is merely an advantage over traditional bookmakers meaning that we are less inclined to do many of the things which traditional bookmakers are accused of and which infringe regulatory principles. For example, we are less likely to manipulate the betting rules in our favour (infringing the principles of fairness to the punter) because we are less interested in the result. And we are less likely to be interested in hiding information on individuals suspected of skulduggery (infringing the principles of fairness to the punter and keeping crime out of sport) because we do not have information networks to protect. Therefore even if some betting exchanges do decide to take increasingly active roles in their own markets, that should only give rise to the same regulatory concerns applying to traditional bookmakers.February 2004."
Seems Loki Lab Rat (Betfair employee, not sure if the Rat in the name has any significance) has come out with a partial reply regarding traders and admitted they are active as part of the multipes operation to reduce risks in running taking advantage of the better odds on offer on in running markets
"Loki Lab Rat 18 Mar 08:20 I can answer this one quickly. There is a trading team based in Malta which manages the risk around the multiples product. They have software which tells them what the risk is associated with a potential result is and suggests what hedge bets can be placed to mitigate that risk at current exchange prices. They then place the hedge bets to manage the risk. They place the bets using the same software as everyone else using the site and respecting any in-play delays. The line about ‘opportunities in-play’ refers to the match situation and is nothing to do with beating the delay. For example, when just about every favourite won their international Euro 2008 qualifiers in early June last year (known as ‘Black Wednesday’ in some quarters), Moldova scored late-ish against Greece to square the match. The multiples team heavily laid the draw as the match drew to a close as it was a much better potential result than a Greek win. That meant that when Greece did score with the last kick of the game, our losses were mitigated to some extent by the hedge bets placed in-running. The multiples product is run under Betfair’s Maltese bookmaking license and is regulated by the LGA there. Therefore the team has to be based in Malta. The operation is an arms-length operation – there is no special access to any functionality or data from the exchange. "
There are always threads on the forums regarding delays in suspension and clock beating on the football markets, whilst there’s no evidence this is due to Betfairs own traders they’ll always be suspicions whilst they’re allowed trade on their own managed markets.
It is also pertinent that this team operates under Maltese jurisdiction; which of course puts it outside the scrutiny of the UK’s Gambling Commission!
However, I think there is also another issue that needs to be explored, and that is the general efficacy of a policy that allows Betfair’s own employees to trade on their exchange. Many people within Betfair have access to historical trading data unavailable to the broader betting public; such as what stables are backed and when; the significance of early money for particular horses etc; some are also able to access the betting records of individual persons. I specifically remember a comment made on Betfair radio concerning the boys in the office and how they had mopped up all the value regarding a particular horse from a gambling yard. The problem for Betfair, and one that is not likely to go away, is that nobody is sure any longer as to who it is they are actually trading against.
BF give out huge credit lines to fat loud mouthed pro punting horse owners whose associates then lay same horses when they are not off. Same individual has knocked plenty in the past so he is effectively BF trading their own markets by proxy. He is the highest profile on there but there must be plenty others.
Dave and Rab,
I will highlight your comments in a Midas Oracle post, later on, today.
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I want to remind the readers and commenters on this page that the best way to consume a blog is to do so within a feed reader, and I recommend Google Reader. http://www.google.com/reader/
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Here’s how it works. You take the 2 Midas Oracle feeds: http://www.midasoracle.org/feed/ http://www.midasoracle.org/comments/feed/
and you add them in Google Reader. From there, every morning, you log in Google Reader, and automatically, you will be served the new Midas Oracle posts and comments. So you won’t miss anything. For your information, there are other comment about BetFair made on other posts, which you have probably missed. http://www.midasoracle.org/archives/comments/ http://www.midasoracle.org/archives/
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If you don’t know what a "feed" is, then go here, and everything is explained to you in plain English, with a geat video: http://www.midasoracle.org/about/feeds/
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And I have another plug to make.
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I have listed here plenty of links (blogs, exchanges, etc.). http://www.midasoracle.org/links/
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I would like the British traders to suggest to me some good additional links.
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Do you guys/gals know some good British betting blogs to add in this list?
Thanks a lot.
Send them to me by e-mail, and I’ll add them in the list. http://www.midasoracle.org/contact/
The new clock beating super trap bet bot from Betfair does break Betfair’s own terms and conditions (which will no doubt be revised imminently), and is very foolish from a business point of view as it hammers the mugs and leaves the shrewdies, the courtside pick-off merchants, and the match fixers, all pretty much untouched. It would be suicidally bad business if this was in anything other than a virgin marketplace, where "growth" either organic or by taking extra cookies unannounced from the cookie jar, can offset quite amusing financial incompetence from the Betfair board.
What is the concern is the "what’s next then?" factor. There is an insatiable demand for more and more and MORE AND MORE money. Any weak line in the sand will be crossed (and has been by the trap bet clock beating bot). I’ve just had an extremely disturbing email about what exactly is next, from someone on the inside track, and its unreal. I’ve asked the person concerned to post on the midas oracle board, if they would be happy to do so. It beggars belief.
I am one of the people who Ed Murray has referred to in this blog. I was interviewed at Hammersmith by Betfair during the summer. For the time being I am going to concentrate on what Betfair has finally admitted from the past,present and future plans that betfair outlined to me.
""Loki Lab Rat 18 Mar 08:20 I can answer this one quickly. There is a trading team based in Malta which manages the risk around the multiples product. They have software which tells them what the risk is associated with a potential result is and suggests what hedge bets can be placed to mitigate that risk at current exchange prices. They then place the hedge bets to manage the risk. They place the bets using the same software as everyone else using the site and respecting any in-play delays."
There is 3 objectives for the "Maltese" trading team, "Maltese" is in quotation marks because betfair were unclear to me about who and what parts of the trading team were still going to be based in London and those who were going to be in Malta.
i) Hedging
ii) Trading
iii) Arbing
All 3 amout to the same thing, Betfair playing their own markets.
On each of the 3 points
i) Hedging, this is what Betfair has admitted to and has been doing to from day 1 of the multiples. Betfair admit to taking the other side of the bet for the mutiples, so i guess like any other bookmaker it is only natural they "hedge" their bets to reduce potential liabilites.
However unlike traditional bookmakers, who will lay off a multiple when one runs up, the bets taken by Betfair multiples are placed directly back into the exchanges before they "run-up".
This is one of the reasons behind the mutliple groups, they look at the back/lays placed on the mutiples for the first match and then the bets are placed into the exchange to reduce the liabilites and to cream off the difference between the price they have offered and that offered on the exchanges.
ii) Trading, this is what betfair are attempting at the moment, albeit unsuccessfully from what I last heard. Betfair have admitted they change their hedging positions, this by definition is trading. however the most serious aspect of their trading, is the in-running trading.
If betfair have accepted liabilities X & Y for events A and B being the outcome of a match, then why would liability X for A or Y for B be no longer acceptable during a match unless there was an advantage to be gained by trading betfair’s position in-running?
Afterall, on betfair’s exchange with a 100% book, whether that 100% book was an efficient or inefficient, the net expectation of betfairs position would remain the same if they were trading hedging positions blindly to "balance" the liabilities.
In the instance of an inefficient market, if betfair were blindly trading (i.e. not using odds compilers, traders or other means to form an opinion on the market) in-running then there would be no net gain as betfair would be equally likely to be on the efficient and inefficient prices and the differences would average out.
iii) Arbing, this is betfairs ultimate goal for the multiples. If this new cross-matching bot is being called a superbot, then this will be the hyperbot. A bot which will perfectly arb the mutiple bets into the exchange so betfair can make money from it’s mutiples operation risk free.
But if betfair are denying that they never form an opinion to a market and place bets accordingly and they have no plans to do this in the future either. Then why are they covertly recruiting academics from universities, odds compilers from the bookmakers and recognised traders from their own customer base ?
If betfair are playing their own markets, then what is to stop them abusing the position they have by owning the exchange. Having worked for several bookmakers in the past, I have yet to know one who would voluntarily wait 5 secs to place their "hedges",wait in the queuelike everyone else, make trading decisions according to the flow of money or not use their "warm sources" wisely.
I wonder how much Betfair’s "value", would be if they weren’t trying to depend on clock-beating, trading their own markets, front-running orders etcetera would be, if the regulators do indeed wake up and see that Betfair’s decision to break their own terms and conditions is a joke.
Every single commercial business in the world relies on extracting the most money from people who can afford to pay the most. Andrew Black and his team are yet again totally failing to do that, and to deliver value to current Betfair investors. It is actually painful how silly all this is. I genuinely believe that if I ran Betfair, I could scrap all this chicanery and grabbing out of the cookie jar, probably at least double profits, and give punters a good run for their money (instead of running a trap bet robot on the exchange etcetera). All this chicanery is incredible incompetence from them, and breathtaking to see.
Roger Duncan – thanks for the post. I genuinely believe that if I had a role within Betfair I could boost their earnings hugely, AND give the little fish a better run for their money. Betfair would never have me though – I’ve gone head to head with the very, very top of the tree people there, and they aren’t interested in the long term sustainability of the exchange or long term profits.
I knew some of the results in advance of evictions on the UK Big Brother television show, because I was a journalist at press conferences at the house. I made the deliberate decision not to bet into the market when I knew the actual result in advance. The weeks I wasn’t at the studios, I could see someone else knew in advance and was smashing everything available on Betfair. Telephone lines would close, and announcement would come live on air maybe 15-20 minutes later of who had been evicted. A market would be evens the pair who went or with what percentage, and that would suddenly be hammered. Betfair told me in 2006 that I was their 2nd biggest player on “specials” markets, so if I’m that far up the food chain, and I know the results after the lines close but before announcement, it seems reasonable for me to request that the markets should be shut once the lines have closed (and the result is known to a few people, but not generally known).
I asked on many levels for the markets to be shut at the time the lines close, but was told no by Betfair key accounts, and the person in charge of Betfair specials. I raised it with Andrew Black and Betfair’s head lawyer Martin Cruddace when I had a meeting with the two of them that these markets needed to be shut once the result was known, as Betfair users were being matched against people who knew the result and were hammering the markets. Mr Cruddace made it clear to me that no law was being broken by telephone vote insiders. My view is that matching people who bet fairly against people who do know the result, is bad business, allowing insiders to scoop tens of thousands of pounds risk free from the Betfair pool. Both betting exchange markets and reality tv are post-millennium recent inventions, and law is only ever a retrospective framework. Just because something isn’t illegal doesn’t make it right. Andrew Black went a step further. He said “there is the saying ‘if you can’t win you can’t lose, but I reject that”. He also said “I have no problem with this, its better to leave the markets open to allow people the choice to bet, even if they have no chance of winning”. He kept stressing the Harry Redknapp to Portsmouth managerial saga, where huge money was gambled on Betfair on Redknapp to move from Southampton to Portsmouth, which caused a bit of a stink when the ‘inspired’ money turned out to be right. I stressed the difference in this case is that the result was definitely known and being bet upon, after the result. It just struck me as wrong, and Betfair punters being ripped off.
There is a financial advantage to current Betfair shareholders allowing insiders to hammer Betfair markets. In the very instant short term, someone whacking through tens of thousands of pounds offering juicy odds will find a lot of takers. (In the long term people will grow wary and cynical, as happened with the number of suspicious betting patterns on Nikolay Davydenko matches). It boosts immediate commission, and makes the headline profit figure bigger. The stock is then sold on, either to a Japanese firm “Softbank”, or in the future to other investors, who will not realise that this inflated profit figure came about at the expense of organic growth (people taking tens of thousands of pounds risk free from the pool don’t then blow the money on say a basketball or football match). Betfair is run on a “give us as much profit as possible NOW” basis. I looked up to Black for years, and felt sick that he, as a member of the Betfair board, was doing this.
About ten months earlier, Mark Davies had created front page headlines in the UK press by saying Betfair was cracking down on phone vote insiders who had swiped £105,000 from the pool. It made the front page of most of the tabloids (who love a big reality tv story). The fact is that Black either solely, or in tandem with others, reversed this policy, on the basis that nothing illegal was being done (the lawyers only found this out after Davies went to the press). I told Black he was wrong, but he just could not understand why. I left that room in disbelief, going to the front entrance of the Betfair offices without Black, but with Mr Cruddace. I was a bit speechless, and I can’t speak for Cruddace, but I think he was as dumbstruck as I was that the guy I had looked up to for years,had just had a two hour rant why he was happy for insiders to bet into the Betfair pool risk free, on a known result. It was unbelievable. I have no tape, no proof, they both know what I’m saying is completely true, but obviously its not exactly something which Black would say in public.
It hurts me because at the start of the meeting Black was cooing about his new kid, how wonderful his new kid was etcetera, that he had spent the weekend (I think somewhere down on the south coast?) with his family etcetera. I’ve used Betfair in good faith for years, and often written or done articles hugely pro-Betfair in the UK press. I don’t want fast cars, helicopters, yachts etcetera. All I want is the chance to bet fairly, on the basis of skill, against other Betfair users, who are also betting fairly. It would be really cool if I ever did have a family to be able to look after them in a way that I didn’t have when I grew up. I perhaps have the same goals as Black – looking after a family if I ever had one, but to hear the guy who invented Betfair launch a fairly savage rant about how he rejected ‘if you can’t win you can’t lose’, and that he had no problem with genuine Betfair users being matched for large money against insiders who knew the result, was a massive blow. I left feeling sick, and feeling that I’d been had.
A few weeks later, I saw some alarming quotes in the News of the World (UK paper) from BF spokesman Tony Calvin saying something very close to “Betfair don’t accept bets once events have been completed, and if this happens we will void them”. I called the NOTW journalist to ask if Calvin had really said that, as it was the complete opposite of what I had been told. I then emailed Tony Calvin saying what I had been told by Black and Mr Cruddace, saying that Betfair’s policy was to allow phone vote insiders to bet after lines had closed, and smash thousands of pounds out of genuine Betfair users risk free. I got no email, no correspondence back from Calvin, but the next day the journalist concerned received an email from Calvin saying how much care Betfair took to protect their clients, and gave the example of how Betfair shut the reality tv markets at the time the lines close, instead of announcement by the presenters later on in the shows. It was history rewritten. They said no at every level, UNTIL they thought there was a chance the media would expose what they were doing. Then they wrote an obsequios email saying how much pride they took in protecting their customers. Isn’t that incredibly sad to see? I had campaigned for months for that change, not bet on the markets when I knew the result, and they didn’t even bother to let me know.
I would love to work at Betfair, but I have fought for a number of changes, all of which have been to Betfair’s long term benefit, but all of which they have resisted and resisted. One person claimed to be making over £10,000 a day from a tennis tournament in Asia on game by game tennis markets, by beating the delay. The match odds had a 5 second delay before a submitted bet hit the screen, but the game by game markets only had a 3 second delay. I and others all spoke to Betfair saying that if users did need 5 seconds protection on the long run markets like the match odds, they definitely needed 5 seconds on the game by game odds, especially when one account, but having a friend on a mobile in that stadium, was credibly claiming to be ripping off over £10,000 a day smashing money through on out of date prices. Betfair resisted, but we were eventually told that on the Thursday of that week (late 2006) it would be changed to 5 seconds. When the Thursday came, someone inside Betfair made the decision to overturn that and put it back to three seconds. The NOTW were conducting a campaign against fast picture players betting on out of date prices on horse racing. I thought it was unacceptable that one account with a friend on the phone from the stadium was credibly claiming to be ripping off so much money risk free. I said to the journalist to have a look at those game by game markets the next day to find the real hornet’s nest. I then called Betfair and said “look, tomorrow the NOTW will be looking at those tennis markets, and you can feel free to keep them at three seconds, which is against what you promised and told us, but don’t be surprised if you do to see this getting massive bad publicity in the NOTW this or next Sunday as a result of your decision to allow a pick off snide to run riot”. Betfair caved in, and reversed back to the 5 seconds.
Everything I do has been to protect Betfair and Betfair users. All I want is for Betfair to make a strong profit, but for all users to be able to bet fairly, and for the winners to be users with skill (not users with fast pictures, users with racing “connections”, match fixers etcetera). The chance to live by the sword and to die by it. There is perhaps a ‘jealousy’ from me towards new Betfair girl Anette Oberstad. She is heavily advertised on Betfair as the WSOPE poker champion, and is sponsored by Betfair. The fact is if you play poker you don’t have the hazards of sports players – Betfair is rife with fast picture players, who in effect bet against you by seeing the flop/turn or river whilst you are a card behind. Betfair also has had a number of markets with the ’suspicion’ (lets use the word suspicion for now) of match fixing, where you bet against people who are deciding what the flop/turn/river are going to be. Now that Betfair has internal traders betting into its own markets, how long until they are placing bets against you knowing what your cards are?
Betfair is run in an extremely cynical manner, and I’ve been attacked time and again. One internet troll was outed who was constantly posting attacking me, on a professional level, and also seemingly fascinated with my sex life, and lo and behold, it was a Betfair lawyer. I’ve spoken to him since he was outed, and told him exactly what I think of his trolling. It is sad that he stopped though once he had been outed, if it was worth posting attacking me whilst I didn’t know who he was, then why wasn’t I worth attacking when I did know who he was?
Betfair is a brilliant company, run by people who don’t care about it. I’ve put my neck on the line time and again fighting for it, and against corruption, and time and again the biggest obstacles have been Betfair staff themselves. Most of the things I have campaigned for – shutting reality tv markets at the time the lines close – changing game by game markets to an identical level of delay as match odds on tennis and snooker – fighting the people betting in-running from the USA (Betfair changed their terms and conditions to make betting from territories where people are not allowed to bet an offence) have all happened, and all these steps will boost Betfair’s growth and profits, but all were fought often quite fiercely against by Betfair staff.
I’ve also received a suspension without warning from posting on the BF forum. I asked for anything I have said wrong, any quote, but they will not release a copy of the thread (I had only saved about half of it), where three people betting from the USA on the US Open tennis had a firefight with each other a few months later on the BF forum. I posted on that thread after one of them made repeated accusations at a number of people – all of them anonymous other than as forumites except me (my real name is widely known, and I have been in the press a lot) – of cheating, saying it wasn’t true (it wasn’t true), and received fierce abuse. I was then permanently banned for “being involved in an exchange”, i.e. not having said anything wrong, but posting on a thread.
Mr Cruddace made it clear to me that in the then current climate, where two people had been arrested (the director of Bet on Sports?) by the US authorities for allowing gambling from the USA, that his job included the remit of protecting Black and the other Betfair board members from facing charges in the USA for allowing gambling from there. All the board members wanted it kept quiet, and a thread on the BF forum by three people all falling out with each other, outing each other as each in turn being people who were betting from the USA (to the tune of millions of pounds of wagers) was obviously something which Black and others would not want in the public domain. Hence two of the people were banned from the BF forum, but I was as well. They don’t trust me to keep my mouth shut, and as you can probably see from this post, they are right about that. The greater good comes first, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, and I will not stand back and let Betfair staff decide to allow huge damage to Betfair from insiders, and from people betting from jurisdictions where it is illegal to do so.
Betfair is an essentially brilliant company, but I don’t think they would ever hire anyone who cares about it, least of all me. I have put my neck on the line many times, and there is a satisfaction in protecting Betfair, and helping people nearly all of whom I will never meet, and nearly all of whom will never know it was me that campaigned fiercely, at significant personal cost, to protect them from insiders and certain members of Betfair staff.
Also worth giving a mention to Simon Rowlands who when Racing Editor of the The Sportsman did a good expose on the exchange shop at Cardiff. If I can find thelink I will post it.
Sharapova was 5-3 down to Hantuchova in the first set, so Hantuchova’s chances of winning went from about 25% at the start of the match up to about 57%. Sharapova then pulled it back to 5-5, at which point she was 1.54 to 1.55 to win.
Someone submitted probably around £50,000 backing HANTUCHOVA at 1.55.
Had the Betfair robot been in place it would have laid all the 1.55 on Hantuchova, matching it with odds on lays on Sharapova.
The graphic indicates £48,789 was matched at 1.55 (whilst much more was matched by the user taking every higher available price). There was also a large amount still left up on the screen, which the user presumably cancelled in time. You can see the grey spike where volume traded jumped from pennies to £50,000 (lol).
If the Betfair robot had arbed it instantly, then that would have been an instant risk free profit of £15,000 to £20,000.
Luckily that money, even if lost by that punter (the price never recovered, and Sharapova won 2-0) went to other punters, to be recirculated over the long run into the betfair pool.
Betfair’s robot was disgracefully set up to profit risk free from these kind of mistakes, to carve off risk free cheap money.
The Betfair Q&A was much better handled, and more professional, than I was expecting. It didn’t shirk accusations, and admitted culpability in some areas (such as poor customer relations). However, this bit is just wrong:
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“Anything we can do to address that and give them a better chance of getting a bet matched immediately helps the long-term growth of our markets.”
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That is not true. Betfair taking out more from the pot than previously, as is the case with their superbot, increases the rate of attrition of the userbase, and damages the long-term growth of the markets. If they were offering best execution the statement would be ok, but the positives from giving people a price mismatch are outweighed by the bad value being given to them. The following is also at best misleading and probably false:
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“As the process only matches opposing customer bets, and no bet is matched by this process selectively based on anything that happened in the event being bet on the in-play delay isn’t applicable.”
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It helps people smashing through money on one side backing, or the other side laying, to get filled on both sides. Many snides playing will only be whacking money through on the favourite, either backing or laying, so the Betfair superbot magnifies the clock beating money, in effect beating the clock on the opposing selection by proxy.
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“I accept that I did not consider the difference in-running, as it relates to people mistakenly posting the wrong price, which would take the book over-broke by a significant margin.”
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This would have been an obvious ramification of putting the robot on. I do find this hard to believe, even if I am happy to give Mark Davies the benefit of the doubt.
3. If (1) is the case do Betfair guarantee that they will never change the current policy of best execution for bet requests on the same selection? For instance if I put in a request to back a horse at 2.0 and there is someone offering 2.5 on Betfair on that horse will Betfair never back it at 2.5 with that person and lay it back to me at 2.0?
I think that goes very much against the philosophy of the company as we set it up, and I would resist it very strongly myself.
That isn’t what I’d call an overwhelmingly convincing "no" is it . LOL.
If you haven?t done so already, you really should pop along to The Sportsman?s forum (http://www.thesportsman.com and click on ?forum?). You can talk about pretty much anything that is permitted elsewhere, as well as one or two things that aren?t, or so it seems.
Take the subject of the speed of feeds of racing pictures. Threads on this have apparently been deleted on other forums, but a healthy debate on the subject has been taking place on The Sportsman?s boards. Check out ?ATR SIS Racetech ? The Truth? on the horse racing forum.?
The main bones of contention are the varying lags between events and their being broadcast, the reputed disappearance of one of those delays earlier this year followed swiftly by its reappearance, and what sometimes seems like reluctance on behalf of the parties involved to discuss the issue in detail.
There is some dispute about the precise time lags involved, but all parties seem to agree on the following: pictures on At The Races (ATR, a free-to-air dedicated racing channel as part of a Sky package) are approximately 1 sec behind those on Racing UK (RUK, a subscription-only dedicated racing channel) and 2 sec behind Satellite Information Services (SIS, which broadcasts largely, but by no means exclusively, to betting shops). ?
SIS pictures in turn are a small but nonetheless significant figure (some give it as 1 sec, some as 2 sec) behind real time.
The time delay between SIS pictures and ATR pictures (double that of between SIS and RUK pictures) in particular is crucial. The two platforms cover the same events many times each day. ATR point out that their service "is not exclusively for people betting in running"?and claim that the lag is necessary in order to deliver pictures of a sufficiently high quality.?
Two seconds might not seem like a lot to be getting hot under the collar about, but in that time a sprinter can have covered as much as 40 yards and a jumper can have fallen at a fence when it appears to others to be about to jump it foot-perfectly. ?
On such differences vast sums can be won and lost. And the thing is that many punters are clearly unaware of the time lags involved.
When the 2 sec gap between ATR and SIS reportedly disappeared one day earlier this year it seemed – to those who believe in everyone having as fair a crack of the whip as possible, at least – to be what is known as ?A Good Thing.?
When the gap was there again shortly after, it was only too easy to imagine that there were hidden agendas at play. ATR maintain that there is ?no real evidence yet that there was a change in the delay.? ?
Conspiracy theories often have no substance, but if allowed to fester they can do nearly as much harm as if they were true. It would be for the good of all punters if the various accusations were answered as fully and as openly as possible by the parties involved. It would be even better if an independent body were allowed to investigate such matters.
It would also be for the good of punters ? and in my view should be made statutory ? for the precise time delay to be displayed on all broadcasts of races. ?
When this was suggested to James Singer, Head of Marketing at ATR, his response was ?We don?t believe we have any obligation to caveat the fact that our pictures are live on screen ? no TV pictures are truly real-time, as you point out. Any obligation to in-running punters specifically would sit more with exchanges or bookmakers offering in-running markets I?d say.?
Matthew Imi, Chief Executive Officer for ATR, later added: ?if all the relevant parties voluntarily got together or if we were compelled by a regulatory body to display such information, then I am sure we would be happy to do it.? ?
There?s nothing like looking after the interests of your own customers.
The powers that be, entirely properly, go out of their way to protect the vulnerable punter through bodies such as GamCare. ?Vulnerable punter? might almost be a term coined to describe any individual who bets in running on an event without being entirely au fait with the degree to which they are at a disadvantage in the market.?
Meanwhile, a whole thriving industry exists on the back of the delays associated with pictures transmitted on the dedicated racing channels. Not only do punters with access to faster pictures ? such as those provided directly by SIS ? have the potential to make considerable sums of cash, but those who provide these faster pictures turn a pretty penny as well. Domestic subscription to SIS pictures weighs in at almost 7,000 per annum for a minimum contract of three years.
It should not be forgotten in all this that SIS provide the pictures for ATR, though it has never been suggested that they would attempt to dictate the length of the delay involved in the broadcasting of those pictures, of course.?
Exchange shops have sprung up, providing high-speed feeds and state-of-the-art technology for their users. The reason for this is clear: most of the punters in them make good money by betting in running. One such shop claimed that it had access to feeds that were ?even quicker than SIS?. I was told that I needed to book a place at the shop ?at least a week in advance?. Business is thriving, then.
There are a lot of people who are doing very well out of the status quo. The status quo is being bank-rolled, directly or indirectly, to a large degree by punters, many of whom are ignorant of precisely what is happening. ?
The least that can be expected is that someone, somewhere cares enough for such people to ensure that the facts are brought out into the open.
Interestingly Simon Rowlands then ended up working for Betfair and all has gone quiet now!!!
Betfair introduce a trap bet robot to artificially inflate short term profit at the expense of long term growth, and three weeks later, Black is revealed as cashing in much of his chips.
Puts the statement from Michael Robb on here saying there are no plans for Betfair shares to be traded into context - Betfair is undergoing a change of ownership in part, and the people that buy these stakes were going to be short changed if the trap bet bot could have been passed off as providing real profits.
Ed Murray, I have edited the formatting of your comment for better readability.
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Fawwon, thanks for the SportsMan Forum link. I will put it up in my list: http://www.midasoracle.org/links/
Still no answer from BetFair to that question:
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"Can Tony Clare confirm or deny that Betfair has recruited experienced odds compilers from the betting industry and traders from their own customer base with the purpose of boosting the GP on the bets taken by Betfair Malta?" http://www.midasoracle.org/200.....ltiples-2/
That’s obviously an unacceptable answer from Betfair. Shares are being sold off, and the question was swerved by pretending that stakes in the company can only be transferred through a flotation. That isn’t the case, there is the motive to provide a short term burst in profits, and the owners are selling their stakes. That is totally misleading from the Betfair Q&A.
I agree with Chris Hibbert here. I cannot understand the problem. All BetFair is doing is matching trades that are agreable to all parties yet were sitting there unfilled for no particularly good reason, except that the technology was not able to find them. They simply improved their matching technology.
The allegations about Malta traders is a different story, and I could understand people objecting to that if it’s true.
I have been busy this week but things are winding down a bit..
Dave, as I gathered it, the issue with matching was that Betfair had access to overrounds that no-one else did because they were able to jump to the front of the order queue, effectively freezing out other orders/cancellations at any time. This was especially important in back-and-forth events and amounted to an unadvertised rake in aggregate.
Jason, I think the allegation of queue jumping made in some of the comments is based upon a misunderstanding. BF is just matching the orders when a match becomes available, not inserting new orders at the front of the queue.
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The new method will deprive outside traders access to these riskless arb opportunities, so they may feel like they are being jumped by BF, but really it is just BF doing its matching job better.
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The only issue in my view was the capture of the overround because less sophisticated traders were not aware of the implied odds available, given the existing offers on related outcomes in a multi-outcome event, leading the traders to post over-generous offers to the system. BF should use an approach like the ‘phantom offer’ generation that Chris Hibbert explained a while back, to show the effective prices available. That approach would leave BF out of the overround business and back to collecting a commission, only, on bets matched.
Before Betfair introduced this robot they took a maximum of 5 cents out of each market for every dollar lost. Now they were both charging commission and extracting risk free revenue. It is surprising that you don’t recognise this as an issue for exchange users. Losers will lose more quickly, and winners on average will win less, plus the greater the Betfair rake, the lower liquidity will become.
Please imagine a two runner market, England v Australia at cricket. If there are odds available to back on both runners, before a bet placed, and a 2nd bet placed on second later on the other side, would both be matched against onscreen odds. With the robot, the 2nd bet wouldn’t be if the first bet caused the market to go overbroke. The market has gone overbroke because of the first bet, but it is only 4 seconds after the 2nd bet has been placed that the Betfair robot takes the two overbroke orders. The person submitting the bet then misses out, despite submitting a bet 4 seconds before the betfair robot took the onscreen bet that was available, to crossmatch it. There is definitely clock-beating, in comparison to the market before the robot was turned on. The effect is identical to a zero second delay robot being put on the market by Betfair, a privilege no user has.
Arbing in running is literally almost impossible, but if you look at the example above, Betfair would have made a $30,000 risk free profit if they hadn’t switched the robot off, on the Sharapova v Hantuchova match. This is unethical, to profit not from giving a good service, but to profit from users mistakes, something which Betfair has claimed to try to be upholding by banning trap bettors. You can see from the spike in the graph that most of the unlucky person’s money was matched, but there was still I think over $40,000 still up on the board unmatched which I believe the user managed to cancel in time – something which the Betfair robot would not have allowed.
There are many issues here, which do deserve respect not simplification.
Fawwon; "allowed" may be a bit steep. However, there is clearly still an issue regarding some users having access to more real time pictures than others. And how interesting indeed, that the man who first publicised this, should end up worlking for Betfair.
How "interesting" that as a final resort, Betfair elects to simply bar dissenters from posting in the "forum" thus cementing its development into a propaganda vehicle instead.
Nothing unusual there. History is littered with those who thought they could warp reality.
Starting with the fable of "The Emperor’s Clothes"
Of course, he was naked, wasn’t he?
Adonis
TRADING REPORT
Published: 01/03/2006 (Sport) Matt Williams
THE time delays between SIS and ATR (other channels come into the
argument, too) are a hindrance, and it would be a major boost for
in-running markets if we were all punting on a level playing field with
regard to the live television feed.
Yesterday the delay between the two channels mentioned was negligible,
and it will be interesting to see if it’s repeated today – let’s hope it’s not a one-off. This was the moment Matt "Trading Post" Williams wrote the wrong thing. Strange how he was silenced and his RUK appearances evaporated soon after.
This is the 2nd article that Simon Rowlands wrote on the subject of the scalping of the average Betfair customer…..
"Most of these are big hitters" I was told. "The ones on the
front row would all be among Betfair’s top UK customers and paying
tens of thousands in commission each year." They work hard for their
winnings as well – many of them are there all day. The BMWs and the
Mercs had brought them here from as far afield as Surrey and the
Midlands.
The John Lovell Exchange Shop website had promised "a friendly
atmosphere". Friendly if you were a regular, maybe, but not it seems
if you were a curious reporter: I was treated with some hostile stares.
John Lovell, chairman of the Wales and West Bookmakers Association, was
more welcoming. A pioneering spirit with an eye for the main chance, he
can claim to have been the first bookmaker to have used computers on
course in the UK. While the first exchange shop was established by
Henry Spurway in the centre of Edinburgh, Lovell has gone to school on
what went before and recognised that a High Street presence is
unnecessary just as long as enough serious punters know about you.
Seats at his shop are booked out weeks in advance.
Lovell introduced me to his sons, one of whom recently gained a Degree
in Economics and Gambling Studies from the University of Salford and
the other of whom was "on a sort of gap year after getting straight
As in everything at school". I later spotted the latter trading
busily in the front row – a change from travelling the world I suppose.
The Lovell coffers are being filled from a number of different sources
it seems, but Lovell himself gave every impression of being in
something of a quandary. The Cardiff shop, expanded 15 months ago at a
cost of £70,000, specifically for this purpose, had taken a while to
establish itself but is now a roaring success. He would like to open
other shops like it, but his existing customers would rather he did
not.
The John Lovell Exchange Shop is one of a very small number – Lovell
himself mentioned three – of such ventures in the UK. It reportedly
costs £30 a day for a seat, and, to a man, each one of the 16 traders
at the Cardiff shop cough up the money so that they can concentrate on
in-running betting. More shops would mean more in-running punters. But
not just any type of in-running punters: winning ones. The mug money
- the pot of gold in all this – would then have to be shared
between a greater number.
The in-running punters at Lovell’s shop are winners for a number of
reasons, not least because they are clever chaps, with fast reflexes,
who can read a race and know their horses and jockeys into the bargain.
The crucial element in the set-up is their access to the fastest
pictures available.
The fact that the John Lovell outfit is, in some respects at least, a
conventional betting shop means that it can gain access to SIS pictures
more comprehensive than would be available to a punter at home. As
explained in the Rowley File a fortnight ago, there is some dispute
about the precise time lags involved on the various broadcasting
platforms, but all parties seem to agree on the following: pictures on
At The Races are approximately one second behind those on Racing UK and
two seconds behind SIS. SIS pictures in turn are a small but
nonetheless significant figure – some give it as one second, some as
two – behind real time. RaceTech pictures have the shortest delay of
all but, according to the company, are only available to the public at
racecourses.
The odd second or two here or there might not seem like a lot to be
getting hot under the collar about, but in two seconds a sprinter can
have covered as much as 40 yards and a jumper can have fallen at a
fence when it appears to others to be about to jump it foot-perfectly.
On such differences vast sums of money can be won and lost.
Flat racing is even more popular than jumps racing among Lovell’s
in-running punters, somewhat to my surprise. "The public seems to be
warier about the consequences of betting in-running on jumps, but a lot
can happen in a short space of time in a Flat race", I was told.
Indeed.
Someone surely needs to point out to the armchair punter just what he
is up against if he is to avoid being eaten alive by something a long
way further up the in-running food chain.
Arbitraging bets is the same thing as matching bets. They are equivalent. When someone places a bid at price 10 and someone else places an ask at price 9, there is an "arbitrage" that the exchange eliminates by matching the bets. When the exchange arbs a multi-outcome market, it’s still matching, just in a more complicated way.
Having said that, I now see that perhaps there is something unfair going on. In this new type of matching, Betfair is apparently charging the bettor their full price, rather than giving them the "best available price". I can see how that is a fundamental change that deserves legitimate criticism. It’s as if in the above example, the exchange charged the buyer 10 and only gave the seller 9, keeping the spread for itself.
This is a great quote from Rab that summarizes nicely IMHO: "betting exchanges should merely be viewed as traditional bookmakers who have taken the decision to minimise risk (as any traditional bookmaker can and often will do) by only taking one bet when they know they can find another punter to take the other side of that bet"
Ed
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I think you’ve got the wrong end of the stick with the Daily Telegraph article. I have a friend who works at Betfair who told me recently about what the DT article mentions. Basically it involves some sort of corporate re-structuring and as part of that Betfair have taken the opportunity to offer all shareholders the right to sell up to a certain percentage of their shares back to the company (this is consistent with the DT article’s description of a share buy-back). Therefore as there is no outside investor that shares are being sold to, the suggestion that the bot was introduced to boost profits for the share sale is probably incorrect. The timing of the bot and the share buy-back appear to be purely coincidental.
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On the question of the bot, my take on it is that if/when it is switched back on with best execution (so that the customers benefit from the better prices and Betfair does not profit from the cross-matching), then this can only be a good thing for the majority of Betfair punters (obviously those that currently employ bots to take advantage of markets going overbroke are excepted). I was curious to know whether you agree with that view.
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Although I think Betfair were wrong to introduce the bot without best execution (particularly without announcing it!!), I think they are to be applauded in their U-turn in switching it off and their commitment to only turning it back on when they can provide best execution.
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Roger
Fawwon
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Although Simon Rowlands did work at Betfair for a while, my understanding is that he stopped working for them some time ago. I know this because the guy I know at Betfair (as mentioned in my post above) used to occasionally work with Simon and I recall him telling me that Simon had left.
Roger
Roger – I think you will find that the tentacles of Betfair stretch far enough. It’s just strange that he suddenly skipped over to BF after helping to highlight the cosy deals they have with these Exchange Shops. My guess is that Simon has gone over to the dark side. Same as poor ole "Trading Post" who was reduced to describing how ATR Chief Exec wouldn’t return his telephone calls!
Roger, thankyou for the post.
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I do agree, a bot with best execution would be absolutely fine. In effect, it would reduce the market to a single runner, with equivalent backs and lays being matched against each other, giving the 2nd party the best possible odds (the first party has always submitted a bet, and if it is unmatched and remains on the board to be taken by someone else, then it is matched at the price asked for, whereas the second party if there is a price improvement will reap the benefit from that).
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I’ve never met Simon Rowlands, we used to work for the same newspaper, but I was an outside contributor, and wrote all my columns from home. He’s always come across well on different forums, and is well spoken of. I really don’t think there is any chance at all that Betfair employed him to "shut him up" as the case were.
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I find it hard to believe Mark Davies claim that he did not realise the implications of putting the bot on in-running. That does not match with the comments that a number of people were given face to face by a range of Betfair staff, where the consensus given was that this was ‘fair game’, and they were very happy with it. It was pretty obvious there were major flaws with it, particularly because it acted as a trap bet robot, with the major benefactor from customer errors actually being Betfair itself. Mark Davies is a clever guy with a background in finance I believe, and the flaws were pretty obvious. Some internal Betfair staff were apparently against it, but the people in favour of switching on the robot won the day, until the backlash.
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Most of the quotes coming from Betfair staff to a wide range of people was that this was very much ‘fair game’ in their eyes. They were wrong. The voices were amusingly not unanimous though, good to see that a minority were still switched on and saw this for what it was .
Hello there to all. First of all i would like to appologize for my poor language. I have an expierence with beating the clock at BF. It is my strategies at all (not for soccer betting. It is possible to beat the clock only if you are at the field). All i know is that:
The delay time between the field (when the game and the TV channel is in one country) an the TV channel is approx 2 sec. (The TV channel provided by cable operator).
The delay time between one TV channel provided by cable and satelite is approx 3 sec.
I have personaly tested via phone call and talk with my father.
I am not casting doubts about Simon Rowlands integrity but no1 is going to pay him to write articles thatknock BF’s interests. Now Matt Williams is another matter entirely as the man wants to have his cake and eat it. Why he didn’t resign over the ATR scandal and what he wrote is a msytery. Maybe he has tried punting for a living and prefers an income to put bread on the table?
Betfair Customer Services 19 Mar 18:37 Magician: Specifically did the GC APPROVE this change to the matching algorithm – or where they simply made aware of it and did not grant or reject formal approval
We did not seek Gambling Commission pre-approval for cross matching before we launched it because we don’t believe that this was required. However, we were in dialogue with the Commission in relation to the licensing status of cross matching and we would always be happy to address any questions the Commission has on any part of our business.
In a sperate question and answer session Betfair was asked whether the proposed changes raised any regulatory issues. Whilst it said that it had been in contact with the GC as regards the licencing of the bet matching system, in this instance it suggested that it had actually explained the proposed in detail.
Q. Does this change raise any regulatory issues?A. As a matter of course Betfair highlights any changes to the code base or operations to the relevant regulator, in this case The Gambling Commission . Before any change was made Betfair approached the GC and explained the proposed changes in detail.
There would appear to be some discrepancy here, as regards what Betfair did discuss with the GC, and this is something that I will seek to clear up with the Commission itself.
"We did not seek Gambling Commission pre-approval for cross matching before we launched it because we don’t believe that this was required."
This is disgusting. Betfair’s own staff were saying that the extra revenue on top of commission from mismatching backers and layers, and pocketing the spread was about 15 to 20% above the normal commission raised on the markets it was put on. They actually think that a change of this magnitude does not need to even be mentioned to the Gambling Commission? This change which acts to magnify and punish much more severely any user mistakes, with Betfair pocketing the difference risk free?
I have little respect for past Betfair bashers who have attacked Betfair often unfairly particularly in the earlier years. There are many good things to say about the original exchanges, and later Betfair, but the way Betfair have taken a stranglehold in the market, and looked for ways to exploit weak regulation, its really, really hard to find anything positive to say about Betfair at this moment in time. Their I.T. is very impressive, and the poker is quite good. Their claims to “not have understood” how this worked and would impact on both users and themselves are scarcely credible at best, and the Gambling Commission’s remit is to protect fairness in gambling. Perhaps they have a disdain for the GC. The whole episode is quite simply astonishing.
Let’s be objective here. In order to offset an inefficient aspect of their markets, Betfair made a decision to introduce a flawed piece of match betting software, which afforded them the opportunity to seek risk free arbitrage opportunities using their clients money. Nasty and most likely illegal, as it is unlikely that said clients have given Betfair the right to use their money in such a manner. The question we are left to ask vis a vis Betfair’s action, is, was it a case of bad faith or bad judgement? Either way, the fact that it has happened and the subequent climbdown has served to erode trust between Betfair and its traders; and one can surmise that if Betdaq were not so crap, many Betfair users would be switching sides.
 "Nasty and most likely illegal, as it is unlikely that said clients have given Betfair the right to use their money in such a manner. "what betfair have done/did is perfectly legal and is in the terms and conditions on the site.betfair was not matching 2 players and keeping the differnce, their bookmaking operation was taking on both bets in the same way a traditional bookmaker takes bets.it states clearly in the t+c’s of the site that betfair reserves the right to match bets with its bookmaking operation instead of matching customers with each other.
The thing is though Graham, that Betfair’s tv adverts paint the exact opposite picture.
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEfvb69-zmo
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"unlike traditional bookmakers, Betfair punters bet against each other, and matching a bet, means they can choose their own odds. that’s why in six years we’ve become the uk’s busiest online betting company".
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I would say they have to decide if they want to match punters bets against Betfair’s traders, or if they want to let punters bet against each other. Either people should be matched at best price, and Betfair’s traders should stop betting into the BF markets, or the tv advert should be pulled. There’s no reason not to make a fresh tv advert, but this one is surely misleading. Is it another case of BF wanting to have their cake and eat it? We’ll do one thing, but tell everyone we’re doing something else? As usual, I’m a bit lost with their logic.
P Benckendorf –
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to be honest I don’t think Betfair cares about its ‘traders’, and I can’t really see much of an economic case for it caring. The big winners from gambling are William Hill & Ladbrokes (not Betfair), and it is the mug money which finances that, both from small punters, and in some cases, from big losing "high rollers".
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I have heard some traders say how important they are to Betfair etcetera because they "pay" x thousand pounds commission per year. The truth is that anyone who logs on on January 1st, and takes out money in winnings over the year, has paid no ‘commission’ at all.
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Betfair is held back by its own management team, who are only just beginning to appreciate how to make Betfair a success – look after the little fish. The roulette machines in the traditional bookmakers shops are goldmines for them, but for each pound put in, the customer will get 99 cents back. Betfair have tried the opposite approach, to try to keep increasing the rake (by fair means, or in the case of bet mismatching, by foul). It isn’t very clever, and is costing Betfair money and growth, in terms of an opportunity cost.
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The valuable customers are the ones who lose small amounts consistently over the long run, and keep feeding their habit. The bet mismatching robot failed because it punished people who made mistakes (which is part and parcel of using the BF interface), like on the Sharapova v Hantuchova match shown above. Those customers will never come back.
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BF don’t really care what people think, they care about trying to scoop as much money as they can, as quickly as they can. It doesn’t help punters that the Gambling Commission seems to be so toothless that BF have actually bypassed it, not even bothering to notify them of their bet mismatching robot .
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Punters need a better, more sustained run for their money, and BF needs to stop the board members putting in get-rich-quick bet mismatching robots, and try to deliver a better run for the punters money. That’s where the goldmine is for them, if they can begin to appreciate it.
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Shrewdies go where the fish are. The best thing the BF board could do for BF itself is to ban electrified trawler nets, and try to make sure the shrewdies are armed with at best fishing rods. There are ways to do this, but I don’t think they understand why its in their own interests to level the playing field. Instead they will fail to reach the profitability levels of William Hill & Ladbrokes, because they are going for the high attrition rate, scoop the cash NOW, decisions. Whilst the traditional bookies continue to rake it in from their very low rate of attrition games .
I think what Herr Benckendorf was referring to, was the simple act of Betfair matching punters’ bets, not at best-price, and pocketing the difference….can you show me where within Betfair’s terms and conditions it says that it is legal for them do this. The fact that the profits from this sleight of hand were paid into the company’s bookmaking operation is neither here nor there. The act, as PB says, is risk free arbitrage using their clients money.
There is a braoder issue at play here, which nobody has yet disucssed and that is Betfair, the "betting exchange" and the matter of self-regulation.
Some may be aware that Mark Davies likes to call Betfair a bookmaker, and that as regards regulation, he seems to have convinced the Gambling Commission that this is indeed the case.
The reason, for this, of course, is that he fears that Betfair may end up being regulated by the FSA under more stringent and tighter controls.
On the question of the legailty of Betfair’s bookmaking arm, let me introduce you to the concept of "bucketing" which has been defined as a "method of doing business wherein orders of customers for the purchase or sale of stocks/commodities for future delivery, instead of being executed by bona fide purchases and sales with other traders on an exchange, are simply matched and offset in the soliciting firm or exchanges own office with the firm itself taking the opposite side of the customers’ orders." Purdy v. Commodity Futures Trading Com’n, 968 F.2d 510, 520 (5th Cir.1992).
Said bucketing diminishes the hedging function of exchanges, and has been proven to have a detrimental effect on market liquidity, which, as you may know, is essential to market information aggregation, hedging, effectiveness, and the availability of a competitive market. In time, bucketing reduces the number of participants in a market and creates greater potential for the exercise of market power and distortion of prices.
If Betfair were a properly regulated exchange, might we be suggesting that it could be open to a charge of bucketing?
The cloak of being a loosely regulated bookmaker, has in the past saved Betfair against the charge that it kept the commission in situations where bets were deemed to have been fradulent. Now it would seem to be saving them, in the wake of the charge, that it "inadvertently" introduced a bet matching sytem that allowed it to rake in excess profits over and above its normal commission. However, if it were a properly regulated exchange, it would be bound to act with the utmost objectivity, impartiality, honesty and good faith, and unable to act in a manner designed to further its own selfish interest and personal gain.
Ambiquity suits Betfair but not its traders. Betfair, is an exchange and it should be regulated accordingly…however, one suspects that that is a task for beyond the brains at the Gambling Commission.
My "a priori" is to view the prediction exchanges as pure event derivative exchanges, not as bookmakers —but I’m willing to listen carefully to the other side of the argument. http://www.midasoracle.org/200.....bookmaker/
"can you show me where within Betfair’s terms and conditions it says that it is legal for them do this" http://content.betfair.com/abo.....Conditions 6.14 Notwithstanding any statement to the contrary in these Terms and Conditions, TSEL may elect to nominate one or more of its subsidiaries or joint venture companies to act as counterparty in respect of bets or offers for bets involving a certain category of its customers or a certain bet-type category (a "Nominated Counterparty"). If we do so in relation to our agreement with you we will take reasonable steps to bring this to your attention. In any event, where you attempt to match a bet with a customer who is bound by terms that specify they will bet against a Nominated Counterparty, you shall be deemed to have matched your bet with the Nominated Counterparty as if it were that customer to the extent of the amount so matched. so betfair’s slight of hand is to match the "cross matched" bets not with each other, but with the bookmaking arm. this is something betfair did freely admit in the Q&A session.
"If we do so in relation to our agreement with you we will take reasonable steps to bring this to your attention."
It is quite clear that they made no attempt to take reasonable steps to inform their customers as to what they were doing; thereby voiding the terms and conditions;
Beyond that, the fact that it states that a Betfair subsid may act as a counterparty to a bet, does not in itself allow that subid to take profits over and above the bare commission that forms a central part of the Betfair contract.
Pleasing to see that I’m not alone in thinking the BF board have a very odd policy in trying to generate revenue and profit.
- http://site.forum.betfair.com/.....ID=1444566
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" The Magician (1)26 Mar 17:45
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consistant losers should be on 1%
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consistant winners should be on 5% or more
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in fact – remove the entire comission system and replace it with a tax… the biggest winners pay the most ( simple)"
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People who value the service most, and would be willing to pay the most for the service, should pay the most to use it. . Is it really that hard to work out?
The trap bet mismatching robot has gone back on according to the latest BF announcement, but as I understand it, only for reciprocal odds that are exactly at the price request by the two parties. This was part of the statement
- "2. Some customers also expressed a concern that bets placed in error are more likely to be matched than before. Whilst we haven’t observed this occurring in practice, and if it did we’d be uniquely positioned to refund a customer disadvantaged as a result, we recognise that it’s a concern for some customers.
- This would have been the case on the Sharapova v Hantuchova match highlighted above, where the user instead of losing roughly $40,000, would have lost $40,000 had they closed out immediately, plus another $30,000 to $40,000 to the Betfair robot.
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It is good to see BF acknowledge the trap bet flaw in their robot, and I’d like to see a cast iron commitment put in place that if a user makes a monumental screw up, as happened in this case, where nearly $100,000 was placed on the wrong selection, that BF refund all money that it pockets from the trap bet function of its robot, back to that user. They should never have introduced a trap bet robot – trap bets are one of the worst features/flaws of the way BF run their markets, and scooping up tens of thousands of dollars risk free from a genuine user error may indeed be giving a BF user a bet being "matched" at the price requested", but it doesn’t look right ethically. Sure BF can keep the money if a user makes a massive mistake and clicks the wrong button, but the question is why? Great to see they have acknowledged the flaw in the robot though, and hopefully anyone unlucky enough to make a massive error won’t be further punished in the future by the BF trap bet robot, over and above the damage they will already sustain from clicking on a wrong selection.
On the biggest day of the betting year; a day which should have represented a showcase for their fledgling SP system, Betfair were forced into a major U-Turn, when the system did not work. Accordingly, hundreds of punters found their bets unmatched, many, presumably unaware of the fact;
”
Betfair were forced to issue the following statement, when, after suspension of its Grand National win market the company noticed that the returned Betfair SPs “were not appropriate to the race”. Accordingly, the company reversed the procedure and manually determined the BSP using “methods at its disposal”; “We apologise for any inconvenience this has caused. Betfair Grand National SPThe reconciliation of the Betfair SP for the Grand National win market resulted in prices which we believe were significantly unfair for backers of some horses, most obviously the winner. Therefore we unreconciled the Betfair SP to return what we believe were fair prices. As a result of unreconciling bets after the race, some matched bets (which would have been winning bets for customers) became unmatched bets. In addition, some customers may have traded in-play based on bets they believed had been matched. If you believe that you have been disadvantaged as a result of this, please contact us at bets@betfair.com. We will look at our records to determine the amount you should be due and provide compensation accordingly. Please be aware that this may take some time and it is unlikely that we will be able to address all enquiries until next week.”
Rab Bibater –
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What they have done literally makes me sick. It is unbelievable. I also cannot believe that they are thrusting the impetus onto customers to work out if they were disadvantaged etcetera. It really is quite simple – if someone places a back or lay that wins, they should get paid out. Not they should wait to see if the BF SP system screws up, see if their matched bet is now no longer matched, and then have to beg BF on the off chance of getting compensation. What on earth is going on? Its unbelievable.
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“Betfair: The bookmaker where you can place a bet that we void afterwards because we thought we’d get bad publicity that we only paid out just over 3 to 1 on the Grand National winner. Punters may or may not be compensated if we voided a winning bet they placed, but only if that customer spots our hidden away announcement, AND complains to us in writing”.
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Sorry, but its absolutely unbelievable, and pathetic. Every customer who had a bet matched should get paid out. End of story!!!!
Yes, it’s a National dissgrace. But what is really fascinating , is that once vis a vis the media, another Betfair balls up is simply being brushed under the carpet.
Nothing from the sycophantic pups at the Guardian; nothing from the horse racing industry bible the Racing Post. With friends such as these Betfair need not worry too much what it does, or, what indeed, it does wrong. To the Betfair Poker Heist; The and the Betfair Bet Matching Fiasco we can now add The Betfair Starting Price Balls UP.
But as nobody is prepared to report on these matters, who cares…..
Ed
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Just noticed that there’s more about this SP fiasco on this thread. I assume that your comments above were made before Betfair’s announcement (see here: http://www.midasoracle.org/200.....ent-17858) that they would be compensating everyone. Or is what you describe above still the case?
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Thanks
Roger
You should have carried on posting from your home computer. As I strongly suspected, and can now verify, you are a Betfair employee;
This really does portray you and your company in a rather pathetic and desperate light, and I hope it is something that Mr Masse (whose blog you were so quick to please, when he put up his pro-Betfair comments) will now expose you for the underhand sneak that you are. (Not to mention your so called advice to ED to apply to work at Betfair!!!).
Another massive Betfair own goal!!
Chris, I hope you will now email them in order to find out whether these underhand postings were sanctioned, for if this were to happen at any other company, the person concerned would be sacked. At the very least you should dig out all of “Roger Duncan’s” postings and expose him for the fraud that he is.
P.S. Congratulations, now you know how much your blog is really rattling these guys.
“Information related to ‘213.86.197.128 – 213.86.197.191′ inetnum: 213.86.197.128 – 213.86.197.191
netname: SPORTING-EXCHANGE
descr: The sporting Exchange
descr: 14-16 Peterborough Road
Rab
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You are a funny bloke. Although given your other posts and your apparent hostility to everything connected to Betfair, your over-reaction is perhaps to be expected. I am not sure I understand why my posting on a forum dedicated to prediction markets without revealing my true identity is so scandalous (and merits me being sacked!).
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My posts on this forum (and on any other forum I care to post on) are my own personal views. Obviously they may be tinged with a slight bias given I work for Betfair, but I was a customer long before I started working at Betfair last year. In any case, I don’t think I have been disingenuous in my posting (other than to say that I was only a Betfair customer). I felt that revealing my link to Betfair would have meant that my posts would have been dismissed as the biased comments of an employee. Maybe with hindsight I should have been up-front about this and taken that chance.
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I certainly do not think I was being particularly biased in any of my postings. Just occasionally chipping in where I thought the full story was not being told (as I have done above). Please feel free to point out which of my posts you find so objectionable.
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My comments about Midas Oracle were also all genuine. I have been reading this blog for some time now and I am a big fan. Chris is very fair and balanced in his blogging and the criticisms he makes about Betfair (such as Betfair’s blog) are well reasoned.
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As for my comment to Ed about applying for a job, that was a genuine question. I have seen him post a few times on various forums (particularly on the Betfair forum) and I think he knows his stuff. Unlike some people that want to have a go at Betfair for the sake of it, I think most of what he says has merit. I obviously didn’t know all the history Ed has with Betfair, which sounds like he may have put a few peoples’ noses out of joint.
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Roger
How did you get the IP info about one commenter? From Niall O’Connor’s wordpress e-mails or from your subscribe-to-comments e-mails?
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Is your true name “Rab Bibater”?
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Pro- and anti-BetFair can discuss freely here.
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The error of “Roger Ducan” was to say he is a BetFair customer. He should have not stated that.
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In the coming years, the relationship between the prediction exchanges and the blogs/forums will evolve. As Robert Scoble said in his book (”Naked Conversations”), the Web is a conversation between people within a same vertical. For it to be an interesting conversation, people should respect each other and acknowledge their interlocutors’ arguments. It’s a long road ahead.
Roger Duncan –
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It is good to see the reversal of BF’s earlier stupid position, and BF is now paying out to all affected customers proactively, rather than insisting that its up to each customer to work out if they were affected and try to submit claims etcetera. ALL MATCHED BETS SHOULD GET PAID OUT ON THE GRAND NATIONAL. The wally at BF who decided that the solution to a PR disaster 3.3 to 1 on the winner was to uncouple matched bets, so that the losers still lost, but the winners had their side of the bet uncoupled and lapsed instead of paid out, is just blatant theft! I’m not even tubthumping, you can’t decide after an event to not pay out the winners, because the robot you built yourself gave you a price that your PR department aren’t happy with.
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I have no ‘personal’ problem with anyone at BF, but I have told Andrew Black face to face that I could not disagree more strongly with his decision to allow phone vote insiders back on to reality tv markets, and his decision to order the BF integrity team to allow insiders to hammer the markets. For people who try to bet fairly, Black’s behaviour and decision making is a disaster, he should never have been allowed to reverse Mark Davies efforts against corruption, and he would be vilified if he broadcast his views widely that he has no interest at all in betting being “fair”. I’m glad that when they realised there was a risk of the NOTW exposing Black at the end of 2006, they backed down. I’m not sure its fair to say I have put Black’s “nose out of joint” though. When you’re a full time professional gambler, you can’t afford to let fanciful whims of a person with some very curious ideas dictate that markets are held open for long periods of time when the results are known to insiders (and being bet on). What is the choice? Stand back and let him do it, or campaign for markets to be closed once the result is known? I asked politely for several months at every level, and was told no. The NOTW pick up on it, and suddenly its achieved. Says a lot really,…
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Roger Duncan, if you were one of the people behind reversing the latest BF dumb decision to unmatch bets, then well done. If you were one of the people that made the original decision, then you’re a plonker. I hope it wasn’t you ! . I am delighted it has been reversed, it was absolutely disgusting that they could just unmatch bets and used the winnings that would have been paid to customers who had placed winning bets, to massage the SP back up to a PR friendly level.
Rab –
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Any BF member of staff who is open-minded, balanced, and prepared to think about the overall picture, is an asset both to BF and BF customers. Whoever Roger Duncan is, he is obviously not Andrew Black (who isn’t open-minded), and he is not BF lawyer O’Reilly (who was outed after posting endlessly attacking me, my sex life etcetera, and who is at the very Uriah-Heepish end of the scale where he rushes to tell Emperor’s how wonderful their clothes are).
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I did an econometric project analysing political decision making (based on samples from Italy), where the conclusion was that the more functions/societies/organisations a politician was a member of, the better decisions they made. The skill of listening to people. ‘I’m pro-Betfair and anti-corruption, which is not an ideal position to be in, when there are a tiny minority of BF staff who are pro-corruption, who say they “reject if you can’t win you can’t lose”, and have “no problem if people are matched against other people who know the actual result”. The people who don’t listen at BF have a number of traits – aggression, dishonesty, fibbing, sleight of hand – , but there are people who are both intelligent and open-minded, and there is a reason why BF have reversed their decision to not pay out a number of people who made winning bets on the Grand National. That reason is probably because some people within BF have listened, and realised they were disgustingly wrong to void winning bets. Much has been said on BF racing forum and gen betting forum. If contributions on Midas Oracle help too then great. Black has said to me that he won’t let me post on the BF forum, which to be fair is no surprise, but I haven’t said anything wrong, and the people that should be banned from posting anywhere are Black & O’Reilly.
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There is a chance that Roger Duncan may have read some of the posts on here and pulled someone at BF aside and said “hold on mate, we have got a problem here”. Then fair play. The more that people at BF are intelligent and open-minded, rather than Mugabe-esque, bigoted and aggressive, the better. The stuff O’Reilly was posting up about me was absolutely disgusting, but he should have kept on behaving like that after he was outed.
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Posters like Roger Duncan (who may even possibly be Black or O’Reilly, who knows), seemingly posting with an open mind, should be welcomed on to Midas Oracle. The more there are intelligent people listening to the real argument, and not the propaganda from a tiny minority of BF staff, the better.
I do feel the need to add one more thing
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I have campaigned for many things (markets shut once the result is known, changes to tennis game by game markets, snooker frame markets, football match odds markets, and tackling the betting from the USA, the first four of which were achieved, and the US one had BF change their t&c’s to ban people from betting from the US), but there was one more thing I campaigned for, and they have put it in place with this racing decision
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A few years ago, on the Christmas number one market, BF were offering a number of runners, including “Gary Jules”. A few weeks later, the song ‘Mad World’ was released, but was by M.Andrews ft Gary Jules. Someone in BF voided all the bets on Gary Jules, and introduced a fresh runner M.Andrews ft Gary Jules. By this point instead of being a 50/1 outsider, it was a strong contender. People who had backed at the 50/1 were majorly annoyed, it was that single that they were betting on to be christmas number one, and ok, it was M.Andrews ft Gary Jules, but there was no need to change the original runner, because everyone knew what they were betting on. Jimmy White changed his name for a week as PR stunt to Jimmy Brown (to advertise Brown Sauce), but likewise if you had bet on Jimmy White, and if he won that tournament, you knew what you were betting on, even though his name for a few days wasn’t Jimmy White anymore.
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IBAS ruled that BF were wrong to void the Gary Jules bets, and BF paid out I think £50,000 to Gary Jules backers, a sum wildly above the actual commission generated by that market. The thing is though, they paid out EVERY back bet on the original selection. So if you had bet £50 at 10/1, and laid £50 at 9/1, BF credited your account with £500 profit, despite the fact you were only £50 green on Gary jules, and level the rest of the field. This is ridiculous. You could have backed £100 at 500/1, and laid £100 at 500/1, that does not mean BF should then stick £50,000 in your account. It was a stoopid decision to do that. These markets are heavily traded, and BF paid out way more in compensation than they should have done.
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something similar(ish) then happened on UK Big Brother 5. BF paid out on the wrong evictee for one of the evictions. It was a ridiculously stupid decision to pay out randomly on the wrong person, a number of us tried to explain to BF they had made a massive error, but they waited for IBAS to tell them that paying out on someone who hadn’t been evicted as the evictee, was a bit of a silly thing to do. However, BF’s and BF’s customers interests are intertwined I believe (the Circular Flow of Income) and I couldn’t see why paying out all the winning back bets but not losing lay bets would have been in BF customers interests – there was a risk BF would stop running these novelty markets entirely. Sure it would have been a nice windfall for some people if they had just randomly paid out everyone’s winning back bets, but the changed I campaigned for was to pay out the difference in people’s positions between the two selections, i.e. if they would have won more had they been paid out on the correct runner, THEN credit their accounts with the difference. That seemed fair, not paying out randomly every winning back bet irrespective of if that person had laid it off completely.
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It saved Bf a fortune to do it that way instead of the Gary Jules way, and it was the right thing to do. I’m pleased that this way of doing things has been maintained for the Grand National bets .
“Posters like Roger Duncan (who may even possibly be Black or O’Reilly, who knows), seemingly posting with an open mind, should be welcomed on to Midas Oracle.”
Ed Murray
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Thank you for your posts.
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I was not involved in any of the decisions made following the Grand National. I have read elsewhere that Betfair always intended to compensate everyone affected on the Grand National, although I agree that this doesn’t appear to have been communicated very well.
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Betfair is growing very quickly and in lots of different directions (for example, different product developments/enhancements and internationally into different territories). It is a very exciting time for the company. However, like any company, it is not perfect and it will occasionally make mistakes.
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I DO think that it is right that customers and other interested parties have high expectations and give Betfair a hard time when things don’t go completely to plan. I think it keeps the management on their toes. Although I don’t know anything about the various criticisms you highlight above, I do think that for the most part Betfair has been very good news for punters over the last few years and, with the odd exception, it has been run very well. These were my observations before I started working for the company and they remain so today.
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Roger
Ps. FWIW, I am not David O’Reilly or Andrew Black or anyone else that wields that kind of power! My job description is far more modest than theirs!
I think they had no initial intention whatsoever of compensating everyone who had winning bets voided for no reason. The u-turn was pretty much forced on BF because it wasn’t just bad practise, it is clearly because voiding the winning side of the bets (but not the losing ones of those bets) for no reason other than the PR department not wanting a 3.3 to 1 Grand National winner, is actually stealing. I wish I could think of a stronger word, but you cannot decide to retrospectively void the winnings that would have accrued to winners, and have the losers losses stand.
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BF have no understanding that whilst they weren’t the first exchange (it doesn’t really matter who was first), if BF hadn’t bought out flutter and cornered the market, another company would have arisen to facilitate p2p online betting. It is the invention of the internet that brought about the betting revolution, not any miraculous benevolence or inspiration on the part of any of the past or present BF team.
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I started betting on BF mainly on specials/reality tv market, so put yourself in my position, where I have seen the front page headlines from Mark Davies cracking down on phone vote insiders, write in my magazine column supporting Davies and BF, and then have the horrendous luck to encounter Black, and his horrific pro-corruption rant on these markets. How would you feel? BF isn’t like a traditional bookmaker, relying on every account being a losing one, the model is different. Black has the choice to care or not to care, and, well, his views are clear.
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I don’t agree with you that it is an exciting time for BF. I haven’t got a PHD in Economics as Michael Giberson has, but I do have some real skill in the economics field that I have never seen anyone on the BF board display. The commission system as it currently stands is so flawed against BF’s and BF customers own interests. I find it amazing that the company is valued at £2 billion. The unrealised potential is massive, but the penny has not dropped yet.
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As someone who has mainly bet on tennis & specials, this version of BF you have
(1) Black ordering the integrity team to allow phone vote insiders
(2) Black ordering markets to be left open after the result is known
(3) A wave of “suspicious” tennis matches, both before and after Davydenko v Arguello, where no investigation is undertaken, and the markets are settled no questions asked. Tursunov 1.19 at the start of the match, goes a set AND a break down, and the price doesn’t change, with someone lumping on hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of pounds? No probs – it gets settled. FFS.
(4) Stephen Maguire odds against despite only needing one of the last four frames against a weak opponent in the snooker. Result? Paid out again. He was over a 93.5% chance to win that match if he was up against an equally talented player, but he was up against a rag. Same result, paid out, and the BF forum moderator pulling any threads mentioning it.
(5) Tennis & snooker fans who pay good money to watch these events having the sport they are watching not played out as a fair contest
(6) Mark Davies claiming he wants to stop people getting a free lunch, yet is happy to be CEO of a £2 bn company based mainly on running markets on sports it pays nothing towards (bar racing).
(7) BF voiding the winning side of the bets after their SP system gave them a result they didn’t want, and taking ages to changed from the initial policy of it being up to customers to prove if they were affected.
(8) Statements from Mark Davies saying that getting more bets matched is in customers interests, and seemingly no understanding that a trap bet robot was not a good thing, and depending on the elasticity of demand for BF from marginal customers, an increasing of the rate of attrition potentially much more damaging to growth than the benefits of scooping risk free money
(9) Numerous BF staff at cheltenham and on the phone saying the “skimming” bot was fair game, and increasing BF profits by 15-20%. You really have to wonder.
(10) 6 people feeding scores via phone/hands free kits in the recent Dubai tennis ladies tournament, plus one on a PDA. Should BF really be making millionaires out of pick off merchants? Shouldn’t Mark Davies be going after these “free lunch”ers, rather than introducing trap bet robots to prey on the weak/unskilled?
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To be fair, any punter looking for a run for their money a few years ago, I would have said definitely use BF – the prices are better. Now I would definitely say use one of the traditional bookmakers, and I would personally recommend William Hill. I’m restricted to a maximum bet of zero pence with them, but if I was recommending to someone else where to get value, its William Hill, definitely not BF.
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BF’s biggest problem is it retains a number of the same faces it had 8 years ago. Many of these people would never make it to the top of any normal firm. Instead, you get O’Reilly getting a pat on the back for being a vicious internet troll. Would a senior figure in GlaxoSmithKline or Citigroup spend hour after hour trolling internet forums attacking people?
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BF just don’t understand economics. “bot” from the BF forum is incredibly bright, one of the sharpest people I have ever met, but on the one subject I am strong on, economics, I clearly proved one of his arguments (about a government fee charged to exchanges/bookmakers on a sliding scale dependant on number of premises) about small exchanges being subsidised, to be completely the opposite of the reality. If I can prove one of the brightest people I have ever met completely wrong, then perhaps I know a thing or two in this field. The BF board are at the end of the day, probably wiping in half the value of BF, in my opinion. If they had a rival firm competing with them, they would compare notes and have the obvious answer perhaps made clear. As such this is monopolistic X-inefficiency, combined with quite big dollops of cynicism from Black.
I woner what it says about the business ethics of Betfair, that you are posting on blogs, under the guise of being a Betfair customer?
Perhaps you could reveal your real name and your job title? And what of the backhanded compliment to ED Murray – are you honestly telling me that as a Betfair employee, you did not know who this guy was???
In relation to Betfair being a new company – what, nonsense; in the internet aqe, a ten year old company is not new.
I would like to refresh your mind as to recent Betfair debacles, in the hope, that now that you have been outed, that you may be able to provide us all with an objective overview as to the thinking that lay behind each decision.
Firstly; the Betfair Poker Heist. A software glitch resulted in Betfair stealing from its customers. Betfair’s response was to go silent?
Second; the bet matching fiasco. Betfair quietly introduced a system that allowed it to make monies over and above its normal commission. Six weeks later, it partly withdrew the system, after its customers finally got wind of what was going on.
Third, the Grand National fiasco. Betfair tapped into their customers’ funds to plug a hole in their system, which saw a lower SP being returned than Betfair had expected. In that customer funds are supposed to ringfenced from Betfair’s funds, was it ethical for Betfair to take money out of peoples accounts and to hold onto it for four days?
I can’t comment on the majority of the points you make as I don’t know anything about them (other than obviously what I have read in various forums).
However, I can comment on one or two of the points you make:
“The commission system as it currently stands is so flawed against BF’s and BF customers own interests.”
I don’t know enough about economics, market forces, etc to have a view on the commission structure, however I do know that Betfair spent a lot of time looking at their commission structure last year (I believe they also got an external consultancy involved) and decided that the current structure was the best way forward. As I say, I don’t know what the arguments are for changing it and the merits of those arguments over the status quo.
“(6) Mark Davies … is happy to be CEO of a £2 bn company based mainly on running markets on sports it pays nothing towards (bar racing).”
Only a minor point, but Mark Davies is not the CEO, he is “Director of Corporate Affairs”.
“Making the keynote speech at the Global Leaders in Sport conference in Auckland, New Zealand, Mark Davies, managing director at Betfair … reiterated Betfair’s commitment to pay sports bodies a percentage of the profits achieved on betting on events run under their jurisdiction.”
This has been Betfair’s standpoint for several years. There are two things Betfair has said for some time that Sport should expect from bookmakers: (1) information about what betting was taking place on their matches, to allow them to police their sport better; and (2) a financial contribution to acknowledge that they were putting on the ‘show’.
In fact there was a Corporate email update circulated internally at Betfair a while ago that said that Betfair paid a proportion of its revenue voluntarily to Sport: (1) in Australia, to the AFL, NRL, and cricket among others; (2) in the UK, to British greyhounds; and (3) in Ireland, to Irish horseracing. It is obviously not compelled to make any of these payments.
P Benckendorf
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“I woner what it says about the business ethics of Betfair, that you are posting on blogs, under the guise of being a Betfair customer?”
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As I explained in my post above to Rab, what I post in forums are my own personal views and my business. I don’t think it says anything about the business ethics of Betfair. I also explained above why I withheld my connection with Betfair. However, the rest of what I posted wasn’t particularly biased in favour of Betfair and wasn’t disingenous.
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“And what of the backhanded compliment to ED Murray – are you honestly telling me that as a Betfair employee, you did not know who this guy was???”
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Why should I have known about the various encounters that Ed has had with Betfair. Do you think the “life and times of Ed Murray” is part of Betfair’s induction day?!
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“I would like to refresh your mind as to recent Betfair debacles, in the hope, that now that you have been outed, that you may be able to provide us all with an objective overview as to the thinking that lay behind each decision.”
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I work in the engineering department and am not involved with the management of the company. I don’t know much more about the various issues that you mention other than what is in the public domain. Although I do note that your interpretation of the said events is not completely accurate, I don’t think there’s much point in trying to get into a debate with you.
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It is clear from the tone and contents of your post that you share the same mentality as Rab: namely that everything to do with or related to Betfair must be evil and corrupt. You are of course welcome to your opinions, however I don’t plan to respond to any more of either or your posts from now on. Frankly I have better things to do with my time.
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Roger
Roger – if you are in the engineering department (and sorry for being dim, but I’m not quite sure what ‘engineering’ covers in BF), then if that’s the same thing as the IT department, it has improved hugely in the last two years. BF regularly used to go down a lot, and the standard of their IT has jumped noticeably. I have no idea if it has been extremely expensive (or not) to get the level of improvement, but fair play to the IT team, its very good.
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Please keep posting on here, the more BF staff with an open mind, willing to look at different sides of the coin, the better.
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As far as ‘corruption’ goes, I don’t think BF is corrupt, but I do think that the infamous blind eye has been turned a little too often. When you have Mark Davies on national tv explaining that the Davydenko v Arguello match was voided because of irregular betting patterns/prices, and as he is on air, exactly the same patterns/prices are taking place on Arguello’s 2nd round match, with the BF tennis forum in meltdown, my acct manager saying he has had another acct complaining about it, and BF key accounts say the phones have been lit up like a xmas tree with complaints, to have the match odds settled within a maximum of 3 seconds, possibly within two seconds, of the match point being won, its just very sad to see. Too often BF stand shoulder to shoulder with whoever is winning, however they are winning, and personally, I feel if someone comes in and smashes a market from evens down to 1.01 on a reality tv market, after the lines have closed, and the result is in (but not yet announced) then its not rocket science that those markets needed to be shut at the times the lines closed.
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As far as “evil” goes, letting people bet after the event on known results might be ‘legal’, as was explained to me, but it was surely immoral, in my book, and it definitely wasn’t “betting fairly”, in anyone’s book. If you call a company “bet” “fair”, but actively push policies to allow people who know the result to bet against people who don’t, and make money out of it yourself (the artificial temporary boost in commission from holding markets open once the result is in boost’s BF’s commission in the short term, but drains long term churn, so you can sell off your shares at an artificially high price in the short run, based on phoney profit figures), then I personally think that anyone religious would have real ground to be seriously worried. I’m not religious, but I do think that this kind of behaviour is a bit depraved, and so sad to see from someone I genuinely looked up to for years.
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I think the Australian market is much tougher – the public are much more anti-gambling, and consequently so are the authorities -, and it is good to see those quotes from Mark Davies. I hope he extends them to put money back into all the sports it profits from, in a symbiotic relationship, rather than the parasitical one it has at the moment with most sports.
- Firstly; the Betfair Poker Heist. A software glitch resulted in Betfair stealing from its customers. Betfair’s response was to go silent?
— Erm, the poker heist saw customers all entering six-way games, all going in first hand all in, and the software paid out 1st place with winnings, and 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th all got equal payments that the 2nd place person would normall have got. Each person puts in say $10, the winner gets $40, 2nd $20, the rest nothing. With the heist the winner got $40, and the other 5 all got $20 each , meaning overall $60 was put in, and $140 was taken out. How did BF “steal from its customers”?
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As for the commission structure, the optimal way forward is to introduce an individual account by account commission rate manager. I used to be in the bookmaking industry, and every bookmaking firm will have a manager making decisions on whether accounts are open, closed, restricted etcetera. If someone turns up once a year to whack through £100k in the final minutes of the Big Brother winners market, they shouldn’t pay 5% commission, they should pay 90% commission on their winnings. Tbh, phone vote insiders would still pay 90% commission, and the income from that could be used to lower the commission rate for Joe Bloggs, and at the margin, increase the attractiveness of BF to recreational punters. Charge the people who would pay the most for the service, the most to use it. Look at those 6 courtsiders in the Dubai womens tennis championships using a phone to feed the score through and try to beat the clock, or the 1 person on a PDA. Should they really be on 5%? If they are happy to whack through £10,000 a point once it is won or lost, it may be impossible to stop them without increasing the delay to a prohibitively long time period (affecting liquidity), but an account commission manager would spot who is whacking through £10k a point, put those accounts up to a high commission level, and reduce commission for everyone else. By taking an identical amount of commission per market, but charging the courtsiders more and the people on the margin less, the cost of using BF falls at the margin, and the BF markets would grow. It really is simple. You’d need somebody, bright and very sharp to do this job correctly, and to spot new accounts immediately that were whacking through £10k a point etcetera opened by the courtsiders to try to circumvent it. However, it is very possible to do this, and it would be the right thing to do. The wrong thing to do is the trap bet bet mismatching robot, which clobbers the mugs, and leaves the snides unscathed. That increases BF’s churn rate, and is damaging to BF.
“Why should I have known about the various encounters that Ed has had with Betfair. Do you think the “life and times of Ed Murray” is part of Betfair’s induction day?!”
lol, well that actually happens Hills, i remember my first day at hills many moons ago, being shown the photgraphs and biographies of certain customers the company did’t like doing business with, characters such as barry conway.delroy divine or my favourite “the pencil man”
lol Graham
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I got restricted to zero pence max bet size with Hills in about March 2006. One of their traders was on my msn, and would ask me for advice etcetera, then one day goes “oh, sorry to hear about your account”. I then looked at my account, and lo and behold it was zero pence max bet lol. I was up a few quid overall against them apparently on my online acct.
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I phoned them up last year, and asked if they could refer a bet to a trader for me, but they said I was categorically never allowed 1 penny, on any sports event, ever. This did seem silly, if the bet was referred, the trader could then offer me even a minimal bet, and then move the price.
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My friends got on in the end though. They were offering 6/4 for Beckham not to play 90 minutes against Brazil in a friendly (it finished 1-1 in the end). I thought that as Beckham was getting old, and was being brought back to play in the REAL qualifier for Euro 2008 three days later, no way would McLaren let Beckham play a whole 90 minutes (and tire out his ageing legs). Plus it was Beckham’s return from international exile. If Beckham played badly he’d get taken off, and if Beckham played well, he’d get substituted, so that the crowd would get the chance to give him a standing ovation to their returning hero. I thought the chances of him playing 90 minutes were almost zero, so was quite pleased they were offering 6/4 on it . In the end Beckham was substituted after about an hour i think. I love Hills
For the record, I do not believe that there is a general feeling that Betfair is corrupt or evil. Betfair has sold itself as being a company of the people, and it is clear that the people belive that they are due both consultation and transparency. Words that have been used about the company are arrogant, autocratic and managerially lax; I suspect there are many people who might concur with these descriptions.
The Poker hesit involved flawed software; was it not in the company’s interest, and the interest of other players, that it was more open about this. (See previous post from Ed Murray that this may have been going onfor months). Then there is the question of the money that was being paid out — whose money was it …Betfair’s or customers’ ringfenced money? Why were the players involved in the hesit, who by their own admission had colluded (was it in fact fit for a conspiracy to defraud charge), allowed back onto Betfair Poker? What sort of message does this send out? I understand that there is at least one person, who has not paid Betfair back; if it came to a court case would you be seeking the extradition of this person to Malta? What is the Betfair policy vis a vis collusion; how do you define it? How do you monitor it?
The bet matching fiasco is either a case of arrogance, bad management, or, indeed both, par excellence.
The Grand National fiasco was a bad management decision plain and simple. Something with which many of Betfair’s own traders would seem to concur; with some, indeed, going so far as to accuse Betfair of theft;
I am sure that if you really believe that people are saying that Betfair is corrupt, then a court of law is the best place to have that issue resolved.
I think a good barometer for Betfair, vis a vis the recent trilogy of incidents, is to gauge what the outcome would have been for the company, were it to have been listed.
In simple terms, the company would have been hung, drawn and quartered; the shares would have taken a big hit and there would have been calls for heads to roll. As it is, you come on here, hoping to paper over the cracks.
Perhaps in future Betfair could adopt the same standards as are required of a listed company? The Poker Heist should have been discussed in the open; the bet matching software should not have been introduced until it was ready; the Grand National fiasco should not have happened.
I think you should see the criticism for what it is; a sign that people like Betfair, but they do not want to see it getting too big for its boots!
“Perhaps in future Betfair could adopt the same standards as are required of a listed company? The Poker Heist should have been discussed in the open; the bet matching software should not have been introduced until it was ready; the Grand National fiasco should not have happened.”
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Do public companies tell all, really?
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“I suspect that you are Mark Davies.”
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Bad hypothesis. Mark Davies writes differently, and has other fish to fry than to post comments on Midas Oracle. Plus, he was in New Zealand recently, right? “Roger Ducan” has a short BetFair experience —I believe him when he says that.
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(I’m supposing he is a man because I’ve never met a woman interested in betting or prediction markets, so far. I regret that, of course. )
Plus, it’s hilarious to see somebody hiding his true identity trying to do some “outing” on another person hiding his true identity too. Snake eating its other end.
It is good to know that people are noticing such improvements in the site.
The Engineering team are responsible for researching, designing, building, testing and running all the IT systems needed to deliver Betfair’s products and services.
It employs some very capable people and this is reflected by the fact that it wins award after award from the IT industry. For example, Betfair recently won the Information Age Effective IT award for the “Most Effective Enterprise-Wide IT Infrastructure”, and has been short listed for the British Computer Society President’s Award for Information Security.
BF deserves to be in the running for those kind of IT awards. I obviously can’t say it deserves to win them, as I don’t know who they are up against for those awards, and have no valid criteria to compare other sites/businesses with BF’s engineering/IT anyway .
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However, the days of BF getting Queen’s Awards for business etcetera should be long gone, and it should stay that way for some time. Gambling is in the same bracket as arms and pornography, and does do real damage to many people. Some of the decisions made by BF are deliberately cynical, many have been gormless. We are a long way from having a betting experience that is “fair” on the BF sports exchange. The casino etcetera are fair enough – what you see seems to be what you get. However, running markets often with bets being placed that have a 0% chance of winning, seems reckless, and is a massive thorn in the side of BF, which has achieved so much on its IT side.
Roger Duncan -
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Are there any plans in the offing for myspace style communities being accommodated within the BF website? I know revenue per user is dramatically higher for BF from people who use the forum as opposed to people who don’t, and always thought this seemed a logical step to increase user stickiness. All the football review pages etcetera, and the reality tv page, all that stuff that BF have spent money on looks like a load of useless junk. Building a community does seem a good idea. If I was BF I’d approach the BBC and ask to pay money for hosting BBC Sport website content within a separate shell, i.e. BF would be paying for the journalists to write the articles, which would then appear on both bbc.co.uk & a betfair gambling sports site. Well, the main BF site really. It would be good for the BBC (cuts the bill for its website significantly) whilst not damaging any of the content on bbc.co.uk, plus it would increase BF site stickiness. No reason that couldn’t be linked into the main match odds markets etcetera as well.
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I was told in late 2006 that BF were working on something akin to myspace style communities, but have never seen anything of the like.
Betfair are certainly trying to build on the community theme. Hence the introduction of things like the Betfair ‘blog’ (betting.betfair.com) and Betfair Radio. As you say, it’s important for the success of any online business to maintain stickiness and to reduce churn and developing the ‘Betfair community’ is one of the ways that Betfair hope to achieve that.
I’ve not heard anything about Myspace style communities. Although new releases, enhancements, etc tend to be kept under wraps until a lot nearer the time, I’d be surprised if anything like that was on the cards in the near future.
On a related topic, you may have seen there is currently a discussion on the General Betting forum on Betfair discussing the merits of updating Betfair’s forum: http://site.forum.betfair.com/.....geCount=11. The consensus seems to be to leave it as it is.
If you have say a match odds market for a football match, having a selection of buttons around it that would open up a number of different radio stations with just one click would be a great idea, and miles cheaper, and more effective, than running a BF radio station. Imagine you have a number of buttons where with one click, the first would open up Talksport, the second would open up Radio 5 Live etcetera. All these are free, streamed content, but as well as boosting the audience for these stations, it would make the market/match odds page more of a valuable destination for punters during live matches. A match odds market could become a one stop shop not just for the odds, but as part of an entertainment product, and it would cost next to nothing to do this. I’m looking at the Kohclschreiber v Ferrer market at the mo, the only link is to “Live Scores & Stats”, which have only one problem, they are about five minutes behind live.
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There are so many things that can be done with match odds markets pages. These are the main ones that people look at. Its a big, big wasted opportunity at the mo. I think BF radio is a complete waste of money, and tbh, I can’t even tell how to load it up from looking at the site right now. (I’m sure the team working on it work very hard, but much more entertainment can be generated much more easily and cheaply, than by building a whole radio station and running it).
It’s made by the same people who code WordPress, the open-source blogging software that powers Midas Oracle (and the New York Times blogs, Andrew Black’s blog, etc.).
The forum works ok, the only problem with it is there are one set of rules for BF staff, and one for everybody else, plus the moderator himself is somewhat limited. I met him, and tried to explain why he should do something about the people continuously putting up screaming fake weather reports on cricket matches etcetera, and he doesn’t seem to understand either betting, or human nature. He brings a rather limited skillset to his work, sadly.
Ed Murray has computed what Mark Davies never did: EVENT DERIVATIVE TRADERS WANT EXTERNAL, TRUSTED SOURCES OF INFORMATION —NOT THE EXCHANGE-PRODUCED SAUSAGES.
A Betfair forumite going by the name of Pablo, summed up the feeling of many punters when he wrote;
“It simply beggars belief that people can have had matched bets removed from their account when nothing has gone wrong. Will there be a new department to judge the fairness of the sp returned in every race every day ? What is unfair ? Under the official SP ? Or 20 % under ? or 30 ,40,50 % under? Surely a bet that is matched is sacrosanct unless something has gone wrong,like a late suspension. Why do people have to email in to have their accounts adjusted back to the right amount ? Surely it should be automatic.”
The Grand National SP was a public humiliation for the BF SP system. The free market price it generated was a bargain for layers, and they deserved to be paid out – they entered their bets under predetermined known terms that were available to everyone, and would have had to pay up if the SP generated had been heavily over the odds instead of under it.
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This is all playing to the gallery, trying to maintain the impression of fairness. Its the same old, tired, age-old story.
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It does not matter whether betting is “fair”, what matters is whether the public think that it seems fair on the surface.
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The price in the race half an hour after the Grand National also had an SP that was about half the SP of the normal bookies, yet surprise surprise , nothing was done about it. The track record of Tony Calvin and Mark Davies are one of fairly malicious cynicism in Calvin’s case, and a bumbling encyclopedia of mishaps from the likeable but accident-prone Mark Davies.
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Bets shouldn’t just be voided after a race has finished, because BF are worried that the public are going to think that the BF SP is a weak product that offers bad value. Whoever made that original decision to void winning bets should be sacked – he or she is a menace to Betfair and the reputation of the entire exchange industry. It literally was stealing.
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It is the same story with BF – quieter smaller matches with suspicious goings on get settled immediately no questions asked, whereas if they think there is a risk of the public becoming aware of a problem, as was the case with the malfunctioning BF SP on the Grand National, or the blatant “gamble” on Davydenko v Arguello, then something is done. Its politics. I don’t think it has any place in a well run business, or in BF. I look at the propaganda from ZANU-PF in Zimbabwe, and the election-stealing going on at the moment, and I cannot tell the difference between the high farce of the Zimbabwean information ministry & the Herald, and the stuff that BF come out with.
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The most noteable quotes from the BF trap bet bet mismatching robot, which was switched off after huge protests recently, included how BF were well placed to help people who were the victims of bets put in in error. LOOOOOOOL. Build a trap bet robot that clobbers people, then claim how much you care about your customers by giving the impression that you might help them out if the trap bet robot you built yourself succeeds in clobbering them. Unbelievable.
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I’m not in the “Betfair are sinister and evil” camp, but I do think that their “Ministry of Information” bears remarkable similarities to the media manipulation that takes place in China, Zimbabwe, or anything which Orwell could have envisaged. It is a shame, as it is high jinx, and a lack of transparency, and often active misinformation from both Calvin and Mark Davies, are in the end damaging to BF over the long run. Shame.
Chris – the BF mod is a member of customer services, who as part of his job has to monitor the forum and deal with complaints. BF say that they don’t officially monitor the forum, (otherwise they would be legally responsible for the content posted on it, which isn’t ideal when celebrity X is revealed as having sexual relations with animals etcetera ) , but there is a forum monitor.
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I’ve made my points clear to him, but he’s not a CEO, an IT programmer, a management consultant, or an engineer. His job is to spot rude words on an internet forum.
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There are a range of roles in society for people of all skill ranges and abilities, and some hard jobs will be found to be fairly easy by many people, whilst some easy jobs, will still prove quite challenging to some people. I wouldn’t have thought it is that challenging a role, but I formed the impression that perhaps it is somehow a role that does seem to evidently be challenging.
I have just spotted a bug that may have prevented non-registered people to comment on Midas Oracle. One anti-spam plugin was bugging another one. I will contact the plugin author. That bug may have affected Midas Oracle last week. Non-registered people would come here, they were not able to see the image giving the math equation to perform to be able to comment here. Sorry or that. When such a thing happens, tell me, because I spend most of times as a registered user on Midas Oracle (since I write it), so I am not always aware of what non-registered users see. Thanks.
IEd, there appears to be change of attitude at Betfair re people betting after the result is known.
The Magician (2)
18 Apr 23:58
Dear xxxxx
The win market in the 1850 at Wolverhampton yesterday was suspended late.
Although your bets were made in good faith, all bets placed or matched on or after 18:55:27 will be voided. An adjustment will appear in your account in the near future.
Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions regarding this.
Kind regards
Betfair Helpdesk
In this case the horse winning the photo finish was backed into 1.2 from 2.4 before the result was announced and the market suspended. The only reason it did not hit 1.01 is because The Magician placed a wall 40k lay at 1.2 to see if anyone knew the result before the announcement, he intended taking the case to the GC. It used to be a regular occurence that these markets were swept to 1.01 before the announcement of the result, but they are now much quicker suspending. As far as I’m aware this is the first time they have voided in such circumstances, but interestingly they have not announced it in the service announcements.
We would like to remind those posting on the forum that offensive or defamatory comments are in breach of the terms of forum use and will result in forum rights being revoked. Forum users should be aware that they are fully and personally responsible for comments they post on the forum – and may be answerable for such comments. In this context, Betfair has not contested previous and increasing court applications requiring us to reveal personal details of individuals making forum postings. Not contesting such applications will continue to be our policy.
As a result, please do not assume that you can post without any risk of your identity being disclosed to either the subject of your post or his/her lawyers. Should you not be able to defend your comments it is very likely that you could face very considerable financial consequences.
You should also be aware that certain posts and conduct could be contrary to the Protection from Harassment Act 1997 and could give rise to both civil and criminal proceedings. We will have no hesitation in disclosing identities to the police, or civil court, should they receive a complaint.
Finally, please note that Betfair will shortly be making important changes to the way the forum is run. In future, you will only be able to post on the forum if full ‘know your customer’ (KYC) checks for you have been completed.
Thank you to the majority of forum contributors who continue to use the forum appropriately, in accordance with the forum rules and the spirit of open but responsible discussion.
IEd, there appears to be change of attitude at Betfair re people betting after the result is known.
That’s very, very good news for BF shareholders, and the 99% of normal BF customers who aren’t snides/pick off merchants. I was always shocked that Andrew Black was so fierce in his support of betting after the event, and saying he was happy to leave markets deliberately open to provide the service of giving people the chance to have a bet, even if they have no chance of winning.
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If you look at the amount hoovered at 1.01 and upwards on matchpoint of tennis games, there is usually £500 to £1000 won by the matchpoint hooverers who sweep up everything once the match has been finished. This could easily add up to over a million pounds per year. Then you look at BF’s price earnings ratio, and jeez, are they losing some serious cash off their share price,…. its mindboggling.
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Normally, I heard that BF take about 50% of the losers losses, whilst the winning gamblers take about 50%. This figure is about 3 years old, and I have no idea if it is still representative. However, the money hoovered after matchpoint etcetera has commission paid once of 5% max, with 95% or more going risk free to the hooverers. It is then lost out of the system, whereas if it had been retained, the liquidity on BF on future markets would have increased, as the rate of attrition would have been lower, and that hoovered money would instead have been split 50/50 between BF and winning gamblers, rather than 5% going to BF.
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BF’s policy on late suspension, is something that they have never realised, is wiping tens of millions of pounds off their share price. It is absolutely crazy, but it has been categorised in the “turn a blind eye, hope nobody will notice” box, along with the ”"match”" (cough cough) between Hernandez and Brezezicki earlier this week.
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- “In this case the horse winning the photo finish was backed into 1.2 from 2.4 before the result was announced and the market suspended. The only reason it did not hit 1.01 is because The Magician placed a wall 40k lay at 1.2 to see if anyone knew the result before the announcement, he intended taking the case to the GC. It used to be a regular occurence that these markets were swept to 1.01 before the announcement of the result, but they are now much quicker suspending. As far as I’m aware this is the first time they have voided in such circumstances, but interestingly they have not announced it in the service announcements.”
- I have met The Magician a number of times (I first met both him and Mark Davies at the House of Lords for the report of the all party parliamentary betting & gaming group inquiry, in feb 2005), and I see about 95% eye to eye with him (he thinks inrunning betting should potentially be banned, whereas I think that it has a place when it is policed effectively). He’s extravagantly intelligent, and has fought very hard against corruption, as I have done.
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I think its brilliant The Magician has done that 1.2 lay and threatened BF with taking it to the GC, Andrew Black has been totally immoral and wrong to push for BF customers to be allowed to be ripped off after the result is known, and the sooner Black’s dubious legacy is eroded, and BF shareholders interests are looked after, the better.
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As for the BF forum post, well, I wonder if the Betfair lawyers will release the names and details of the, erm, BF lawyer who camped on the internet talking about me, my work, and my sex life. It was pretty sad to see how empowered he felt to be hurling abuse anonymously, yet – hilariously – went quiet when he was outed. What a weed.
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The reason it won’t be announced in the service announcements is that all these things will be on a hit and miss, case by case basis. If the Magician has threatened them with taking it to the GC, then they’ll know that the game was up on this market, but policy is usually made up ad hoc with BF. Arguello v Davydenko was voided, but Arguello’s next match in the following round, with identical betting patterns, wasn’t. They don’t know what is in their own interests. As ever, it will be people like me and The Magician putting pressure on them to look after BF shareholders and BF customers, and muzzle Andrew Black and any other pro-corruption and pro-betting after the event voices inside BF.
In-running betting should be banned and will be banned by the Gambling Commission.
It should be crystal clear to anyone by now that betfair are not interested in providing a level playing field. Profiting from- and exploiting the concept of time is high on their agenda.
Together with the complexity of the underlying problems of in-running betting (which no-one seems willing to solve, or even give it a try) there is only one thing left to do for the GC. It will be quick, fair, cheap and effective.
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The 5-sec delay, the bet matching algorithm, Betfair rapid, you name it Jose…
All conceived and nurtured by Betfair to give one group an edge over the other. Betfair have become so accustomed to this that they believe they are entitled to BECOME (surprise surprise) one of both groups, and you can guess which one.
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If betfair were an arms manufacturer, they would distribute their guns all over the world. Then have people fight each other knowing who would win in advance. Every greedy & braindead person in the UK (that should include everyone except a few) would immediately go shopping to see where he/she can buy the best gun in town…
Congratulations… you have all become victims of the rich and powerful and of a non-existent society. Make sure you close and seal the coffin when you die.
The whole issue simplifies to a single basic fact:
Betfair have excercised, and (see their own forum statements!) intend to retain their “right” to control and even freeze the timeliness of their Customer’s efforts to get their bets and lays matched. Purely so that they can extract profit from the “if then” nature of that Customer-to-Customer process! If time is frozen, money can be abstracted without risk at all…… and betfair state publicly ( rather boastfully in fact!) that they are a zero-risk bookmaker.
Unfortunately “zero risk bookmaker” does NOT mean zero risk” for the Customer….in fact it actually means that ALL of the risk ( and ALL of the associated losses) are borne by the Customer.
On the one hand, betfair advertise on TV that they are different to conventional bookmakers in that they facilitate person-to-person betting, yet on the other they insist that they are bookmakers and have every “right” to skim monies covertly from those very Customers who are encouraged to trust them to be of High Integrity, and referee their activities fully to the Rules published and policed by the Gambling Commission.
No doubt betfair ( and possibly other exchanges: we should not assume that betfair are unique, even though a virtual monopoly) would like to return to the “good old days” when the only Rule in town was their own inglorious, oft-quoted, “caveat emptor”, viz: anything goes.
Those same days when on Betfair’s own forum cheats boasted about their unrestricted, unrestrained ability to defraud bone fide betfair Customers via Prior Knowledge ( striking “bets” but AFTER one party to the bets knew the Result)……… some ( or is that many?) of us long-term betfair Customers remain convinced that Dirty Washing Day is inevitable, and carefully preserve copies of those conveniently forgotten postings; timed, authored and dated.
Adonis
and, incidentally, what do the Gambling Commission tell an interested, taxpaying Public about their attitude to it all?
NOTHING!
It’s about time that the GC realised that their salaries and business meals are paid for by us Taxpayers and Exchange Customers….. Keep us in the dark, and we’ll start flinging the manure around!
There again, maybe we’d be better served just dumping the GC and asking the FSA to take over responsibility for our Welfare?
Adonis
Why don’t the Betfair Traders get together and set up an Association – the Betfair Traders Asosciation (BTA). After all it is our commission that pays for the exchange.
Was this another example of a Betfair insider at work, posting on somebody’s blog in response to criticism of the company?
Sources, who wish to remain nameless, have suggested to me that the poster going by the name of Johnn is a Betfair insider.
Whilst this is indeed an unsubstantiated allegation at this point in time (source will soon provide IP address of said poster), it would certainly seem that the language of the poster is both partisan and aggressive for somebody who is not associated with the company;
“I think you’ve seriously got the wrong end of the stick on this one Harry. It might have taken a couple of days to calculate what doing the right thing was, but they did say they’d do the right thing straight away. Your version of events isn’t what happened and I had a lot of bets on that market. I’m sure you know what you’re doing, but making allegations when you’ve got your facts wrong can be a very expensive business to get into.”
@Rab Bibater: “Johnn is a Betfair insider”. I don’t know whom you’re talking about. But I think we agreed on the fact that here’s a free zone, with people of all stripes having the constitutional right to comment. Why on Earth would we forbid people working at a prediction exchange (betting exchange) to open their mouth on a damn blog dedicated to prediction markets (and betting exchanges)? Everybody has the right to speak for their values, or to state facts.
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As for unmasking people, mister “Rab Bibater” (or whoever hides under this pseudo) should understand that that same thing could be done to him. And then I would state some hypothesis about what the real name of that commenter is. (If one lives in a glass house, one should not send stones.)
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I can’t understand why some people would silence some other people. Isn’t there free speech in the UK?
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The anti-BetFair has the right to speak out, here. Then why would the pro-BetFair be silenced? Sounds like Stalin’s method.
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The betfair insiders are everywhere, or so it seems.
Adonis and I were banned on “Punter’s Lounge” within 2 hours.
Not that we did anything wrong, we certainly didn’t break any of the forum rules.
Or maybe it was because betfair advertise there.
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Either way, I’m not particularly fond of the tactics of certain people who are continually trying to silence me. The only result will be that my determination to get my opinion across will grow with every ban.
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I tried registering here after my first post but it said “IP-adress banned”, making it the 4th time in less than 2 months that I have been banned. It’s probably an error this time but you can imagine how I must feel. I’m really a gentle and nice person in reality who is not afraid to tell the truth the way I see it. Because what else is there ?
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Let’s see what happens on here.
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… I just read your post Chris, as I was typing this. I think you’ve answered my “question”.
Chris, I like the cut of your jib.
Free Speech is a priceless benefit of a Free Society, not to be taken for granted (or abused). Your commentary earns due respect.
I have always accepted the right of opposite opinion to express theimselves – as long as their viewpopint and expression is legal. Thus, I have no issue with any Betfair “insider” criticising my opinions as long as it is fairly, honourably and openly done.
In my book, it is honourable to declare an interest bias (eg: I make it clear that I am a betfair Customer, and a punter. I expect any Betfair insider wishing to engage in dialogue to ALSO declare their true position.)
Unfortunately, such declarations are rare indeed – with the exception of those insiders recently “outed” on betfair’s own, comment-screened forum.
(The one I was banned from for asking awkward questions and citing certain aspects of Betting Integrity and their relationship with Time. And for upsetting a betfair business affiliate ( from Bet Angel) who consistently posed as a bone fide Customer instead.)
Life can be problematic for those interested in truth!
Have a great week all; and, if you are, stay lucky!
Adonis
It’s an interesting debate whether posters should declare their interests / identify themselves.
We are talking about the boundaries of freedom of speech, where does it start and where does it end ? In this case, where does it start ?
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It starts with a certain responsibility of every individual. We cannot have total freedom of speech without it. A politician for instance can say many things, but he should be aware that certain remarks could cause fear/panic amongst the public because of the influence he has.
It’s different for a betfair employee. It is the honourable and right thing to do to say who you are when you’re posting on the betfair forum. Again, we cannot have complete freedom of speech without people taking responsibility.
It’s not something you would expect from betfair employees or the betfair management for that matter, because anything outside the scopy of betting they are having a real hard time of grasping. So next time when they decide to ban someone from the forum because their undercover agents can’t handle the debate, maybe it’s time for some reflection. Maybe not, and we should just accept the fact that freedom of speech is a somewhat alienated concept in the UK. Yes… I did mention the UK. Because it’s not just individuals who have certain responsibilities, companies do as well!
@medemi: (Replying to your first post)
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Were you banned from registering on Midas Oracle?
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Hummmm…. We use 2 anti-spam plugins… WP SPAM FREE and SABRE. They are supposed to deter spammers.
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If they throw you out, that’s maybe they think you’re using the IPs of a spammer. i don’t know, I need more info on that to understand.
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If you want to be registered, then I could do it manually for you, if you wished. Just contact me by e-mail, and I’d do.
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As of today, I have pruned comments that were pure spam. The other reason I would exclude someone is that if that person would insult or defame. I haven’t had the case, yet.
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@medemi: I agree with your statement that a commenter should disclose his/her interest(s).
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Comments were open only to registered users, at the origin, on Midas Oracle. I have recently decided to open the comments to anyone, which is what most blogs do. However, that opens the possiblity for people to come here and spam us (thus my anti-spam plugins that might also catch good people), and for people to come here anonymously (giving a pseudo).
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In fact, it’s not fully anonymous, because the the administrator sees the IPs of the commenters. I don’t monitor this info closely. However, you’re seen that “Rab Bibater” (or whoever hides behind that pen name) has access to this info, too. In his recent comment, he claims to have a “source”. Well, his “source” is our WordPress software, that’s all. Somebody’s registered inside Midas Oracle and has the required authorization has access to the comments panel and thus to the IPs. If “Rab Bibater” persists in his approach to unmasking other people, then his access to the IPs can help unmasking him, too. It’s just a question of equity. Everybody should be on the same basis, here.
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Anyway, that is crazy discussion.
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Hey, folks, we’re not going to have like 10,000 comments on that page. Taht makes a too long page. Maybe at one point, a new post should be created about BetFair and the discussion would be continued there. (Well, already, we have had other BetFair pages, but people seem to stick to here.)
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Thanks for the offer Chris.
I will be doing more reading than talking in the next couple of days/weeks.
There’s a lot of stuff on here. Let’s see if I can navigate through all of this.
When I feel I should register I will send you an e-mail.
Your opinion is interesting. Thanks, Niall.
I’m confused by your comment. I thought the
bet matching system found new matches between customers bets. I don’t remember reading that it was an automated trader that took positions by making bets. If its only role is to find new matches between offers made by traders, then it isn’t reasonable to characterize it as the exchange trading on its own account.
Just one point, Betfair have already hired a team of traders to bet into its own markets last year, and are increasing that. Andrew Black has insisted that these traders are betting without looking at who is betting on what. I can’t understand how if 98% of Betfair punters lose overall, how they are paying the hypothetical £25,000-£30,000 a year salaries of these traders. They not only have to break even, but also have to win at least £25k to £30k a year to justify the expense of actually employing them.
I have no idea how anyone could get a straight answer out of Betfair about this. They either mothball and as happened with this new case, not even bother announcing it, or they have a record of press statements which, to be frank, have mostly been the opposite of what has happened. Mark Davies went on Radio 5 at the end of 2007 claiming that they didn’t offer any markets on Davydenko or Arguello, when in fact Betfair had been offering loads on both, after the voided Davydenko v Arguello match. The Radio 5 presenter threw him an unexpected googly live on air, which Davies wasn’t prepared for, saying "well surely if you have deemed that one player (davydenko) is not someone that you see fit to run markets on, surely the other player involved in the suspicious match is also someone you don’t take bets on". Davies stuttered, saw that it seemed completely logical, and said something very close to ‘erm,…. yes,…… we don’t offer markets on arguello either’. It simply wasn’t true.
Betfair are exploiting a total lack of regulation in sports markets to beat the clock, bet into its own pool, take a huge scoop out of the pool unannounced, change their bet matching software unannounced, etcetera. All this would be completely illegal in any financial market. I think sports markets deserve the same level of protection, and its time the FSA were compelled to step in to stop them.
This is all about Betfair’s share price. They still have a massive price/earnings ratio, and they are gambling that if they scoop an extra £15 million from the pool by placing their own robot on the markets, they can boost the value of the company by say £500 million. The people who buy these shares looking solely at the headline growth in profits are going to be gobsmacked in 2 or 3 years time that Betfair is being run as a pyramid scheme, and will wonder why company profits growth actually went into reverse in 2009, 2010 and 2011. The markets cannot sustain this level of front-running, clock-beating, trap bets, and attrition of the userbase. I just pray that the people tempted to buy Betfair shares are able to understand why the headline profits figure is going to be completely misleading for 2008.
Ed, where did you see that BetFair had hired its own team of traders? I haven’t seen any other discussion of this online (but I don’t follow the BetFair forums closely). If I were a trader on BetFair’s exchange, it would make me a little nervous if the exchange had an in-house trading team.
.
But like Chris Hibbert, I’m confused by Niall’s remarks. The new bet matching system appears to just expand the sophistication of BetFair’s system for accepting offers made by users. I could see that the new system could disadvantage some mildly sophisticated traders, who have profited by finding such arbitration matches themselves. But having the exchange automatically make such matches can improve liquidity and prices for other traders.
"Ed, where did you see that BetFair had hired its own team of traders?"  Join http://www.bettingforum.co.uk where Andrew Black posts as "Bert". He himself confirmed on there that there are in-house Betfair traders, but insisted that these traders don\’t look at who is betting on what. The posts he made related to this were in February/March ish 2007. I made it clear that letting in house traders pick off/frontrun winning accounts would be absolutely disastrous for Betfair. What we do know now though is that even a change of the magnitude brought in with the new parasite robot, which may rake in over £10 million a year for Betfair, they won\’t announce it, they\’ll just sneak it in. The same will be the case if they make the decision to allow their in house traders to start looking at who is betting on what. The logic put forward originally was that Betfair started offering "multiples" bets, with prices derived from the main markets.  These are at prices with a very wide spread, and mostly poor value, but still popular nonetheless with Joe Public (fair enough). The in house traders were supposed to hedge these into the exchange to minimise risk. Betfair has a rush to make as much money as possible by whatever means, and I have no idea if the traders are looking at who is betting on what, and placing their \’hedges\’ of the multiples accordingly. I also know someone who has been interviewed and offered one of these (unadvertised) trading positions internally to Betfair. They have kept it pretty quiet. "I haven’t seen any other discussion of this online (but I don’t follow the BetFair forums closely). If I were a trader on BetFair’s exchange, it would make me a little nervous if the exchange had an in-house trading team." Tbh, I think its pathetic. Betfair are haemorrhaging cash again this week to people beating the clock on the tennis by up to 8 seconds. (The delay BF allow users is only 5 seconds, so anyone more than 5 seconds ahead of UK users can mop up huge value). Its like chucking water out of a sinking ship with a spoon, and congratulating yourself on how hard you are working with said spoon. Betfair really need to find a way to extract money from the hooverers, thats where their goldmine is. "But like Chris Hibbert, I’m confused by Niall’s remarks. The new bet matching system appears to just expand the sophistication of BetFair’s system for accepting offers made by users." It works just about ok on stable, non in-running markets, but with in-running markets, with violent swings in the odds, it is scooping out a much greater rake from the pool than was the case previously. One semi-official "whisper" is that its on course already to make £4m a year by mismatching people\’s bets. I\’d say that it would be worth telling people they were going to be raked for £4m more a year personally,….. There are many side effects of the Betfair robot. If you submit a bet to take a price off the screen, that price won\’t be there 5 seconds later, when your bet would have been matched without the robot, if the robot can find a way to arb that bet. Many people that would have been matched now won\’t be, and there orders will be left up on the board instead. With the in-running markets, there are huge swings in probabilities of different teams/players winning throughout a match or game, and these bets being left up are then ripe to be picked off by the people using fast pictures.  If I ask for a price, I am more likely to get it with this robot, BUT I am also more likely not to get it at the time I request it (because Betfair can queue jump in the period users have to wait 5 seconds), and it will often be matched only when the odds have swung against the user who has placed it up. Time is critical.  A back of a player at a price may be at a fair value, but if he goes love 15 down on his service game, and its only then that you get matched instead, because the Betfair robot jumped in the way and took the order you would have taken, you will be shortchanged as a result of the robot.  " I could see that the new system could disadvantage some mildly sophisticated traders, who have profited by finding such arbitration matches themselves." In running markets are really fast. I don\’t think its possible for someone to place arbs on both sides in an inrunning market. It is only possible for a robot that does not have to have the same 5 second delay that everyone else has.  I have no axe to grind at all, I really don\’t think it is possible to sit there with bets going through on both sides, and expect an \’arb\’ to be there, on an inrunning event. " But having the exchange automatically make such matches can improve liquidity and prices for other traders." If a match had £100,000 lost by the people who lost before the robot was activated, Betfair would rake a maximum of £5,000 and the winners would get £95,000 or more.  Now the robot can rake not a maximum of 5% of a transaction, but anything up to and over 99%.  If Betfair are taking £10,000 instead of £5,000, every single match, then there is less money in the pot, the average winner wins less, the rate of attrition is up. The people who lose out the most are the inexperienced users who don\’t really know what they are doing (the sophisticated users will be much more savvy and careful and adapt to the robot), and its these people that Betfair need to keep on the exchange to shuffle money back and forth. Betfair need to give the mugs a run for their money.  The sad thing is there are plenty of ways to rake lots of money from the snides, the courtsiders etcetera, but this robot, which does beat the clock, actually hammers the mugs, and probably actually helps the snides to get on, when they whack through thousands of pounds on out of date prices, and now the betfair robot will look to see if there is a way to help the snides get on not just by letting the sides hoover a back on a selection, but by auto-matching the money on lays on other selections.  Really, really silly.
"Ed, where did you see that BetFair had hired its own team of traders?"
Â
Join <a href=\"http://www.bettingforum.co.uk/\">www.bettingforum.co.uk</a> where Andrew Black posts as "Bert". He himself confirmed on there that there are in-house Betfair traders, but insisted that these traders don\’t look at who is betting on what. The posts he made related to this were in February/March ish 2007. I made it clear that letting in house traders pick off/frontrun winning accounts would be absolutely disastrous for Betfair. What we do know now though is that even a change of the magnitude brought in with the new parasite robot, which may rake in over £10 million a year for Betfair, they won\’t announce it, they\’ll just sneak it in. The same will be the case if they make the decision to allow their in house traders to start looking at who is betting on what.Â
The logic put forward originally was that Betfair started offering "multiples" bets, with prices derived from the main markets.  These are at prices with a very wide spread, and mostly poor value, but still popular nonetheless with Joe Public (fair enough). The in house traders were supposed to hedge these into the exchange to minimise risk. Betfair has a rush to make as much money as possible by whatever means, and I have no idea if the traders are looking at who is betting on what, and placing their \’hedges\’ of the multiples accordingly. I also know someone who has been interviewed and offered one of these (unadvertised) trading positions internally to Betfair. They have kept it pretty quiet.Â
"I haven’t seen any other discussion of this online (but I don’t follow the BetFair forums closely). If I were a trader on BetFair’s exchange, it would make me a little nervous if the exchange had an in-house trading team."Tbh, I think its pathetic. Betfair are haemorrhaging cash again this week to people beating the clock on the tennis by up to 8 seconds. (The delay BF allow users is only 5 seconds, so anyone more than 5 seconds ahead of UK users can mop up huge value). Its like chucking water out of a sinking ship with a spoon, and congratulating yourself on how hard you are working with said spoon. Betfair really need to find a way to extract money from the hooverers, thats where their goldmine is.
"But like Chris Hibbert, I’m confused by Niall’s remarks. The new bet matching system appears to just expand the sophistication of BetFair’s system for accepting offers made by users."It works just about ok on stable, non in-running markets, but with in-running markets, with violent swings in the odds, it is scooping out a much greater rake from the pool than was the case previously. One semi-official "whisper" is that its on course already to make £4m a year by mismatching people\’s bets. I\’d say that it would be worth telling people they were going to be raked for £4m more a year personally,…..There are many side effects of the Betfair robot. If you submit a bet to take a price off the screen, that price won\’t be there 5 seconds later, when your bet would have been matched without the robot, if the robot can find a way to arb that bet. Many people that would have been matched now won\’t be, and there orders will be left up on the board instead. With the in-running markets, there are huge swings in probabilities of different teams/players winning throughout a match or game, and these bets being left up are then ripe to be picked off by the people using fast pictures.  If I ask for a price, I am more likely to get it with this robot, BUT I am also more likely not to get it at the time I request it (because Betfair can queue jump in the period users have to wait 5 seconds), and it will often be matched only when the odds have swung against the user who has placed it up. Time is critical.  A back of a player at a price may be at a fair value, but if he goes love 15 down on his service game, and its only then that you get matched instead, because the Betfair robot jumped in the way and took the order you would have taken, you will be shortchanged as a result of the robot. Â
" I could see that the new system could disadvantage some mildly sophisticated traders, who have profited by finding such arbitration matches themselves."In running markets are really fast. I don\’t think its possible for someone to place arbs on both sides in an inrunning market. It is only possible for a robot that does not have to have the same 5 second delay that everyone else has.  I have no axe to grind at all, I really don\’t think it is possible to sit there with bets going through on both sides, and expect an \’arb\’ to be there, on an inrunning event.Â
" But having the exchange automatically make such matches can improve liquidity and prices for other traders."If a match had £100,000 lost by the people who lost before the robot was activated, Betfair would rake a maximum of £5,000 and the winners would get £95,000 or more.  Now the robot can rake not a maximum of 5% of a transaction, but anything up to and over 99%.  If Betfair are taking £10,000 instead of £5,000, every single match, then there is less money in the pot, the average winner wins less, the rate of attrition is up. The people who lose out the most are the inexperienced users who don\’t really know what they are doing (the sophisticated users will be much more savvy and careful and adapt to the robot), and its these people that Betfair need to keep on the exchange to shuffle money back and forth. Betfair need to give the mugs a run for their money.  The sad thing is there are plenty of ways to rake lots of money from the snides, the courtsiders etcetera, but this robot, which does beat the clock, actually hammers the mugs, and probably actually helps the snides to get on, when they whack through thousands of pounds on out of date prices, and now the betfair robot will look to see if there is a way to help the snides get on not just by letting the sides hoover a back on a selection, but by auto-matching the money on lays on other selections.  Really, really silly.
"someone is 8 sec in front of sky pictures"
http://site.forum.betfair.com/.....ennis#null
see this thread on the bf forum. The betfair board are just bonkers. This is where they are losing money hand over fist – to the person/people beating the clock who looks to actually be betting from the US.
jme17 Mar 00:52obviously betting is taking place in the USA this week it is 99.99999% a certain. Therefore i ask why do betfair not look at the accounts who r 7 secs ahead of sky and 4 infront of Raw feeds? To my knowledge it is the broadcasters who r responsible – (the company that cover the MASTERS events), they are using 200k per trade and are probably making an absolute killing whilst discouraging new comers and the average joe punter who trades on here.
Now we all know it is illegal to use betfair from the USA so betfair can you go ahead and investigate these crooks and fine them heavily – $2million or more you could make from it and then you can pocket the money meaning you can scrap your silly super cheating bot and the world will be a happier place the guy has it spot on. shame the betfair board just cannot see why losing money hand over fist, wondering why they aren’t making as much money as they would like to, then retaliating by sneaking in a £10million bet mismatching robot, really is just woefully incompetent.
Some anonymous person posting on a betting forum with the "Bert" byline is not necessarily Andrew Black. If BetFair were to hire traders to operate on its own exchange, their P.R. department would have disclosed it. Furthermore, they could be asked whether it’s true. I will ask them, or somebody will ask them. HammerSmith is not the KGB. They are open people.
Dear Chris
I hope you do ask them, and I look forward to seeing their reply….
Rab,
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I have send an e-mail to a PR guy at BetFair, giving him 2 MO links, and asking whether BetFair does employ internal traders to operate on its markets. I have told him that I will republish here the Q&A they will post on their forum. Let’s wait and see.
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To tell you frankly, this info sounds like an unfounded rumor… but we will see…
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Also, it were to be true, we would investigate this issue scientifically and legally… without passion.
Good to hear.
http://wck2.companieshouse.gov.....ompdetails
"If BetFair were to hire traders to operate on its own exchange, their P.R. department would have disclosed it."
They didn’t disclose the new bet matching system, whereby they are taking a significant rake from each market before they charge commission. Their robot has an advantage that no normal user has – it does not have to wait 5 seconds to try to arb any out of date prices.
"Furthermore, they could be asked whether it’s true. I will ask them, or somebody will ask them. HammerSmith is not the KGB. They are open people."
Their record for accuracy with what they say to the press is lamentable. Be careful how you phrase a question to them. They could be employing 100 people to bet into Betfair markets, but if you asked them if they employ traders to bet into Betfair markets, they could easily tell you no they don’t (because the people they employ are given the job title "hedging operatives" rather than traders). Be blunt and say to them "are there any staff who place bets on Betfair’s behalf into the Betfair markets, yes or no".
"I hope you do ask them, and I look forward to seeing their reply…."
Me too
"I have told him that I will republish here the Q&A they will post on their forum. Let’s wait and see."
"To tell you frankly, this info sounds like an unfounded rumor… but we will see…"
"Also, it were to be true, we would investigate this issue scientifically and legally… without passion."
Without looking at who is betting on what it is still bringing in an inefficiency because the cross elasticity of demand for different markets (multiples and single events) vary. If (/when?) they do start peeking at who is betting on what, then not only do winning accounts pay 5% commission, if they leave bets up they can then be undercut by a trader making the decision to undercut them (commission free because its on Betfair’s own account) safe in the knowledge that they are getting a good run for Betfair’s money. A mug punter will find that had they left the same bet up at the same price as the shrewd one did, then instead of being undercut, Betfair might actually take that bet.
I’m not sure that the question of Betfair traiding in its own markets is news;
"19. The Joint Committee will be aware that Betfair sees its business as being no different—other than in the provision of choice, control, and better value—from a traditional bookmaker (who will now fall under the category "general betting operator"). Betfair is concerned that creating a separate licensing category for betting exchanges will merely create a political football which traditional bookmakers will continue to abuse by lobbying for unnecessary regulation in order to impede or undermine betting exchanges in any way possible. Betfair understands however the desire of government to maintain flexibility going forwards in case the betting exchange business model generates regulatory advantages or disadvantages which genuinely do merit differences in treatment. For example, the fact that a "pure" betting exchange operator takes no risk, means that an applicant should not have to prove an ability to manage risk positions. A betting exchange operator who does want to start taking risk will have to obtain a general betting operating licence as well and, as part of the application procedure, prove that it can manage the risk positions it intends to take. Most betting exchanges will no doubt apply for both licences so that they can participate in their markets as and when they see fit. This accords with the principle that betting exchanges should merely be viewed as traditional bookmakers who have taken the decision to minimise risk (as any traditional bookmaker can and often will do) by only taking one bet when they know they can find another punter to take the other side of that bet, locking in a profit by effectively adjusting down the odds offered to each punter by charging a small commission."
Second, what is the purpose of the Malta based Betfair Counterparty Limited?
Rab,
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Michael Robb advised to submit a question to their "LiveChat". I did e-mail them and ask them whether there are instances where BetFair acts as a bookmaker, besides the multiples.
http://www.midasoracle.org/200.....bookmaker/
http://www.midasoracle.org/200.....les-redux/
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The automatic reply I got:
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Should you have any queries about the site or your account, please
e-mail our Helpdesk on info@betfair.com.
Kind regards,
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Ed Murraywrote “They didn’t disclose the new bet matching system, whereby they are taking a significant rake from each market before they charge commission. Their robot has an advantage that no normal user has – it does not have to wait 5 seconds to try to arb any out of date prices.”
If the description of the bet matching robot that was previously provided here was accurate, there is no “advantage” for the robot to take. It’s matching bets among customers. If it takes a bigger commission, that would be a change, but they haven’t said that they are doing anything other than matching bets. Speaking of it as arbitraging is also not called for from this description. They aren’t taking advantage of the matching (perhaps overmatching) bets, they’re settling them against each other.
(The description was repeated in their response to CFM: “Where there is no opposing bet to match on the same selection, rather than just leaving a customer’s bet request unmatched, we will now attempt to match the bet request against unmatched bets on other runners.”)
" I did e-mail them and ask them whether there are instances where BetFair acts as a bookmaker, besides the multiples."
They definitely have traders hedging positions from the multiples into the Betfair exchange. Where this is a serious problem, is if say Betfair’s exposure is heavily towards say Birmingham City winning a football match (a Birmingham victory would be a big win for Betfair, a draw/loss would be bad news for Betfair). They could if they wanted check the match odds, and if they saw that a large number of shrewdies were all backing Birmingham to win, they could steer clear of laying Birmingham in the match odds to offset their risk. However, if they saw that the shrewdies were near uniformly laying Birmingham, they could then decide to lay Birmingham to get rid of their own position. Further to this, they could potentially nip in front of orders already up on the exchange, forcing people who would have been matched at the price requested to either request a lower price, or go unmatched. It isn’t a free exchange market.
Be careful giving Betfair any open ended questions – "are there instances where Betfair acts as a bookmaker, besides multiples" already has big grey areas, as highlighted above. There is a strong reason to run a multiples position if the accounts of shrewdies are all trying to get the same way that Betfair’s multiples position is already pointing. This does distort market dynamics, and there are internal Betfair traders appointed to bet into the Betfair markets. Any chance of wriggling that anyone gives Betfair will be used if they want to. A blunt question – "do you employ a team of inhouse traders to bet into the Betfair pool for whatever reason, yes or no" will leave them forced to either give an honest answer, or try to deflect it.
"If the description of the bet matching robot that was previously provided here was accurate, there is no "advantage" for the robot to take".
It instantly matches overbroke orders risk free to take significant sums of money out of all markets it operates on. If a user spotted an overbroke book, they would have to submit two bets on both sides, in the hope that 5 seconds later, both bets would still be available. That won’t be the case 99% of the time. The robot doesn’t have to wait 5 seconds, it can match one person’s bet against its own, whilst matching another person’s bet also against a 2nd bet from the robot, locking in the spread. This isn’t what Betfair advertises on television – in the UK betfair claims that punters bet against each other, now they bet against the robot, if the robot can find another punter who it can arb with instantly.
If you submit a bet to take an unfilled order on the screen, where previously you would have been able to match it, now the Betfair robot still has 5 seconds during which time it will take the unmatched order already up if it can find a way to arb it, leaving your order unmatched (and vulnerable to be picked off in many cases).
If there is no advantage to being able to fill two orders instantly if there is an overrround, then there are many users who would pay fortunes for said advantage if it was offered to them on a commercial basis.
"It’s matching bets among customers."
Not quite – its scooping a lot more money out of the pot, and increasing the customer churn rate, putting people off in the long term. Your chances of getting a match are reduced in the long term dependent on how big the scoop is. People need to consider that time is a critical factor in in-running markets, and this bot helps hooverers sweep both players/teams in a two way market. If you put in a bet where you would have been matched before, but now you aren’t (which will happen many, many times) you have to leave the bet up to try to get matched, and you are more vulnerable to being picked off as a wicket falls/point is won. There is no point requesting 2.1 on a player, then get picked off as the real probability swings ten clicks against you. That isn’t an improvement.
"If it takes a bigger commission, that would be a change, but they haven\’t said that they are doing anything other than matching bets. Speaking of it as arbitraging is also not called for from this description."
Plenty of examples have been posted on the Betfair forum confirming exactly this. Read this on page 33 of this thread ("Curious about some odd activity at Betfair" on the Betfair general betting forum)
http://site.forum.betfair.com/.....tname=null
Robin Ewe09 Mar 18:19i wasted another £2 on the arsenal match trying this out.
market was:
under 4.5: n/o / 1.01
over 4.5: 3 / n/o
I backed over 4.5 at 5 – matched instantly of course even though there was no money there.
4696736633 2008-03-09
17:43 Fixtures 09 March Wigan v Arsenal / Over/Under 4.5 Goals / Over 4.5 Goals
Back 5.00 2.00 Lost (2.00)
I risked £2 to win £8.
Where is the betfair customer that risked £8 to win £2?
There isnt one.
"They aren\’t taking advantage of the matching (perhaps overmatching) bets, they\’re settling them against each other."
Not true, as shown in the example just quoted.
Ed Murray,
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After I asked my main question, I added that there was that rumor about BetFair having hired traders, and I did put up the Midas Oracle URL where you mentioned this.
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We will see whether the Q&A is satisfying. If it is not, we would ask questions more directly to some higher-ups at BetFair, but there is no need for that at this point.
I know someone who was interviewed for a job as a Betfair internal trader, but who happened not to take the job at that moment in time. Another poster on the BF forum has claimed he was also interviewed for one of these positions, was talked through it all, and came to the conclusion that BF were heavily involved in their own markets. I can put you in touch with the first of these two people via facebook if you would like to chat with him.
http://www.facebook.com/s.php?.....=508629310
that’s my facebook profile – will put you in touch with the first person through there if you want to speak to him.
you may find other people who know about this by posting on the bf general betting forum as well. i don’t know if Betfair will answer any direct question about it.
I don’t comfortably read odds in that style (under/over; back & lay), but if I understood the example correctly, BetFair’s description of their bot’s behavior doesn’t match what they’re doing.
Yes, that would be costly to traders, rather than an advantage to them. While BetFair’s description made it seem that they were adding liquidity to the markets in the way I have described, this sounds like they’re allowing customers to place overmatched bets, and then pocketing the overage as they cross-match the bets.
The customers get the price they asked for, but BetFair knew at the time that they accepted the offers that a better price was available. Brokers in the US often offer "price improvement" as a competitive advantage to their customers in situations like this. This is a trading advantage larger brokerages can offer that smaller ones can’t match because they don’t see the trading volume. Not offering price improvement isn’t stealing–the customer got the price she asked for–but it’s considered better customer service to do it when you can.
Efficient markets work where supply and demand are met at a point most beneficial to both parties. If I buy a CD of my favourite artist for $10, the reality is I may have been happy to pay $15 or $20 for it, but at $10, suppliers and buyers meet up at a common price where there is no deadweight loss. The new Betfair robot ensures that a deadweight loss to Pareto optimality is introduced, and the people that are most disadvantaged by this will be inexperienced users. These are the ones that any company looking at its own long term health would try to nurture over the long run, not shaft in the short run to provide glittering (but fake) headline profits growth.
The most important thing I think is not to think about "traders", but to think about the gormless mugs. If for every dollar they bet on Betfair they used to get back 95 cents, and now they get back only 90 cents, then that’s no good. The Betfair take out from each market they run this robot on is higher, and the ones who are paying this increased takeout will be mostly the inexperienced users. Shame.
I think the robot is fairly close to neutral in markets before the match has started, but during matches there are wild swings in odds throughout the match, and taking a say 5% wedge between two users, plus charging the winner 2 to 5% commission, will reduce long term churn in the markets.
The problems are (1) is this sustainable? (2) is it targetting the right people? (3) did they bother announcing it? (4) what else have they got up their sleeve? (5) would this be legal on any financial market (6) if it indeed would be illegal on established financial markets, what in reality makes sports markets so different that people don’t deserve the same protection? .
Ed Murray,
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The proper way to contact me is by e-mail.
http://www.midasoracle.org/contact/
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As for publishing up comments or posts on Midas Oracle, here are the links to read to get more info:
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Your two guys are welcome to say what they want, here, on Midas Oracle, but don’t expect me to use all those social websites. I am a bit old fashioned. I don’t FaceBook that much, I don’t Twitter, I don’t IM, etc…
Chris , if you have any questions regarding traders on Betfair you’d need to email them direct info@betfair.com or maybe email Michael Robb direct if you have his email. The livechat@betfair.com has only been set up to put forward questions relating directly to the bet matching . Anything else even though the issues may be connected will be ignored.
Dave,
Micheal Robb of BetFair told me to address the "in-house traders" question to the LiveChat. Which I did. He said that BetFair’s market design specialists are gathering all questions, and will try to answer all questions.
If we are not satisfied by the answers provided by this LiveForum, we will ask this question thru other channels, later on.
Here are some facts about what is going on in Betfair for the doubters. These are facts and not supositions.
1. Betfair are skimming a variety of markets which is creating a windfall profit amounting to SEVEN figures per week
2. Betfair are ‘beating the clock’
3. Betfair staff are able to look at clients accounts and bet accordingly
4. It is Betfair’s intention to bring skimming to the horse racing in-running markets effectively killing off the 1.01 merchants
Betfair have recently moved their operations into a murky area and, imo, significantly changing their ethics.
Personally I believe much of what they do now is effectively illegal and they should be reported to the GC and brought to heel. Eventually of course they will shoot themselves in the foot but by then it will be too late. The wider their unethical practices can be broadcast the better as it may make potential investors think twice about future investments.
Deep Throat,
Would you be able to substantiate your accusations with evidence (which you would need if you were go to the Gambling Commission)?
It would seem that the debate is spreading, with a reference to somebody having reported Betfair to the Gambling Commission, and a reference from ED to his postings on here;
http://forums.moneysavingexper.....l?t=784195
Betfair abuses its market dominance.
http://hamishwrites.blogspot.c.....nance.html
" 4. [to Betfair] You state that "most betting exchange operators will no doubt apply for both [betting exchange operator and general betting operator] licences so that they can participate in their markets as and when they see fit". Do you currently participate in your own markets and, if so, is it really true to say that you have "`no interest in the outcome of the event"?
"We do not, and have never participated in any of the markets on mainstream UK sport, such as horseracing, football, cricket, etc. Occasionally we do stand as counterparty to bets in more obscure foreign markets to kick-start them by adding some liquidity. In that instance, the cost is part of our marketing spend and it therefore has no bearing at all on our impartiality in the market or our willingness to give up information to relevant sporting bodies. It is also declared to Customs and Excise in the event that it shows a profit."
"It should be noted that our relative impartiality to results is merely an advantage over traditional bookmakers meaning that we are less inclined to do many of the things which traditional bookmakers are accused of and which infringe regulatory principles. For example, we are less likely to manipulate the betting rules in our favour (infringing the principles of fairness to the punter) because we are less interested in the result. And we are less likely to be interested in hiding information on individuals suspected of skulduggery (infringing the principles of fairness to the punter and keeping crime out of sport) because we do not have information networks to protect. Therefore even if some betting exchanges do decide to take increasingly active roles in their own markets, that should only give rise to the same regulatory concerns applying to traditional bookmakers.February 2004."
Rab,
Would you mind providing a link or a reference?
Thanks a lot.
Sure;
http://www.publications.parlia.....012216.htm
Seems Loki Lab Rat (Betfair employee, not sure if the Rat in the name has any significance) has come out with a partial reply regarding traders and admitted they are active as part of the multipes operation to reduce risks in running taking advantage of the better odds on offer on in running markets
http://site.forum.betfair.com/.....ID=1435122
"Loki Lab Rat 18 Mar 08:20 I can answer this one quickly. There is a trading team based in Malta which manages the risk around the multiples product. They have software which tells them what the risk is associated with a potential result is and suggests what hedge bets can be placed to mitigate that risk at current exchange prices. They then place the hedge bets to manage the risk. They place the bets using the same software as everyone else using the site and respecting any in-play delays. The line about ‘opportunities in-play’ refers to the match situation and is nothing to do with beating the delay. For example, when just about every favourite won their international Euro 2008 qualifiers in early June last year (known as ‘Black Wednesday’ in some quarters), Moldova scored late-ish against Greece to square the match. The multiples team heavily laid the draw as the match drew to a close as it was a much better potential result than a Greek win. That meant that when Greece did score with the last kick of the game, our losses were mitigated to some extent by the hedge bets placed in-running. The multiples product is run under Betfair’s Maltese bookmaking license and is regulated by the LGA there. Therefore the team has to be based in Malta. The operation is an arms-length operation – there is no special access to any functionality or data from the exchange. "
There are always threads on the forums regarding delays in suspension and clock beating on the football markets, whilst there’s no evidence this is due to Betfairs own traders they’ll always be suspicions whilst they’re allowed trade on their own managed markets.
It is also pertinent that this team operates under Maltese jurisdiction; which of course puts it outside the scrutiny of the UK’s Gambling Commission!
However, I think there is also another issue that needs to be explored, and that is the general efficacy of a policy that allows Betfair’s own employees to trade on their exchange. Many people within Betfair have access to historical trading data unavailable to the broader betting public; such as what stables are backed and when; the significance of early money for particular horses etc; some are also able to access the betting records of individual persons. I specifically remember a comment made on Betfair radio concerning the boys in the office and how they had mopped up all the value regarding a particular horse from a gambling yard. The problem for Betfair, and one that is not likely to go away, is that nobody is sure any longer as to who it is they are actually trading against.
BF give out huge credit lines to fat loud mouthed pro punting horse owners whose associates then lay same horses when they are not off. Same individual has knocked plenty in the past so he is effectively BF trading their own markets by proxy. He is the highest profile on there but there must be plenty others.
Dave and Rab,
I will highlight your comments in a Midas Oracle post, later on, today.
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I want to remind the readers and commenters on this page that the best way to consume a blog is to do so within a feed reader, and I recommend Google Reader.
http://www.google.com/reader/
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Here’s how it works. You take the 2 Midas Oracle feeds:
http://www.midasoracle.org/feed/
http://www.midasoracle.org/comments/feed/
and you add them in Google Reader. From there, every morning, you log in Google Reader, and automatically, you will be served the new Midas Oracle posts and comments. So you won’t miss anything. For your information, there are other comment about BetFair made on other posts, which you have probably missed.
http://www.midasoracle.org/archives/comments/
http://www.midasoracle.org/archives/
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If you don’t know what a "feed" is, then go here, and everything is explained to you in plain English, with a geat video:
http://www.midasoracle.org/about/feeds/
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And I have another plug to make.
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I have listed here plenty of links (blogs, exchanges, etc.).
http://www.midasoracle.org/links/
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I would like the British traders to suggest to me some good additional links.
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Do you guys/gals know some good British betting blogs to add in this list?
Thanks a lot.
Send them to me by e-mail, and I’ll add them in the list.
http://www.midasoracle.org/contact/
The new clock beating super trap bet bot from Betfair does break Betfair’s own terms and conditions (which will no doubt be revised imminently), and is very foolish from a business point of view as it hammers the mugs and leaves the shrewdies, the courtside pick-off merchants, and the match fixers, all pretty much untouched. It would be suicidally bad business if this was in anything other than a virgin marketplace, where "growth" either organic or by taking extra cookies unannounced from the cookie jar, can offset quite amusing financial incompetence from the Betfair board.
What is the concern is the "what’s next then?" factor. There is an insatiable demand for more and more and MORE AND MORE money. Any weak line in the sand will be crossed (and has been by the trap bet clock beating bot). I’ve just had an extremely disturbing email about what exactly is next, from someone on the inside track, and its unreal. I’ve asked the person concerned to post on the midas oracle board, if they would be happy to do so. It beggars belief.
I am one of the people who Ed Murray has referred to in this blog. I was interviewed at Hammersmith by Betfair during the summer. For the time being I am going to concentrate on what Betfair has finally admitted from the past,present and future plans that betfair outlined to me.
""Loki Lab Rat 18 Mar 08:20 I can answer this one quickly. There is a trading team based in Malta which manages the risk around the multiples product. They have software which tells them what the risk is associated with a potential result is and suggests what hedge bets can be placed to mitigate that risk at current exchange prices. They then place the hedge bets to manage the risk. They place the bets using the same software as everyone else using the site and respecting any in-play delays."
There is 3 objectives for the "Maltese" trading team, "Maltese" is in quotation marks because betfair were unclear to me about who and what parts of the trading team were still going to be based in London and those who were going to be in Malta.
i) Hedging
ii) Trading
iii) Arbing
All 3 amout to the same thing, Betfair playing their own markets.
On each of the 3 points
i) Hedging, this is what Betfair has admitted to and has been doing to from day 1 of the multiples. Betfair admit to taking the other side of the bet for the mutiples, so i guess like any other bookmaker it is only natural they "hedge" their bets to reduce potential liabilites.
However unlike traditional bookmakers, who will lay off a multiple when one runs up, the bets taken by Betfair multiples are placed directly back into the exchanges before they "run-up".
This is one of the reasons behind the mutliple groups, they look at the back/lays placed on the mutiples for the first match and then the bets are placed into the exchange to reduce the liabilites and to cream off the difference between the price they have offered and that offered on the exchanges.
ii) Trading, this is what betfair are attempting at the moment, albeit unsuccessfully from what I last heard. Betfair have admitted they change their hedging positions, this by definition is trading. however the most serious aspect of their trading, is the in-running trading.
If betfair have accepted liabilities X & Y for events A and B being the outcome of a match, then why would liability X for A or Y for B be no longer acceptable during a match unless there was an advantage to be gained by trading betfair’s position in-running?
Afterall, on betfair’s exchange with a 100% book, whether that 100% book was an efficient or inefficient, the net expectation of betfairs position would remain the same if they were trading hedging positions blindly to "balance" the liabilities.
In the instance of an inefficient market, if betfair were blindly trading (i.e. not using odds compilers, traders or other means to form an opinion on the market) in-running then there would be no net gain as betfair would be equally likely to be on the efficient and inefficient prices and the differences would average out.
iii) Arbing, this is betfairs ultimate goal for the multiples. If this new cross-matching bot is being called a superbot, then this will be the hyperbot. A bot which will perfectly arb the mutiple bets into the exchange so betfair can make money from it’s mutiples operation risk free.
But if betfair are denying that they never form an opinion to a market and place bets accordingly and they have no plans to do this in the future either. Then why are they covertly recruiting academics from universities, odds compilers from the bookmakers and recognised traders from their own customer base ?
If betfair are playing their own markets, then what is to stop them abusing the position they have by owning the exchange. Having worked for several bookmakers in the past, I have yet to know one who would voluntarily wait 5 secs to place their "hedges",wait in the queuelike everyone else, make trading decisions according to the flow of money or not use their "warm sources" wisely.
Jesus.
I wonder how much Betfair’s "value", would be if they weren’t trying to depend on clock-beating, trading their own markets, front-running orders etcetera would be, if the regulators do indeed wake up and see that Betfair’s decision to break their own terms and conditions is a joke.
Every single commercial business in the world relies on extracting the most money from people who can afford to pay the most. Andrew Black and his team are yet again totally failing to do that, and to deliver value to current Betfair investors. It is actually painful how silly all this is. I genuinely believe that if I ran Betfair, I could scrap all this chicanery and grabbing out of the cookie jar, probably at least double profits, and give punters a good run for their money (instead of running a trap bet robot on the exchange etcetera). All this chicanery is incredible incompetence from them, and breathtaking to see.
woo hoo, they’ve stopped the thieving today
official announcement up on the bf site.
its only a matter of time before they launch another hair-brained rip off, but well done everyone who posted across the forums and won the argument.
Ed,
You seem to know a lot about Betfair and notwithstanding making some very strong criticisms of them, you also seemingly would like to work there.
I would have thought that someone like you would be an invaluable resource for them. Have you ever though about approaching them for a job?
Clandestine in-house trading, the scandal of the whole SIS ATR Racetech delayed pics scenario the whole company is asking for GC to kick the doors in.
Roger Duncan – thanks for the post. I genuinely believe that if I had a role within Betfair I could boost their earnings hugely, AND give the little fish a better run for their money. Betfair would never have me though – I’ve gone head to head with the very, very top of the tree people there, and they aren’t interested in the long term sustainability of the exchange or long term profits.
I knew some of the results in advance of evictions on the UK Big Brother television show, because I was a journalist at press conferences at the house. I made the deliberate decision not to bet into the market when I knew the actual result in advance. The weeks I wasn’t at the studios, I could see someone else knew in advance and was smashing everything available on Betfair. Telephone lines would close, and announcement would come live on air maybe 15-20 minutes later of who had been evicted. A market would be evens the pair who went or with what percentage, and that would suddenly be hammered. Betfair told me in 2006 that I was their 2nd biggest player on “specials” markets, so if I’m that far up the food chain, and I know the results after the lines close but before announcement, it seems reasonable for me to request that the markets should be shut once the lines have closed (and the result is known to a few people, but not generally known).
I asked on many levels for the markets to be shut at the time the lines close, but was told no by Betfair key accounts, and the person in charge of Betfair specials. I raised it with Andrew Black and Betfair’s head lawyer Martin Cruddace when I had a meeting with the two of them that these markets needed to be shut once the result was known, as Betfair users were being matched against people who knew the result and were hammering the markets. Mr Cruddace made it clear to me that no law was being broken by telephone vote insiders. My view is that matching people who bet fairly against people who do know the result, is bad business, allowing insiders to scoop tens of thousands of pounds risk free from the Betfair pool. Both betting exchange markets and reality tv are post-millennium recent inventions, and law is only ever a retrospective framework. Just because something isn’t illegal doesn’t make it right. Andrew Black went a step further. He said “there is the saying ‘if you can’t win you can’t lose, but I reject that”. He also said “I have no problem with this, its better to leave the markets open to allow people the choice to bet, even if they have no chance of winning”. He kept stressing the Harry Redknapp to Portsmouth managerial saga, where huge money was gambled on Betfair on Redknapp to move from Southampton to Portsmouth, which caused a bit of a stink when the ‘inspired’ money turned out to be right. I stressed the difference in this case is that the result was definitely known and being bet upon, after the result. It just struck me as wrong, and Betfair punters being ripped off.
There is a financial advantage to current Betfair shareholders allowing insiders to hammer Betfair markets. In the very instant short term, someone whacking through tens of thousands of pounds offering juicy odds will find a lot of takers. (In the long term people will grow wary and cynical, as happened with the number of suspicious betting patterns on Nikolay Davydenko matches). It boosts immediate commission, and makes the headline profit figure bigger. The stock is then sold on, either to a Japanese firm “Softbank”, or in the future to other investors, who will not realise that this inflated profit figure came about at the expense of organic growth (people taking tens of thousands of pounds risk free from the pool don’t then blow the money on say a basketball or football match). Betfair is run on a “give us as much profit as possible NOW” basis. I looked up to Black for years, and felt sick that he, as a member of the Betfair board, was doing this.
About ten months earlier, Mark Davies had created front page headlines in the UK press by saying Betfair was cracking down on phone vote insiders who had swiped £105,000 from the pool. It made the front page of most of the tabloids (who love a big reality tv story). The fact is that Black either solely, or in tandem with others, reversed this policy, on the basis that nothing illegal was being done (the lawyers only found this out after Davies went to the press). I told Black he was wrong, but he just could not understand why. I left that room in disbelief, going to the front entrance of the Betfair offices without Black, but with Mr Cruddace. I was a bit speechless, and I can’t speak for Cruddace, but I think he was as dumbstruck as I was that the guy I had looked up to for years,had just had a two hour rant why he was happy for insiders to bet into the Betfair pool risk free, on a known result. It was unbelievable. I have no tape, no proof, they both know what I’m saying is completely true, but obviously its not exactly something which Black would say in public.
It hurts me because at the start of the meeting Black was cooing about his new kid, how wonderful his new kid was etcetera, that he had spent the weekend (I think somewhere down on the south coast?) with his family etcetera. I’ve used Betfair in good faith for years, and often written or done articles hugely pro-Betfair in the UK press. I don’t want fast cars, helicopters, yachts etcetera. All I want is the chance to bet fairly, on the basis of skill, against other Betfair users, who are also betting fairly. It would be really cool if I ever did have a family to be able to look after them in a way that I didn’t have when I grew up. I perhaps have the same goals as Black – looking after a family if I ever had one, but to hear the guy who invented Betfair launch a fairly savage rant about how he rejected ‘if you can’t win you can’t lose’, and that he had no problem with genuine Betfair users being matched for large money against insiders who knew the result, was a massive blow. I left feeling sick, and feeling that I’d been had.
A few weeks later, I saw some alarming quotes in the News of the World (UK paper) from BF spokesman Tony Calvin saying something very close to “Betfair don’t accept bets once events have been completed, and if this happens we will void them”. I called the NOTW journalist to ask if Calvin had really said that, as it was the complete opposite of what I had been told. I then emailed Tony Calvin saying what I had been told by Black and Mr Cruddace, saying that Betfair’s policy was to allow phone vote insiders to bet after lines had closed, and smash thousands of pounds out of genuine Betfair users risk free. I got no email, no correspondence back from Calvin, but the next day the journalist concerned received an email from Calvin saying how much care Betfair took to protect their clients, and gave the example of how Betfair shut the reality tv markets at the time the lines close, instead of announcement by the presenters later on in the shows. It was history rewritten. They said no at every level, UNTIL they thought there was a chance the media would expose what they were doing. Then they wrote an obsequios email saying how much pride they took in protecting their customers. Isn’t that incredibly sad to see? I had campaigned for months for that change, not bet on the markets when I knew the result, and they didn’t even bother to let me know.
I would love to work at Betfair, but I have fought for a number of changes, all of which have been to Betfair’s long term benefit, but all of which they have resisted and resisted. One person claimed to be making over £10,000 a day from a tennis tournament in Asia on game by game tennis markets, by beating the delay. The match odds had a 5 second delay before a submitted bet hit the screen, but the game by game markets only had a 3 second delay. I and others all spoke to Betfair saying that if users did need 5 seconds protection on the long run markets like the match odds, they definitely needed 5 seconds on the game by game odds, especially when one account, but having a friend on a mobile in that stadium, was credibly claiming to be ripping off over £10,000 a day smashing money through on out of date prices. Betfair resisted, but we were eventually told that on the Thursday of that week (late 2006) it would be changed to 5 seconds. When the Thursday came, someone inside Betfair made the decision to overturn that and put it back to three seconds. The NOTW were conducting a campaign against fast picture players betting on out of date prices on horse racing. I thought it was unacceptable that one account with a friend on the phone from the stadium was credibly claiming to be ripping off so much money risk free. I said to the journalist to have a look at those game by game markets the next day to find the real hornet’s nest. I then called Betfair and said “look, tomorrow the NOTW will be looking at those tennis markets, and you can feel free to keep them at three seconds, which is against what you promised and told us, but don’t be surprised if you do to see this getting massive bad publicity in the NOTW this or next Sunday as a result of your decision to allow a pick off snide to run riot”. Betfair caved in, and reversed back to the 5 seconds.
Everything I do has been to protect Betfair and Betfair users. All I want is for Betfair to make a strong profit, but for all users to be able to bet fairly, and for the winners to be users with skill (not users with fast pictures, users with racing “connections”, match fixers etcetera). The chance to live by the sword and to die by it. There is perhaps a ‘jealousy’ from me towards new Betfair girl Anette Oberstad. She is heavily advertised on Betfair as the WSOPE poker champion, and is sponsored by Betfair. The fact is if you play poker you don’t have the hazards of sports players – Betfair is rife with fast picture players, who in effect bet against you by seeing the flop/turn or river whilst you are a card behind. Betfair also has had a number of markets with the ’suspicion’ (lets use the word suspicion for now) of match fixing, where you bet against people who are deciding what the flop/turn/river are going to be. Now that Betfair has internal traders betting into its own markets, how long until they are placing bets against you knowing what your cards are?
Betfair is run in an extremely cynical manner, and I’ve been attacked time and again. One internet troll was outed who was constantly posting attacking me, on a professional level, and also seemingly fascinated with my sex life, and lo and behold, it was a Betfair lawyer. I’ve spoken to him since he was outed, and told him exactly what I think of his trolling. It is sad that he stopped though once he had been outed, if it was worth posting attacking me whilst I didn’t know who he was, then why wasn’t I worth attacking when I did know who he was?
Betfair is a brilliant company, run by people who don’t care about it. I’ve put my neck on the line time and again fighting for it, and against corruption, and time and again the biggest obstacles have been Betfair staff themselves. Most of the things I have campaigned for – shutting reality tv markets at the time the lines close – changing game by game markets to an identical level of delay as match odds on tennis and snooker – fighting the people betting in-running from the USA (Betfair changed their terms and conditions to make betting from territories where people are not allowed to bet an offence) have all happened, and all these steps will boost Betfair’s growth and profits, but all were fought often quite fiercely against by Betfair staff.
I’ve also received a suspension without warning from posting on the BF forum. I asked for anything I have said wrong, any quote, but they will not release a copy of the thread (I had only saved about half of it), where three people betting from the USA on the US Open tennis had a firefight with each other a few months later on the BF forum. I posted on that thread after one of them made repeated accusations at a number of people – all of them anonymous other than as forumites except me (my real name is widely known, and I have been in the press a lot) – of cheating, saying it wasn’t true (it wasn’t true), and received fierce abuse. I was then permanently banned for “being involved in an exchange”, i.e. not having said anything wrong, but posting on a thread.
Mr Cruddace made it clear to me that in the then current climate, where two people had been arrested (the director of Bet on Sports?) by the US authorities for allowing gambling from the USA, that his job included the remit of protecting Black and the other Betfair board members from facing charges in the USA for allowing gambling from there. All the board members wanted it kept quiet, and a thread on the BF forum by three people all falling out with each other, outing each other as each in turn being people who were betting from the USA (to the tune of millions of pounds of wagers) was obviously something which Black and others would not want in the public domain. Hence two of the people were banned from the BF forum, but I was as well. They don’t trust me to keep my mouth shut, and as you can probably see from this post, they are right about that. The greater good comes first, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, and I will not stand back and let Betfair staff decide to allow huge damage to Betfair from insiders, and from people betting from jurisdictions where it is illegal to do so.
Betfair is an essentially brilliant company, but I don’t think they would ever hire anyone who cares about it, least of all me. I have put my neck on the line many times, and there is a satisfaction in protecting Betfair, and helping people nearly all of whom I will never meet, and nearly all of whom will never know it was me that campaigned fiercely, at significant personal cost, to protect them from insiders and certain members of Betfair staff.
BetFair Q&A:
http://www.midasoracle.org/200.....r-q-and-a/
Thanks for the response Ed! Wow!!
Well, it’s nice to know that there are people like you out there looking out for the little guy.
Good luck.
Also worth giving a mention to Simon Rowlands who when Racing Editor of the The Sportsman did a good expose on the exchange shop at Cardiff. If I can find thelink I will post it.
Hi guys very interesting, i have long thought Betfair do what they want when they want and nobody has any real right of reply.
Feel free to post some comments on here http://www.betfair-sucks.com which i hope will grow into some kind of diary of misdemeanors of Betfair.
Something happened last night which happily came 24 hours too late for the Betfair superbot to profit.
Please look at the following graphic
http://img297.imageshack.us/my.....geryh5.jpg
Sharapova was 5-3 down to Hantuchova in the first set, so Hantuchova’s chances of winning went from about 25% at the start of the match up to about 57%. Sharapova then pulled it back to 5-5, at which point she was 1.54 to 1.55 to win.
Someone submitted probably around £50,000 backing HANTUCHOVA at 1.55.
Had the Betfair robot been in place it would have laid all the 1.55 on Hantuchova, matching it with odds on lays on Sharapova.
The graphic indicates £48,789 was matched at 1.55 (whilst much more was matched by the user taking every higher available price). There was also a large amount still left up on the screen, which the user presumably cancelled in time. You can see the grey spike where volume traded jumped from pennies to £50,000 (lol).
If the Betfair robot had arbed it instantly, then that would have been an instant risk free profit of £15,000 to £20,000.
Luckily that money, even if lost by that punter (the price never recovered, and Sharapova won 2-0) went to other punters, to be recirculated over the long run into the betfair pool.
Betfair’s robot was disgracefully set up to profit risk free from these kind of mistakes, to carve off risk free cheap money.
The Betfair Q&A was much better handled, and more professional, than I was expecting. It didn’t shirk accusations, and admitted culpability in some areas (such as poor customer relations). However, this bit is just wrong:
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“Anything we can do to address that and give them a better chance of getting a bet matched immediately helps the long-term growth of our markets.”
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That is not true. Betfair taking out more from the pot than previously, as is the case with their superbot, increases the rate of attrition of the userbase, and damages the long-term growth of the markets. If they were offering best execution the statement would be ok, but the positives from giving people a price mismatch are outweighed by the bad value being given to them. The following is also at best misleading and probably false:
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“As the process only matches opposing customer bets, and no bet is matched by this process selectively based on anything that happened in the event being bet on the in-play delay isn’t applicable.”
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It helps people smashing through money on one side backing, or the other side laying, to get filled on both sides. Many snides playing will only be whacking money through on the favourite, either backing or laying, so the Betfair superbot magnifies the clock beating money, in effect beating the clock on the opposing selection by proxy.
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“I accept that I did not consider the difference in-running, as it relates to people mistakenly posting the wrong price, which would take the book over-broke by a significant margin.”
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This would have been an obvious ramification of putting the robot on. I do find this hard to believe, even if I am happy to give Mark Davies the benefit of the doubt.
3. If (1) is the case do Betfair guarantee that they will never change the current policy of best execution for bet requests on the same selection? For instance if I put in a request to back a horse at 2.0 and there is someone offering 2.5 on Betfair on that horse will Betfair never back it at 2.5 with that person and lay it back to me at 2.0?
I think that goes very much against the philosophy of the company as we set it up, and I would resist it very strongly myself.
That isn’t what I’d call an overwhelmingly convincing "no" is it
. LOL.
As published in The Sportsman:
If you haven?t done so already, you really should pop along to The Sportsman?s forum (http://www.thesportsman.com and click on ?forum?). You can talk about pretty much anything that is permitted elsewhere, as well as one or two things that aren?t, or so it seems.
Take the subject of the speed of feeds of racing pictures. Threads on this have apparently been deleted on other forums, but a healthy debate on the subject has been taking place on The Sportsman?s boards. Check out ?ATR SIS Racetech ? The Truth? on the horse racing forum.?
The main bones of contention are the varying lags between events and their being broadcast, the reputed disappearance of one of those delays earlier this year followed swiftly by its reappearance, and what sometimes seems like reluctance on behalf of the parties involved to discuss the issue in detail.
There is some dispute about the precise time lags involved, but all parties seem to agree on the following: pictures on At The Races (ATR, a free-to-air dedicated racing channel as part of a Sky package) are approximately 1 sec behind those on Racing UK (RUK, a subscription-only dedicated racing channel) and 2 sec behind Satellite Information Services (SIS, which broadcasts largely, but by no means exclusively, to betting shops). ?
SIS pictures in turn are a small but nonetheless significant figure (some give it as 1 sec, some as 2 sec) behind real time.
The time delay between SIS pictures and ATR pictures (double that of between SIS and RUK pictures) in particular is crucial. The two platforms cover the same events many times each day. ATR point out that their service "is not exclusively for people betting in running"?and claim that the lag is necessary in order to deliver pictures of a sufficiently high quality.?
Two seconds might not seem like a lot to be getting hot under the collar about, but in that time a sprinter can have covered as much as 40 yards and a jumper can have fallen at a fence when it appears to others to be about to jump it foot-perfectly. ?
On such differences vast sums can be won and lost. And the thing is that many punters are clearly unaware of the time lags involved.
When the 2 sec gap between ATR and SIS reportedly disappeared one day earlier this year it seemed – to those who believe in everyone having as fair a crack of the whip as possible, at least – to be what is known as ?A Good Thing.?
When the gap was there again shortly after, it was only too easy to imagine that there were hidden agendas at play. ATR maintain that there is ?no real evidence yet that there was a change in the delay.? ?
Conspiracy theories often have no substance, but if allowed to fester they can do nearly as much harm as if they were true. It would be for the good of all punters if the various accusations were answered as fully and as openly as possible by the parties involved. It would be even better if an independent body were allowed to investigate such matters.
It would also be for the good of punters ? and in my view should be made statutory ? for the precise time delay to be displayed on all broadcasts of races. ?
When this was suggested to James Singer, Head of Marketing at ATR, his response was ?We don?t believe we have any obligation to caveat the fact that our pictures are live on screen ? no TV pictures are truly real-time, as you point out. Any obligation to in-running punters specifically would sit more with exchanges or bookmakers offering in-running markets I?d say.?
Matthew Imi, Chief Executive Officer for ATR, later added: ?if all the relevant parties voluntarily got together or if we were compelled by a regulatory body to display such information, then I am sure we would be happy to do it.? ?
There?s nothing like looking after the interests of your own customers.
The powers that be, entirely properly, go out of their way to protect the vulnerable punter through bodies such as GamCare. ?Vulnerable punter? might almost be a term coined to describe any individual who bets in running on an event without being entirely au fait with the degree to which they are at a disadvantage in the market.?
Meanwhile, a whole thriving industry exists on the back of the delays associated with pictures transmitted on the dedicated racing channels. Not only do punters with access to faster pictures ? such as those provided directly by SIS ? have the potential to make considerable sums of cash, but those who provide these faster pictures turn a pretty penny as well. Domestic subscription to SIS pictures weighs in at almost 7,000 per annum for a minimum contract of three years.
It should not be forgotten in all this that SIS provide the pictures for ATR, though it has never been suggested that they would attempt to dictate the length of the delay involved in the broadcasting of those pictures, of course.?
Exchange shops have sprung up, providing high-speed feeds and state-of-the-art technology for their users. The reason for this is clear: most of the punters in them make good money by betting in running. One such shop claimed that it had access to feeds that were ?even quicker than SIS?. I was told that I needed to book a place at the shop ?at least a week in advance?. Business is thriving, then.
There are a lot of people who are doing very well out of the status quo. The status quo is being bank-rolled, directly or indirectly, to a large degree by punters, many of whom are ignorant of precisely what is happening. ?
The least that can be expected is that someone, somewhere cares enough for such people to ensure that the facts are brought out into the open.
Interestingly Simon Rowlands then ended up working for Betfair and all has gone quiet now!!!
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/mon.....ary113.xml
And there it is. Quelle surprise.
Betfair introduce a trap bet robot to artificially inflate short term profit at the expense of long term growth, and three weeks later, Black is revealed as cashing in much of his chips.
Puts the statement from Michael Robb on here saying there are no plans for Betfair shares to be traded into context - Betfair is undergoing a change of ownership in part, and the people that buy these stakes were going to be short changed if the trap bet bot could have been passed off as providing real profits.
Extraordinarily predictable.
Ed Murray, I have edited the formatting of your comment for better readability.
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Fawwon, thanks for the SportsMan Forum link. I will put it up in my list:
http://www.midasoracle.org/links/
Chris
The Sportsman went bust so the link in the piece is redundant. There was another good article which a mate is getting me and which I will post.
OK.
Still no answer from BetFair to that question:
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"Can Tony Clare confirm or deny that Betfair has recruited experienced odds compilers from the betting industry and traders from their own customer base with the purpose of boosting the GP on the bets taken by Betfair Malta?"
http://www.midasoracle.org/200.....ltiples-2/
11) Is there any other motivation for betfair to show a short term increase in profits, for example, given talk of a flotation?
There are no plans for a Betfair flotation
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/mon.....ary113.xml
That’s obviously an unacceptable answer from Betfair. Shares are being sold off, and the question was swerved by pretending that stakes in the company can only be transferred through a flotation. That isn’t the case, there is the motive to provide a short term burst in profits, and the owners are selling their stakes. That is totally misleading from the Betfair Q&A.
I agree with Chris Hibbert here. I cannot understand the problem. All BetFair is doing is matching trades that are agreable to all parties yet were sitting there unfilled for no particularly good reason, except that the technology was not able to find them. They simply improved their matching technology.
The allegations about Malta traders is a different story, and I could understand people objecting to that if it’s true.
I have been busy this week but things are winding down a bit..
Dave, as I gathered it, the issue with matching was that Betfair had access to overrounds that no-one else did because they were able to jump to the front of the order queue, effectively freezing out other orders/cancellations at any time. This was especially important in back-and-forth events and amounted to an unadvertised rake in aggregate.
Jason, I think the allegation of queue jumping made in some of the comments is based upon a misunderstanding. BF is just matching the orders when a match becomes available, not inserting new orders at the front of the queue.
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The new method will deprive outside traders access to these riskless arb opportunities, so they may feel like they are being jumped by BF, but really it is just BF doing its matching job better.
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The only issue in my view was the capture of the overround because less sophisticated traders were not aware of the implied odds available, given the existing offers on related outcomes in a multi-outcome event, leading the traders to post over-generous offers to the system. BF should use an approach like the ‘phantom offer’ generation that Chris Hibbert explained a while back, to show the effective prices available. That approach would leave BF out of the overround business and back to collecting a commission, only, on bets matched.
Michael Giberson –
Before Betfair introduced this robot they took a maximum of 5 cents out of each market for every dollar lost. Now they were both charging commission and extracting risk free revenue. It is surprising that you don’t recognise this as an issue for exchange users. Losers will lose more quickly, and winners on average will win less, plus the greater the Betfair rake, the lower liquidity will become.
Please imagine a two runner market, England v Australia at cricket. If there are odds available to back on both runners, before a bet placed, and a 2nd bet placed on second later on the other side, would both be matched against onscreen odds. With the robot, the 2nd bet wouldn’t be if the first bet caused the market to go overbroke. The market has gone overbroke because of the first bet, but it is only 4 seconds after the 2nd bet has been placed that the Betfair robot takes the two overbroke orders. The person submitting the bet then misses out, despite submitting a bet 4 seconds before the betfair robot took the onscreen bet that was available, to crossmatch it. There is definitely clock-beating, in comparison to the market before the robot was turned on. The effect is identical to a zero second delay robot being put on the market by Betfair, a privilege no user has.
Arbing in running is literally almost impossible, but if you look at the example above, Betfair would have made a $30,000 risk free profit if they hadn’t switched the robot off, on the Sharapova v Hantuchova match. This is unethical, to profit not from giving a good service, but to profit from users mistakes, something which Betfair has claimed to try to be upholding by banning trap bettors. You can see from the spike in the graph that most of the unlucky person’s money was matched, but there was still I think over $40,000 still up on the board unmatched which I believe the user managed to cancel in time – something which the Betfair robot would not have allowed.
There are many issues here, which do deserve respect not simplification.
Is it possible that users in the Betfair subsidised Trading Shops are alloweo beat the clock too?
Fawwon; "allowed" may be a bit steep. However, there is clearly still an issue regarding some users having access to more real time pictures than others. And how interesting indeed, that the man who first publicised this, should end up worlking for Betfair.
How "interesting" that as a final resort, Betfair elects to simply bar dissenters from posting in the "forum" thus cementing its development into a propaganda vehicle instead.
Nothing unusual there. History is littered with those who thought they could warp reality.
Starting with the fable of "The Emperor’s Clothes"
Of course, he was naked, wasn’t he?
Adonis
TRADING REPORT
Published: 01/03/2006 (Sport) Matt Williams
THE time delays between SIS and ATR (other channels come into the
argument, too) are a hindrance, and it would be a major boost for
in-running markets if we were all punting on a level playing field with
regard to the live television feed.
Yesterday the delay between the two channels mentioned was negligible,
and it will be interesting to see if it’s repeated today – let’s hope it’s not a one-off.
This was the moment Matt "Trading Post" Williams wrote the wrong thing. Strange how he was silenced and his RUK appearances evaporated soon after.
This is the 2nd article that Simon Rowlands wrote on the subject of the scalping of the average Betfair customer…..
"Most of these are big hitters" I was told. "The ones on the
front row would all be among Betfair’s top UK customers and paying
tens of thousands in commission each year." They work hard for their
winnings as well – many of them are there all day. The BMWs and the
Mercs had brought them here from as far afield as Surrey and the
Midlands.
The John Lovell Exchange Shop website had promised "a friendly
atmosphere". Friendly if you were a regular, maybe, but not it seems
if you were a curious reporter: I was treated with some hostile stares.
John Lovell, chairman of the Wales and West Bookmakers Association, was
more welcoming. A pioneering spirit with an eye for the main chance, he
can claim to have been the first bookmaker to have used computers on
course in the UK. While the first exchange shop was established by
Henry Spurway in the centre of Edinburgh, Lovell has gone to school on
what went before and recognised that a High Street presence is
unnecessary just as long as enough serious punters know about you.
Seats at his shop are booked out weeks in advance.
Lovell introduced me to his sons, one of whom recently gained a Degree
in Economics and Gambling Studies from the University of Salford and
the other of whom was "on a sort of gap year after getting straight
As in everything at school". I later spotted the latter trading
busily in the front row – a change from travelling the world I suppose.
The Lovell coffers are being filled from a number of different sources
it seems, but Lovell himself gave every impression of being in
something of a quandary. The Cardiff shop, expanded 15 months ago at a
cost of £70,000, specifically for this purpose, had taken a while to
establish itself but is now a roaring success. He would like to open
other shops like it, but his existing customers would rather he did
not.
The John Lovell Exchange Shop is one of a very small number – Lovell
himself mentioned three – of such ventures in the UK. It reportedly
costs £30 a day for a seat, and, to a man, each one of the 16 traders
at the Cardiff shop cough up the money so that they can concentrate on
in-running betting. More shops would mean more in-running punters. But
not just any type of in-running punters: winning ones. The mug money
- the pot of gold in all this – would then have to be shared
between a greater number.
The in-running punters at Lovell’s shop are winners for a number of
reasons, not least because they are clever chaps, with fast reflexes,
who can read a race and know their horses and jockeys into the bargain.
The crucial element in the set-up is their access to the fastest
pictures available.
The fact that the John Lovell outfit is, in some respects at least, a
conventional betting shop means that it can gain access to SIS pictures
more comprehensive than would be available to a punter at home. As
explained in the Rowley File a fortnight ago, there is some dispute
about the precise time lags involved on the various broadcasting
platforms, but all parties seem to agree on the following: pictures on
At The Races are approximately one second behind those on Racing UK and
two seconds behind SIS. SIS pictures in turn are a small but
nonetheless significant figure – some give it as one second, some as
two – behind real time. RaceTech pictures have the shortest delay of
all but, according to the company, are only available to the public at
racecourses.
The odd second or two here or there might not seem like a lot to be
getting hot under the collar about, but in two seconds a sprinter can
have covered as much as 40 yards and a jumper can have fallen at a
fence when it appears to others to be about to jump it foot-perfectly.
On such differences vast sums of money can be won and lost.
Flat racing is even more popular than jumps racing among Lovell’s
in-running punters, somewhat to my surprise. "The public seems to be
warier about the consequences of betting in-running on jumps, but a lot
can happen in a short space of time in a Flat race", I was told.
Indeed.
Someone surely needs to point out to the armchair punter just what he
is up against if he is to avoid being eaten alive by something a long
way further up the in-running food chain.
http://www.exchangebet-incardiff.co.uk/ This is the link
Arbitraging bets is the same thing as matching bets. They are equivalent. When someone places a bid at price 10 and someone else places an ask at price 9, there is an "arbitrage" that the exchange eliminates by matching the bets. When the exchange arbs a multi-outcome market, it’s still matching, just in a more complicated way.
Having said that, I now see that perhaps there is something unfair going on. In this new type of matching, Betfair is apparently charging the bettor their full price, rather than giving them the "best available price". I can see how that is a fundamental change that deserves legitimate criticism. It’s as if in the above example, the exchange charged the buyer 10 and only gave the seller 9, keeping the spread for itself.
This is a great quote from Rab that summarizes nicely IMHO: "betting exchanges should merely be viewed as traditional bookmakers who have taken the decision to minimise risk (as any traditional bookmaker can and often will do) by only taking one bet when they know they can find another punter to take the other side of that bet"
Ed
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I think you’ve got the wrong end of the stick with the Daily Telegraph article. I have a friend who works at Betfair who told me recently about what the DT article mentions. Basically it involves some sort of corporate re-structuring and as part of that Betfair have taken the opportunity to offer all shareholders the right to sell up to a certain percentage of their shares back to the company (this is consistent with the DT article’s description of a share buy-back). Therefore as there is no outside investor that shares are being sold to, the suggestion that the bot was introduced to boost profits for the share sale is probably incorrect. The timing of the bot and the share buy-back appear to be purely coincidental.
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On the question of the bot, my take on it is that if/when it is switched back on with best execution (so that the customers benefit from the better prices and Betfair does not profit from the cross-matching), then this can only be a good thing for the majority of Betfair punters (obviously those that currently employ bots to take advantage of markets going overbroke are excepted). I was curious to know whether you agree with that view.
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Although I think Betfair were wrong to introduce the bot without best execution (particularly without announcing it!!), I think they are to be applauded in their U-turn in switching it off and their commitment to only turning it back on when they can provide best execution.
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Roger
Fawwon
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Although Simon Rowlands did work at Betfair for a while, my understanding is that he stopped working for them some time ago. I know this because the guy I know at Betfair (as mentioned in my post above) used to occasionally work with Simon and I recall him telling me that Simon had left.
Roger
Roger – I think you will find that the tentacles of Betfair stretch far enough. It’s just strange that he suddenly skipped over to BF after helping to highlight the cosy deals they have with these Exchange Shops. My guess is that Simon has gone over to the dark side. Same as poor ole "Trading Post" who was reduced to describing how ATR Chief Exec wouldn’t return his telephone calls!
Roger, thankyou for the post.
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I do agree, a bot with best execution would be absolutely fine. In effect, it would reduce the market to a single runner, with equivalent backs and lays being matched against each other, giving the 2nd party the best possible odds (the first party has always submitted a bet, and if it is unmatched and remains on the board to be taken by someone else, then it is matched at the price asked for, whereas the second party if there is a price improvement will reap the benefit from that).
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I’ve never met Simon Rowlands, we used to work for the same newspaper, but I was an outside contributor, and wrote all my columns from home. He’s always come across well on different forums, and is well spoken of. I really don’t think there is any chance at all that Betfair employed him to "shut him up" as the case were.
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I find it hard to believe Mark Davies claim that he did not realise the implications of putting the bot on in-running. That does not match with the comments that a number of people were given face to face by a range of Betfair staff, where the consensus given was that this was ‘fair game’, and they were very happy with it. It was pretty obvious there were major flaws with it, particularly because it acted as a trap bet robot, with the major benefactor from customer errors actually being Betfair itself. Mark Davies is a clever guy with a background in finance I believe, and the flaws were pretty obvious. Some internal Betfair staff were apparently against it, but the people in favour of switching on the robot won the day, until the backlash.
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Most of the quotes coming from Betfair staff to a wide range of people was that this was very much ‘fair game’ in their eyes. They were wrong. The voices were amusingly not unanimous though, good to see that a minority were still switched on and saw this for what it was
Hello there to all. First of all i would like to appologize for my poor language. I have an expierence with beating the clock at BF. It is my strategies at all (not for soccer betting. It is possible to beat the clock only if you are at the field). All i know is that:
The delay time between the field (when the game and the TV channel is in one country) an the TV channel is approx 2 sec. (The TV channel provided by cable operator).
The delay time between one TV channel provided by cable and satelite is approx 3 sec.
I have personaly tested via phone call and talk with my father.
Ed
I am not casting doubts about Simon Rowlands integrity but no1 is going to pay him to write articles thatknock BF’s interests. Now Matt Williams is another matter entirely as the man wants to have his cake and eat it. Why he didn’t resign over the ATR scandal and what he wrote is a msytery. Maybe he has tried punting for a living and prefers an income to put bread on the table?
Fawwon
Betfair Customer Services 19 Mar 18:37
Magician: Specifically did the GC APPROVE this change to the matching algorithm – or where they simply made aware of it and did not grant or reject formal approval
"We did not seek Gambling Commission pre-approval for cross matching before we launched it because we don’t believe that this was required."
This is disgusting. Betfair’s own staff were saying that the extra revenue on top of commission from mismatching backers and layers, and pocketing the spread was about 15 to 20% above the normal commission raised on the markets it was put on. They actually think that a change of this magnitude does not need to even be mentioned to the Gambling Commission? This change which acts to magnify and punish much more severely any user mistakes, with Betfair pocketing the difference risk free?
I have little respect for past Betfair bashers who have attacked Betfair often unfairly particularly in the earlier years. There are many good things to say about the original exchanges, and later Betfair, but the way Betfair have taken a stranglehold in the market, and looked for ways to exploit weak regulation, its really, really hard to find anything positive to say about Betfair at this moment in time. Their I.T. is very impressive, and the poker is quite good. Their claims to “not have understood” how this worked and would impact on both users and themselves are scarcely credible at best, and the Gambling Commission’s remit is to protect fairness in gambling. Perhaps they have a disdain for the GC. The whole episode is quite simply astonishing.
Via Niall O’Connor
http://www.arbforum.co.uk/cgi-.....975565/7#3
Let’s be objective here. In order to offset an inefficient aspect of their markets, Betfair made a decision to introduce a flawed piece of match betting software, which afforded them the opportunity to seek risk free arbitrage opportunities using their clients money. Nasty and most likely illegal, as it is unlikely that said clients have given Betfair the right to use their money in such a manner. The question we are left to ask vis a vis Betfair’s action, is, was it a case of bad faith or bad judgement? Either way, the fact that it has happened and the subequent climbdown has served to erode trust between Betfair and its traders; and one can surmise that if Betdaq were not so crap, many Betfair users would be switching sides.
 "Nasty and most likely illegal, as it is unlikely that said clients have given Betfair the right to use their money in such a manner. "what betfair have done/did is perfectly legal and is in the terms and conditions on the site.betfair was not matching 2 players and keeping the differnce, their bookmaking operation was taking on both bets in the same way a traditional bookmaker takes bets.it states clearly in the t+c’s of the site that betfair reserves the right to match bets with its bookmaking operation instead of matching customers with each other.
The thing is though Graham, that Betfair’s tv adverts paint the exact opposite picture.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEfvb69-zmo
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"unlike traditional bookmakers, Betfair punters bet against each other, and matching a bet, means they can choose their own odds. that’s why in six years we’ve become the uk’s busiest online betting company".
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I would say they have to decide if they want to match punters bets against Betfair’s traders, or if they want to let punters bet against each other. Either people should be matched at best price, and Betfair’s traders should stop betting into the BF markets, or the tv advert should be pulled. There’s no reason not to make a fresh tv advert, but this one is surely misleading. Is it another case of BF wanting to have their cake and eat it? We’ll do one thing, but tell everyone we’re doing something else? As usual, I’m a bit lost with their logic.
P Benckendorf –
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to be honest I don’t think Betfair cares about its ‘traders’, and I can’t really see much of an economic case for it caring. The big winners from gambling are William Hill & Ladbrokes (not Betfair), and it is the mug money which finances that, both from small punters, and in some cases, from big losing "high rollers".
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I have heard some traders say how important they are to Betfair etcetera because they "pay" x thousand pounds commission per year. The truth is that anyone who logs on on January 1st, and takes out money in winnings over the year, has paid no ‘commission’ at all.
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Betfair is held back by its own management team, who are only just beginning to appreciate how to make Betfair a success – look after the little fish. The roulette machines in the traditional bookmakers shops are goldmines for them, but for each pound put in, the customer will get 99 cents back. Betfair have tried the opposite approach, to try to keep increasing the rake (by fair means, or in the case of bet mismatching, by foul). It isn’t very clever, and is costing Betfair money and growth, in terms of an opportunity cost.
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The valuable customers are the ones who lose small amounts consistently over the long run, and keep feeding their habit. The bet mismatching robot failed because it punished people who made mistakes (which is part and parcel of using the BF interface), like on the Sharapova v Hantuchova match shown above. Those customers will never come back.
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BF don’t really care what people think, they care about trying to scoop as much money as they can, as quickly as they can. It doesn’t help punters that the Gambling Commission seems to be so toothless that BF have actually bypassed it, not even bothering to notify them of their bet mismatching robot
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Punters need a better, more sustained run for their money, and BF needs to stop the board members putting in get-rich-quick bet mismatching robots, and try to deliver a better run for the punters money. That’s where the goldmine is for them, if they can begin to appreciate it.
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Shrewdies go where the fish are. The best thing the BF board could do for BF itself is to ban electrified trawler nets, and try to make sure the shrewdies are armed with at best fishing rods. There are ways to do this, but I don’t think they understand why its in their own interests to level the playing field. Instead they will fail to reach the profitability levels of William Hill & Ladbrokes, because they are going for the high attrition rate, scoop the cash NOW, decisions. Whilst the traditional bookies continue to rake it in from their very low rate of attrition games
Sharp
I think what Herr Benckendorf was referring to, was the simple act of Betfair matching punters’ bets, not at best-price, and pocketing the difference….can you show me where within Betfair’s terms and conditions it says that it is legal for them do this. The fact that the profits from this sleight of hand were paid into the company’s bookmaking operation is neither here nor there. The act, as PB says, is risk free arbitrage using their clients money.
There is a braoder issue at play here, which nobody has yet disucssed and that is Betfair, the "betting exchange" and the matter of self-regulation.
Some may be aware that Mark Davies likes to call Betfair a bookmaker, and that as regards regulation, he seems to have convinced the Gambling Commission that this is indeed the case.
The reason, for this, of course, is that he fears that Betfair may end up being regulated by the FSA under more stringent and tighter controls.
On the question of the legailty of Betfair’s bookmaking arm, let me introduce you to the concept of "bucketing" which has been defined as a "method of doing business wherein orders of customers for the purchase or sale of stocks/commodities for future delivery, instead of being executed by bona fide purchases and sales with other traders on an exchange, are simply matched and offset in the soliciting firm or exchanges own office with the firm itself taking the opposite side of the customers’ orders." Purdy v. Commodity Futures Trading Com’n, 968 F.2d 510, 520 (5th Cir.1992).
Said bucketing diminishes the hedging function of exchanges, and has been proven to have a detrimental effect on market liquidity, which, as you may know, is essential to market information aggregation, hedging, effectiveness, and the availability of a competitive market. In time, bucketing reduces the number of participants in a market and creates greater potential for the exercise of market power and distortion of prices.
If Betfair were a properly regulated exchange, might we be suggesting that it could be open to a charge of bucketing?
The cloak of being a loosely regulated bookmaker, has in the past saved Betfair against the charge that it kept the commission in situations where bets were deemed to have been fradulent. Now it would seem to be saving them, in the wake of the charge, that it "inadvertently" introduced a bet matching sytem that allowed it to rake in excess profits over and above its normal commission. However, if it were a properly regulated exchange, it would be bound to act with the utmost objectivity, impartiality, honesty and good faith, and unable to act in a manner designed to further its own selfish interest and personal gain.
Ambiquity suits Betfair but not its traders. Betfair, is an exchange and it should be regulated accordingly…however, one suspects that that is a task for beyond the brains at the Gambling Commission.
My "a priori" is to view the prediction exchanges as pure event derivative exchanges, not as bookmakers —but I’m willing to listen carefully to the other side of the argument.
http://www.midasoracle.org/200.....bookmaker/
"can you show me where within Betfair’s terms and conditions it says that it is legal for them do this" http://content.betfair.com/abo.....Conditions 6.14 Notwithstanding any statement to the contrary in these Terms and Conditions, TSEL may elect to nominate one or more of its subsidiaries or joint venture companies to act as counterparty in respect of bets or offers for bets involving a certain category of its customers or a certain bet-type category (a "Nominated Counterparty"). If we do so in relation to our agreement with you we will take reasonable steps to bring this to your attention. In any event, where you attempt to match a bet with a customer who is bound by terms that specify they will bet against a Nominated Counterparty, you shall be deemed to have matched your bet with the Nominated Counterparty as if it were that customer to the extent of the amount so matched. so betfair’s slight of hand is to match the "cross matched" bets not with each other, but with the bookmaking arm. this is something betfair did freely admit in the Q&A session.
"If we do so in relation to our agreement with you we will take reasonable steps to bring this to your attention."
It is quite clear that they made no attempt to take reasonable steps to inform their customers as to what they were doing; thereby voiding the terms and conditions;
http://www.betangel.com/kb/?Vi.....EntryID=19
Beyond that, the fact that it states that a Betfair subsid may act as a counterparty to a bet, does not in itself allow that subid to take profits over and above the bare commission that forms a central part of the Betfair contract.
Pleasing to see that I’m not alone in thinking the BF board have a very odd policy in trying to generate revenue and profit.
. Is it really that hard to work out? 
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http://site.forum.betfair.com/.....ID=1444566
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" The Magician (1)26 Mar 17:45
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consistant losers should be on 1%
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consistant winners should be on 5% or more
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in fact – remove the entire comission system and replace it with a tax… the biggest winners pay the most ( simple)"
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People who value the service most, and would be willing to pay the most for the service, should pay the most to use it.
The trap bet mismatching robot has gone back on according to the latest BF announcement, but as I understand it, only for reciprocal odds that are exactly at the price request by the two parties. This was part of the statement
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"2. Some customers also expressed a concern that bets placed in error are more likely to be matched than before. Whilst we haven’t observed this occurring in practice, and if it did we’d be uniquely positioned to refund a customer disadvantaged as a result, we recognise that it’s a concern for some customers.
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This would have been the case on the Sharapova v Hantuchova match highlighted above, where the user instead of losing roughly $40,000, would have lost $40,000 had they closed out immediately, plus another $30,000 to $40,000 to the Betfair robot.
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It is good to see BF acknowledge the trap bet flaw in their robot, and I’d like to see a cast iron commitment put in place that if a user makes a monumental screw up, as happened in this case, where nearly $100,000 was placed on the wrong selection, that BF refund all money that it pockets from the trap bet function of its robot, back to that user. They should never have introduced a trap bet robot – trap bets are one of the worst features/flaws of the way BF run their markets, and scooping up tens of thousands of dollars risk free from a genuine user error may indeed be giving a BF user a bet being "matched" at the price requested", but it doesn’t look right ethically. Sure BF can keep the money if a user makes a massive mistake and clicks the wrong button, but the question is why? Great to see they have acknowledged the flaw in the robot though, and hopefully anyone unlucky enough to make a massive error won’t be further punished in the future by the BF trap bet robot, over and above the damage they will already sustain from clicking on a wrong selection.
On the biggest day of the betting year; a day which should have represented a showcase for their fledgling SP system, Betfair were forced into a major U-Turn, when the system did not work. Accordingly, hundreds of punters found their bets unmatched, many, presumably unaware of the fact;
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Betfair were forced to issue the following statement, when, after suspension of its Grand National win market the company noticed that the returned Betfair SPs “were not appropriate to the race”. Accordingly, the company reversed the procedure and manually determined the BSP using “methods at its disposal”; “We apologise for any inconvenience this has caused. Betfair Grand National SPThe reconciliation of the Betfair SP for the Grand National win market resulted in prices which we believe were significantly unfair for backers of some horses, most obviously the winner. Therefore we unreconciled the Betfair SP to return what we believe were fair prices. As a result of unreconciling bets after the race, some matched bets (which would have been winning bets for customers) became unmatched bets. In addition, some customers may have traded in-play based on bets they believed had been matched. If you believe that you have been disadvantaged as a result of this, please contact us at bets@betfair.com. We will look at our records to determine the amount you should be due and provide compensation accordingly. Please be aware that this may take some time and it is unlikely that we will be able to address all enquiries until next week.”
Rab Bibater –
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What they have done literally makes me sick. It is unbelievable. I also cannot believe that they are thrusting the impetus onto customers to work out if they were disadvantaged etcetera. It really is quite simple – if someone places a back or lay that wins, they should get paid out. Not they should wait to see if the BF SP system screws up, see if their matched bet is now no longer matched, and then have to beg BF on the off chance of getting compensation. What on earth is going on? Its unbelievable.
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“Betfair: The bookmaker where you can place a bet that we void afterwards because we thought we’d get bad publicity that we only paid out just over 3 to 1 on the Grand National winner. Punters may or may not be compensated if we voided a winning bet they placed, but only if that customer spots our hidden away announcement, AND complains to us in writing”.
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Sorry, but its absolutely unbelievable, and pathetic. Every customer who had a bet matched should get paid out. End of story!!!!
Yes, it’s a National dissgrace. But what is really fascinating , is that once vis a vis the media, another Betfair balls up is simply being brushed under the carpet.
Nothing from the sycophantic pups at the Guardian; nothing from the horse racing industry bible the Racing Post. With friends such as these Betfair need not worry too much what it does, or, what indeed, it does wrong. To the Betfair Poker Heist; The and the Betfair Bet Matching Fiasco we can now add The Betfair Starting Price Balls UP.
But as nobody is prepared to report on these matters, who cares…..
How the Betfair forum are discussing the Betfair Grand National SP debacle;
http://site.forum.betfair.com/.....;schatname=
“nobody is prepared to report on these matters”
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I will publish about that on MO a bit later… and a guy named Niall O’Connor can do too, if he wishes… Or any other MO people…
Ed
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Just noticed that there’s more about this SP fiasco on this thread. I assume that your comments above were made before Betfair’s announcement (see here: http://www.midasoracle.org/200.....ent-17858) that they would be compensating everyone. Or is what you describe above still the case?
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Thanks
Roger
Dear “Roger Duncan”
You should have carried on posting from your home computer. As I strongly suspected, and can now verify, you are a Betfair employee;
This really does portray you and your company in a rather pathetic and desperate light, and I hope it is something that Mr Masse (whose blog you were so quick to please, when he put up his pro-Betfair comments) will now expose you for the underhand sneak that you are. (Not to mention your so called advice to ED to apply to work at Betfair!!!).
Another massive Betfair own goal!!
Chris, I hope you will now email them in order to find out whether these underhand postings were sanctioned, for if this were to happen at any other company, the person concerned would be sacked. At the very least you should dig out all of “Roger Duncan’s” postings and expose him for the fraud that he is.
P.S. Congratulations, now you know how much your blog is really rattling these guys.
“Information related to ‘213.86.197.128 – 213.86.197.191′
inetnum: 213.86.197.128 – 213.86.197.191
netname: SPORTING-EXCHANGE
descr: The sporting Exchange
descr: 14-16 Peterborough Road
Rab
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You are a funny bloke. Although given your other posts and your apparent hostility to everything connected to Betfair, your over-reaction is perhaps to be expected. I am not sure I understand why my posting on a forum dedicated to prediction markets without revealing my true identity is so scandalous (and merits me being sacked!).
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My posts on this forum (and on any other forum I care to post on) are my own personal views. Obviously they may be tinged with a slight bias given I work for Betfair, but I was a customer long before I started working at Betfair last year. In any case, I don’t think I have been disingenuous in my posting (other than to say that I was only a Betfair customer). I felt that revealing my link to Betfair would have meant that my posts would have been dismissed as the biased comments of an employee. Maybe with hindsight I should have been up-front about this and taken that chance.
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I certainly do not think I was being particularly biased in any of my postings. Just occasionally chipping in where I thought the full story was not being told (as I have done above). Please feel free to point out which of my posts you find so objectionable.
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My comments about Midas Oracle were also all genuine. I have been reading this blog for some time now and I am a big fan. Chris is very fair and balanced in his blogging and the criticisms he makes about Betfair (such as Betfair’s blog) are well reasoned.
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As for my comment to Ed about applying for a job, that was a genuine question. I have seen him post a few times on various forums (particularly on the Betfair forum) and I think he knows his stuff. Unlike some people that want to have a go at Betfair for the sake of it, I think most of what he says has merit. I obviously didn’t know all the history Ed has with Betfair, which sounds like he may have put a few peoples’ noses out of joint.
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Roger
“Rab Bibater”,
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How did you get the IP info about one commenter? From Niall O’Connor’s wordpress e-mails or from your subscribe-to-comments e-mails?
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Is your true name “Rab Bibater”?
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Pro- and anti-BetFair can discuss freely here.
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The error of “Roger Ducan” was to say he is a BetFair customer. He should have not stated that.
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In the coming years, the relationship between the prediction exchanges and the blogs/forums will evolve. As Robert Scoble said in his book (”Naked Conversations”), the Web is a conversation between people within a same vertical. For it to be an interesting conversation, people should respect each other and acknowledge their interlocutors’ arguments. It’s a long road ahead.
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test
Roger Duncan –
. I am delighted it has been reversed, it was absolutely disgusting that they could just unmatch bets and used the winnings that would have been paid to customers who had placed winning bets, to massage the SP back up to a PR friendly level.
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It is good to see the reversal of BF’s earlier stupid position, and BF is now paying out to all affected customers proactively, rather than insisting that its up to each customer to work out if they were affected and try to submit claims etcetera. ALL MATCHED BETS SHOULD GET PAID OUT ON THE GRAND NATIONAL. The wally at BF who decided that the solution to a PR disaster 3.3 to 1 on the winner was to uncouple matched bets, so that the losers still lost, but the winners had their side of the bet uncoupled and lapsed instead of paid out, is just blatant theft! I’m not even tubthumping, you can’t decide after an event to not pay out the winners, because the robot you built yourself gave you a price that your PR department aren’t happy with.
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I have no ‘personal’ problem with anyone at BF, but I have told Andrew Black face to face that I could not disagree more strongly with his decision to allow phone vote insiders back on to reality tv markets, and his decision to order the BF integrity team to allow insiders to hammer the markets. For people who try to bet fairly, Black’s behaviour and decision making is a disaster, he should never have been allowed to reverse Mark Davies efforts against corruption, and he would be vilified if he broadcast his views widely that he has no interest at all in betting being “fair”. I’m glad that when they realised there was a risk of the NOTW exposing Black at the end of 2006, they backed down. I’m not sure its fair to say I have put Black’s “nose out of joint” though. When you’re a full time professional gambler, you can’t afford to let fanciful whims of a person with some very curious ideas dictate that markets are held open for long periods of time when the results are known to insiders (and being bet on). What is the choice? Stand back and let him do it, or campaign for markets to be closed once the result is known? I asked politely for several months at every level, and was told no. The NOTW pick up on it, and suddenly its achieved. Says a lot really,…
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Roger Duncan, if you were one of the people behind reversing the latest BF dumb decision to unmatch bets, then well done. If you were one of the people that made the original decision, then you’re a plonker. I hope it wasn’t you !
Rab –
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Any BF member of staff who is open-minded, balanced, and prepared to think about the overall picture, is an asset both to BF and BF customers. Whoever Roger Duncan is, he is obviously not Andrew Black (who isn’t open-minded), and he is not BF lawyer O’Reilly (who was outed after posting endlessly attacking me, my sex life etcetera, and who is at the very Uriah-Heepish end of the scale where he rushes to tell Emperor’s how wonderful their clothes are).
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I did an econometric project analysing political decision making (based on samples from Italy), where the conclusion was that the more functions/societies/organisations a politician was a member of, the better decisions they made. The skill of listening to people. ‘I’m pro-Betfair and anti-corruption, which is not an ideal position to be in, when there are a tiny minority of BF staff who are pro-corruption, who say they “reject if you can’t win you can’t lose”, and have “no problem if people are matched against other people who know the actual result”. The people who don’t listen at BF have a number of traits – aggression, dishonesty, fibbing, sleight of hand – , but there are people who are both intelligent and open-minded, and there is a reason why BF have reversed their decision to not pay out a number of people who made winning bets on the Grand National. That reason is probably because some people within BF have listened, and realised they were disgustingly wrong to void winning bets. Much has been said on BF racing forum and gen betting forum. If contributions on Midas Oracle help too then great. Black has said to me that he won’t let me post on the BF forum, which to be fair is no surprise, but I haven’t said anything wrong, and the people that should be banned from posting anywhere are Black & O’Reilly.
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There is a chance that Roger Duncan may have read some of the posts on here and pulled someone at BF aside and said “hold on mate, we have got a problem here”. Then fair play. The more that people at BF are intelligent and open-minded, rather than Mugabe-esque, bigoted and aggressive, the better. The stuff O’Reilly was posting up about me was absolutely disgusting, but he should have kept on behaving like that after he was outed.
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Posters like Roger Duncan (who may even possibly be Black or O’Reilly, who knows), seemingly posting with an open mind, should be welcomed on to Midas Oracle. The more there are intelligent people listening to the real argument, and not the propaganda from a tiny minority of BF staff, the better.
I do feel the need to add one more thing
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I have campaigned for many things (markets shut once the result is known, changes to tennis game by game markets, snooker frame markets, football match odds markets, and tackling the betting from the USA, the first four of which were achieved, and the US one had BF change their t&c’s to ban people from betting from the US), but there was one more thing I campaigned for, and they have put it in place with this racing decision
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A few years ago, on the Christmas number one market, BF were offering a number of runners, including “Gary Jules”. A few weeks later, the song ‘Mad World’ was released, but was by M.Andrews ft Gary Jules. Someone in BF voided all the bets on Gary Jules, and introduced a fresh runner M.Andrews ft Gary Jules. By this point instead of being a 50/1 outsider, it was a strong contender. People who had backed at the 50/1 were majorly annoyed, it was that single that they were betting on to be christmas number one, and ok, it was M.Andrews ft Gary Jules, but there was no need to change the original runner, because everyone knew what they were betting on. Jimmy White changed his name for a week as PR stunt to Jimmy Brown (to advertise Brown Sauce), but likewise if you had bet on Jimmy White, and if he won that tournament, you knew what you were betting on, even though his name for a few days wasn’t Jimmy White anymore.
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IBAS ruled that BF were wrong to void the Gary Jules bets, and BF paid out I think £50,000 to Gary Jules backers, a sum wildly above the actual commission generated by that market. The thing is though, they paid out EVERY back bet on the original selection. So if you had bet £50 at 10/1, and laid £50 at 9/1, BF credited your account with £500 profit, despite the fact you were only £50 green on Gary jules, and level the rest of the field. This is ridiculous. You could have backed £100 at 500/1, and laid £100 at 500/1, that does not mean BF should then stick £50,000 in your account. It was a stoopid decision to do that. These markets are heavily traded, and BF paid out way more in compensation than they should have done.
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something similar(ish) then happened on UK Big Brother 5. BF paid out on the wrong evictee for one of the evictions. It was a ridiculously stupid decision to pay out randomly on the wrong person, a number of us tried to explain to BF they had made a massive error, but they waited for IBAS to tell them that paying out on someone who hadn’t been evicted as the evictee, was a bit of a silly thing to do. However, BF’s and BF’s customers interests are intertwined I believe (the Circular Flow of Income) and I couldn’t see why paying out all the winning back bets but not losing lay bets would have been in BF customers interests – there was a risk BF would stop running these novelty markets entirely. Sure it would have been a nice windfall for some people if they had just randomly paid out everyone’s winning back bets, but the changed I campaigned for was to pay out the difference in people’s positions between the two selections, i.e. if they would have won more had they been paid out on the correct runner, THEN credit their accounts with the difference. That seemed fair, not paying out randomly every winning back bet irrespective of if that person had laid it off completely.
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It saved Bf a fortune to do it that way instead of the Gary Jules way, and it was the right thing to do. I’m pleased that this way of doing things has been maintained for the Grand National bets
“Posters like Roger Duncan (who may even possibly be Black or O’Reilly, who knows), seemingly posting with an open mind, should be welcomed on to Midas Oracle.”
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Yes.
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However, I think posters should be banned from using middle initials. Over to you Chris Masse
Yes, those snobbish people should be banned from posting here….
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”but I was a customer long before I started working at Betfair last year”
Roger, where you interviewed around the same time as me in august ?
Ed Murray
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Thank you for your posts.
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I was not involved in any of the decisions made following the Grand National. I have read elsewhere that Betfair always intended to compensate everyone affected on the Grand National, although I agree that this doesn’t appear to have been communicated very well.
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Betfair is growing very quickly and in lots of different directions (for example, different product developments/enhancements and internationally into different territories). It is a very exciting time for the company. However, like any company, it is not perfect and it will occasionally make mistakes.
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I DO think that it is right that customers and other interested parties have high expectations and give Betfair a hard time when things don’t go completely to plan. I think it keeps the management on their toes. Although I don’t know anything about the various criticisms you highlight above, I do think that for the most part Betfair has been very good news for punters over the last few years and, with the odd exception, it has been run very well. These were my observations before I started working for the company and they remain so today.
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Roger
Ps. FWIW, I am not David O’Reilly or Andrew Black or anyone else that wields that kind of power! My job description is far more modest than theirs!
I think they had no initial intention whatsoever of compensating everyone who had winning bets voided for no reason. The u-turn was pretty much forced on BF because it wasn’t just bad practise, it is clearly because voiding the winning side of the bets (but not the losing ones of those bets) for no reason other than the PR department not wanting a 3.3 to 1 Grand National winner, is actually stealing. I wish I could think of a stronger word, but you cannot decide to retrospectively void the winnings that would have accrued to winners, and have the losers losses stand.
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BF have no understanding that whilst they weren’t the first exchange (it doesn’t really matter who was first), if BF hadn’t bought out flutter and cornered the market, another company would have arisen to facilitate p2p online betting. It is the invention of the internet that brought about the betting revolution, not any miraculous benevolence or inspiration on the part of any of the past or present BF team.
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I started betting on BF mainly on specials/reality tv market, so put yourself in my position, where I have seen the front page headlines from Mark Davies cracking down on phone vote insiders, write in my magazine column supporting Davies and BF, and then have the horrendous luck to encounter Black, and his horrific pro-corruption rant on these markets. How would you feel? BF isn’t like a traditional bookmaker, relying on every account being a losing one, the model is different. Black has the choice to care or not to care, and, well, his views are clear.
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I don’t agree with you that it is an exciting time for BF. I haven’t got a PHD in Economics as Michael Giberson has, but I do have some real skill in the economics field that I have never seen anyone on the BF board display. The commission system as it currently stands is so flawed against BF’s and BF customers own interests. I find it amazing that the company is valued at £2 billion. The unrealised potential is massive, but the penny has not dropped yet.
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As someone who has mainly bet on tennis & specials, this version of BF you have
(1) Black ordering the integrity team to allow phone vote insiders
(2) Black ordering markets to be left open after the result is known
(3) A wave of “suspicious” tennis matches, both before and after Davydenko v Arguello, where no investigation is undertaken, and the markets are settled no questions asked. Tursunov 1.19 at the start of the match, goes a set AND a break down, and the price doesn’t change, with someone lumping on hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of pounds? No probs – it gets settled. FFS.
(4) Stephen Maguire odds against despite only needing one of the last four frames against a weak opponent in the snooker. Result? Paid out again. He was over a 93.5% chance to win that match if he was up against an equally talented player, but he was up against a rag. Same result, paid out, and the BF forum moderator pulling any threads mentioning it.
(5) Tennis & snooker fans who pay good money to watch these events having the sport they are watching not played out as a fair contest
(6) Mark Davies claiming he wants to stop people getting a free lunch, yet is happy to be CEO of a £2 bn company based mainly on running markets on sports it pays nothing towards (bar racing).
(7) BF voiding the winning side of the bets after their SP system gave them a result they didn’t want, and taking ages to changed from the initial policy of it being up to customers to prove if they were affected.
(8) Statements from Mark Davies saying that getting more bets matched is in customers interests, and seemingly no understanding that a trap bet robot was not a good thing, and depending on the elasticity of demand for BF from marginal customers, an increasing of the rate of attrition potentially much more damaging to growth than the benefits of scooping risk free money
(9) Numerous BF staff at cheltenham and on the phone saying the “skimming” bot was fair game, and increasing BF profits by 15-20%. You really have to wonder.
(10) 6 people feeding scores via phone/hands free kits in the recent Dubai tennis ladies tournament, plus one on a PDA. Should BF really be making millionaires out of pick off merchants? Shouldn’t Mark Davies be going after these “free lunch”ers, rather than introducing trap bet robots to prey on the weak/unskilled?
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To be fair, any punter looking for a run for their money a few years ago, I would have said definitely use BF – the prices are better. Now I would definitely say use one of the traditional bookmakers, and I would personally recommend William Hill. I’m restricted to a maximum bet of zero pence with them, but if I was recommending to someone else where to get value, its William Hill, definitely not BF.
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BF’s biggest problem is it retains a number of the same faces it had 8 years ago. Many of these people would never make it to the top of any normal firm. Instead, you get O’Reilly getting a pat on the back for being a vicious internet troll. Would a senior figure in GlaxoSmithKline or Citigroup spend hour after hour trolling internet forums attacking people?
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BF just don’t understand economics. “bot” from the BF forum is incredibly bright, one of the sharpest people I have ever met, but on the one subject I am strong on, economics, I clearly proved one of his arguments (about a government fee charged to exchanges/bookmakers on a sliding scale dependant on number of premises) about small exchanges being subsidised, to be completely the opposite of the reality. If I can prove one of the brightest people I have ever met completely wrong, then perhaps I know a thing or two in this field. The BF board are at the end of the day, probably wiping in half the value of BF, in my opinion. If they had a rival firm competing with them, they would compare notes and have the obvious answer perhaps made clear. As such this is monopolistic X-inefficiency, combined with quite big dollops of cynicism from Black.
Dear “Roger”
I woner what it says about the business ethics of Betfair, that you are posting on blogs, under the guise of being a Betfair customer?
Perhaps you could reveal your real name and your job title? And what of the backhanded compliment to ED Murray – are you honestly telling me that as a Betfair employee, you did not know who this guy was???
In relation to Betfair being a new company – what, nonsense; in the internet aqe, a ten year old company is not new.
I would like to refresh your mind as to recent Betfair debacles, in the hope, that now that you have been outed, that you may be able to provide us all with an objective overview as to the thinking that lay behind each decision.
Firstly; the Betfair Poker Heist. A software glitch resulted in Betfair stealing from its customers. Betfair’s response was to go silent?
Second; the bet matching fiasco. Betfair quietly introduced a system that allowed it to make monies over and above its normal commission. Six weeks later, it partly withdrew the system, after its customers finally got wind of what was going on.
Third, the Grand National fiasco. Betfair tapped into their customers’ funds to plug a hole in their system, which saw a lower SP being returned than Betfair had expected. In that customer funds are supposed to ringfenced from Betfair’s funds, was it ethical for Betfair to take money out of peoples accounts and to hold onto it for four days?
Ed Murray
I can’t comment on the majority of the points you make as I don’t know anything about them (other than obviously what I have read in various forums).
However, I can comment on one or two of the points you make:
“The commission system as it currently stands is so flawed against BF’s and BF customers own interests.”
I don’t know enough about economics, market forces, etc to have a view on the commission structure, however I do know that Betfair spent a lot of time looking at their commission structure last year (I believe they also got an external consultancy involved) and decided that the current structure was the best way forward. As I say, I don’t know what the arguments are for changing it and the merits of those arguments over the status quo.
“(6) Mark Davies … is happy to be CEO of a £2 bn company based mainly on running markets on sports it pays nothing towards (bar racing).”
Only a minor point, but Mark Davies is not the CEO, he is “Director of Corporate Affairs”.
In relation to what Betfair pays towards sport, I came across the following article on my Google Alerts email a few days back. http://www.thoroughbrednews.co.....;stud_id=0
“Making the keynote speech at the Global Leaders in Sport conference in Auckland, New Zealand, Mark Davies, managing director at Betfair … reiterated Betfair’s commitment to pay sports bodies a percentage of the profits achieved on betting on events run under their jurisdiction.”
This has been Betfair’s standpoint for several years. There are two things Betfair has said for some time that Sport should expect from bookmakers: (1) information about what betting was taking place on their matches, to allow them to police their sport better; and (2) a financial contribution to acknowledge that they were putting on the ‘show’.
In fact there was a Corporate email update circulated internally at Betfair a while ago that said that Betfair paid a proportion of its revenue voluntarily to Sport: (1) in Australia, to the AFL, NRL, and cricket among others; (2) in the UK, to British greyhounds; and (3) in Ireland, to Irish horseracing. It is obviously not compelled to make any of these payments.
Roger
Graham: “Roger, where you interviewed around the same time as me in august ?”
No, I started in May.
P Benckendorf
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“I woner what it says about the business ethics of Betfair, that you are posting on blogs, under the guise of being a Betfair customer?”
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As I explained in my post above to Rab, what I post in forums are my own personal views and my business. I don’t think it says anything about the business ethics of Betfair. I also explained above why I withheld my connection with Betfair. However, the rest of what I posted wasn’t particularly biased in favour of Betfair and wasn’t disingenous.
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“And what of the backhanded compliment to ED Murray – are you honestly telling me that as a Betfair employee, you did not know who this guy was???”
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Why should I have known about the various encounters that Ed has had with Betfair. Do you think the “life and times of Ed Murray” is part of Betfair’s induction day?!
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“I would like to refresh your mind as to recent Betfair debacles, in the hope, that now that you have been outed, that you may be able to provide us all with an objective overview as to the thinking that lay behind each decision.”
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I work in the engineering department and am not involved with the management of the company. I don’t know much more about the various issues that you mention other than what is in the public domain. Although I do note that your interpretation of the said events is not completely accurate, I don’t think there’s much point in trying to get into a debate with you.
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It is clear from the tone and contents of your post that you share the same mentality as Rab: namely that everything to do with or related to Betfair must be evil and corrupt. You are of course welcome to your opinions, however I don’t plan to respond to any more of either or your posts from now on. Frankly I have better things to do with my time.
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Roger
Roger – if you are in the engineering department (and sorry for being dim, but I’m not quite sure what ‘engineering’ covers in BF), then if that’s the same thing as the IT department, it has improved hugely in the last two years. BF regularly used to go down a lot, and the standard of their IT has jumped noticeably. I have no idea if it has been extremely expensive (or not) to get the level of improvement, but fair play to the IT team, its very good.
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Please keep posting on here, the more BF staff with an open mind, willing to look at different sides of the coin, the better.
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As far as ‘corruption’ goes, I don’t think BF is corrupt, but I do think that the infamous blind eye has been turned a little too often. When you have Mark Davies on national tv explaining that the Davydenko v Arguello match was voided because of irregular betting patterns/prices, and as he is on air, exactly the same patterns/prices are taking place on Arguello’s 2nd round match, with the BF tennis forum in meltdown, my acct manager saying he has had another acct complaining about it, and BF key accounts say the phones have been lit up like a xmas tree with complaints, to have the match odds settled within a maximum of 3 seconds, possibly within two seconds, of the match point being won, its just very sad to see. Too often BF stand shoulder to shoulder with whoever is winning, however they are winning, and personally, I feel if someone comes in and smashes a market from evens down to 1.01 on a reality tv market, after the lines have closed, and the result is in (but not yet announced) then its not rocket science that those markets needed to be shut at the times the lines closed.
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As far as “evil” goes, letting people bet after the event on known results might be ‘legal’, as was explained to me, but it was surely immoral, in my book, and it definitely wasn’t “betting fairly”, in anyone’s book. If you call a company “bet” “fair”, but actively push policies to allow people who know the result to bet against people who don’t, and make money out of it yourself (the artificial temporary boost in commission from holding markets open once the result is in boost’s BF’s commission in the short term, but drains long term churn, so you can sell off your shares at an artificially high price in the short run, based on phoney profit figures), then I personally think that anyone religious would have real ground to be seriously worried. I’m not religious, but I do think that this kind of behaviour is a bit depraved, and so sad to see from someone I genuinely looked up to for years.
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I think the Australian market is much tougher – the public are much more anti-gambling, and consequently so are the authorities -, and it is good to see those quotes from Mark Davies. I hope he extends them to put money back into all the sports it profits from, in a symbiotic relationship, rather than the parasitical one it has at the moment with most sports.
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Firstly; the Betfair Poker Heist. A software glitch resulted in Betfair stealing from its customers. Betfair’s response was to go silent?
— Erm, the poker heist saw customers all entering six-way games, all going in first hand all in, and the software paid out 1st place with winnings, and 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th all got equal payments that the 2nd place person would normall have got. Each person puts in say $10, the winner gets $40, 2nd $20, the rest nothing. With the heist the winner got $40, and the other 5 all got $20 each , meaning overall $60 was put in, and $140 was taken out. How did BF “steal from its customers”?
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As for the commission structure, the optimal way forward is to introduce an individual account by account commission rate manager. I used to be in the bookmaking industry, and every bookmaking firm will have a manager making decisions on whether accounts are open, closed, restricted etcetera. If someone turns up once a year to whack through £100k in the final minutes of the Big Brother winners market, they shouldn’t pay 5% commission, they should pay 90% commission on their winnings. Tbh, phone vote insiders would still pay 90% commission, and the income from that could be used to lower the commission rate for Joe Bloggs, and at the margin, increase the attractiveness of BF to recreational punters. Charge the people who would pay the most for the service, the most to use it. Look at those 6 courtsiders in the Dubai womens tennis championships using a phone to feed the score through and try to beat the clock, or the 1 person on a PDA. Should they really be on 5%? If they are happy to whack through £10,000 a point once it is won or lost, it may be impossible to stop them without increasing the delay to a prohibitively long time period (affecting liquidity), but an account commission manager would spot who is whacking through £10k a point, put those accounts up to a high commission level, and reduce commission for everyone else. By taking an identical amount of commission per market, but charging the courtsiders more and the people on the margin less, the cost of using BF falls at the margin, and the BF markets would grow. It really is simple. You’d need somebody, bright and very sharp to do this job correctly, and to spot new accounts immediately that were whacking through £10k a point etcetera opened by the courtsiders to try to circumvent it. However, it is very possible to do this, and it would be the right thing to do. The wrong thing to do is the trap bet bet mismatching robot, which clobbers the mugs, and leaves the snides unscathed. That increases BF’s churn rate, and is damaging to BF.
“Why should I have known about the various encounters that Ed has had with Betfair. Do you think the “life and times of Ed Murray” is part of Betfair’s induction day?!”
lol, well that actually happens Hills, i remember my first day at hills many moons ago, being shown the photgraphs and biographies of certain customers the company did’t like doing business with, characters such as barry conway.delroy divine or my favourite “the pencil man”
lol Graham
. In the end Beckham was substituted after about an hour i think. 
I love Hills 
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I got restricted to zero pence max bet size with Hills in about March 2006. One of their traders was on my msn, and would ask me for advice etcetera, then one day goes “oh, sorry to hear about your account”. I then looked at my account, and lo and behold it was zero pence max bet lol. I was up a few quid overall against them apparently on my online acct.
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I phoned them up last year, and asked if they could refer a bet to a trader for me, but they said I was categorically never allowed 1 penny, on any sports event, ever. This did seem silly, if the bet was referred, the trader could then offer me even a minimal bet, and then move the price.
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My friends got on in the end though. They were offering 6/4 for Beckham not to play 90 minutes against Brazil in a friendly (it finished 1-1 in the end). I thought that as Beckham was getting old, and was being brought back to play in the REAL qualifier for Euro 2008 three days later, no way would McLaren let Beckham play a whole 90 minutes (and tire out his ageing legs). Plus it was Beckham’s return from international exile. If Beckham played badly he’d get taken off, and if Beckham played well, he’d get substituted, so that the crowd would get the chance to give him a standing ovation to their returning hero. I thought the chances of him playing 90 minutes were almost zero, so was quite pleased they were offering 6/4 on it
Dear “Roger” Black
For the record, I do not believe that there is a general feeling that Betfair is corrupt or evil. Betfair has sold itself as being a company of the people, and it is clear that the people belive that they are due both consultation and transparency. Words that have been used about the company are arrogant, autocratic and managerially lax; I suspect there are many people who might concur with these descriptions.
The Poker hesit involved flawed software; was it not in the company’s interest, and the interest of other players, that it was more open about this. (See previous post from Ed Murray that this may have been going onfor months). Then there is the question of the money that was being paid out — whose money was it …Betfair’s or customers’ ringfenced money? Why were the players involved in the hesit, who by their own admission had colluded (was it in fact fit for a conspiracy to defraud charge), allowed back onto Betfair Poker? What sort of message does this send out? I understand that there is at least one person, who has not paid Betfair back; if it came to a court case would you be seeking the extradition of this person to Malta? What is the Betfair policy vis a vis collusion; how do you define it? How do you monitor it?
The bet matching fiasco is either a case of arrogance, bad management, or, indeed both, par excellence.
The Grand National fiasco was a bad management decision plain and simple. Something with which many of Betfair’s own traders would seem to concur; with some, indeed, going so far as to accuse Betfair of theft;
http://site.forum.betfair.com/.....tting#null
I am sure that if you really believe that people are saying that Betfair is corrupt, then a court of law is the best place to have that issue resolved.
I think a good barometer for Betfair, vis a vis the recent trilogy of incidents, is to gauge what the outcome would have been for the company, were it to have been listed.
In simple terms, the company would have been hung, drawn and quartered; the shares would have taken a big hit and there would have been calls for heads to roll. As it is, you come on here, hoping to paper over the cracks.
Perhaps in future Betfair could adopt the same standards as are required of a listed company? The Poker Heist should have been discussed in the open; the bet matching software should not have been introduced until it was ready; the Grand National fiasco should not have happened.
I think you should see the criticism for what it is; a sign that people like Betfair, but they do not want to see it getting too big for its boots!
P.S I suspect that you are Mark Davies.
“Perhaps in future Betfair could adopt the same standards as are required of a listed company? The Poker Heist should have been discussed in the open; the bet matching software should not have been introduced until it was ready; the Grand National fiasco should not have happened.”
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Do public companies tell all, really?
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“I suspect that you are Mark Davies.”
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Bad hypothesis. Mark Davies writes differently, and has other fish to fry than to post comments on Midas Oracle. Plus, he was in New Zealand recently, right? “Roger Ducan” has a short BetFair experience —I believe him when he says that.
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(I’m supposing he is a man because I’ve never met a woman interested in betting or prediction markets, so far. I regret that, of course.
)
Plus, it’s hilarious to see somebody hiding his true identity trying to do some “outing” on another person hiding his true identity too. Snake eating its other end.
Ed
It is good to know that people are noticing such improvements in the site.
The Engineering team are responsible for researching, designing, building, testing and running all the IT systems needed to deliver Betfair’s products and services.
It employs some very capable people and this is reflected by the fact that it wins award after award from the IT industry. For example, Betfair recently won the Information Age Effective IT award for the “Most Effective Enterprise-Wide IT Infrastructure”, and has been short listed for the British Computer Society President’s Award for Information Security.
Roger
BF deserves to be in the running for those kind of IT awards. I obviously can’t say it deserves to win them, as I don’t know who they are up against for those awards, and have no valid criteria to compare other sites/businesses with BF’s engineering/IT anyway
.
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However, the days of BF getting Queen’s Awards for business etcetera should be long gone, and it should stay that way for some time. Gambling is in the same bracket as arms and pornography, and does do real damage to many people. Some of the decisions made by BF are deliberately cynical, many have been gormless. We are a long way from having a betting experience that is “fair” on the BF sports exchange. The casino etcetera are fair enough – what you see seems to be what you get. However, running markets often with bets being placed that have a 0% chance of winning, seems reckless, and is a massive thorn in the side of BF, which has achieved so much on its IT side.
Roger Duncan -
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Are there any plans in the offing for myspace style communities being accommodated within the BF website? I know revenue per user is dramatically higher for BF from people who use the forum as opposed to people who don’t, and always thought this seemed a logical step to increase user stickiness. All the football review pages etcetera, and the reality tv page, all that stuff that BF have spent money on looks like a load of useless junk. Building a community does seem a good idea. If I was BF I’d approach the BBC and ask to pay money for hosting BBC Sport website content within a separate shell, i.e. BF would be paying for the journalists to write the articles, which would then appear on both bbc.co.uk & a betfair gambling sports site. Well, the main BF site really. It would be good for the BBC (cuts the bill for its website significantly) whilst not damaging any of the content on bbc.co.uk, plus it would increase BF site stickiness. No reason that couldn’t be linked into the main match odds markets etcetera as well.
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I was told in late 2006 that BF were working on something akin to myspace style communities, but have never seen anything of the like.
Ed Murray
Betfair are certainly trying to build on the community theme. Hence the introduction of things like the Betfair ‘blog’ (betting.betfair.com) and Betfair Radio. As you say, it’s important for the success of any online business to maintain stickiness and to reduce churn and developing the ‘Betfair community’ is one of the ways that Betfair hope to achieve that.
I’ve not heard anything about Myspace style communities. Although new releases, enhancements, etc tend to be kept under wraps until a lot nearer the time, I’d be surprised if anything like that was on the cards in the near future.
On a related topic, you may have seen there is currently a discussion on the General Betting forum on Betfair discussing the merits of updating Betfair’s forum: http://site.forum.betfair.com/.....geCount=11. The consensus seems to be to leave it as it is.
Roger
If you have say a match odds market for a football match, having a selection of buttons around it that would open up a number of different radio stations with just one click would be a great idea, and miles cheaper, and more effective, than running a BF radio station. Imagine you have a number of buttons where with one click, the first would open up Talksport, the second would open up Radio 5 Live etcetera. All these are free, streamed content, but as well as boosting the audience for these stations, it would make the market/match odds page more of a valuable destination for punters during live matches. A match odds market could become a one stop shop not just for the odds, but as part of an entertainment product, and it would cost next to nothing to do this. I’m looking at the Kohclschreiber v Ferrer market at the mo, the only link is to “Live Scores & Stats”, which have only one problem, they are about five minutes behind live.
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There are so many things that can be done with match odds markets pages. These are the main ones that people look at. Its a big, big wasted opportunity at the mo. I think BF radio is a complete waste of money, and tbh, I can’t even tell how to load it up from looking at the site right now. (I’m sure the team working on it work very hard, but much more entertainment can be generated much more easily and cheaply, than by building a whole radio station and running it).
The BetFair CIO said he would look into creating a FaceBook application —maybe.
As for updating the BetFair web forum software, just for your information, you could look into an open-source software for powering web forums:
http://bbpress.org/
It’s made by the same people who code WordPress, the open-source blogging software that powers Midas Oracle (and the New York Times blogs, Andrew Black’s blog, etc.).
http://wordpress.org/
UPDATE: And bbPress can be integrated into a WordPress installation… Interesting.
http://bbpress.org/documentati.....wordpress/
The forum works ok, the only problem with it is there are one set of rules for BF staff, and one for everybody else, plus the moderator himself is somewhat limited. I met him, and tried to explain why he should do something about the people continuously putting up screaming fake weather reports on cricket matches etcetera, and he doesn’t seem to understand either betting, or human nature. He brings a rather limited skillset to his work, sadly.
Who is that guy who moderates the BetFair forum?
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By the way:
Ed Murray has computed what Mark Davies never did: EVENT DERIVATIVE TRADERS WANT EXTERNAL, TRUSTED SOURCES OF INFORMATION —NOT THE EXCHANGE-PRODUCED SAUSAGES.
http://www.midasoracle.org/200.....adio-blog/
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[Bizarre, the self-ping system didn't work for that post.]
Niall, gimme the URL of that, please:
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QUOTE
A Betfair forumite going by the name of Pablo, summed up the feeling of many punters when he wrote;
“It simply beggars belief that people can have had matched bets removed from their account when nothing has gone wrong. Will there be a new department to judge the fairness of the sp returned in every race every day ? What is unfair ? Under the official SP ? Or 20 % under ? or 30 ,40,50 % under? Surely a bet that is matched is sacrosanct unless something has gone wrong,like a late suspension. Why do people have to email in to have their accounts adjusted back to the right amount ? Surely it should be automatic.”
UNQUOTE
http://www.bettingmarket.com/startingprice.htm
Thanks.
” the moderator himself is somewhat limited. I met him, and tried to explain”
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Who’s that guy???? Thanks.
The Grand National SP was a public humiliation for the BF SP system. The free market price it generated was a bargain for layers, and they deserved to be paid out – they entered their bets under predetermined known terms that were available to everyone, and would have had to pay up if the SP generated had been heavily over the odds instead of under it.
, nothing was done about it. The track record of Tony Calvin and Mark Davies are one of fairly malicious cynicism in Calvin’s case, and a bumbling encyclopedia of mishaps from the likeable but accident-prone Mark Davies.
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This is all playing to the gallery, trying to maintain the impression of fairness. Its the same old, tired, age-old story.
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It does not matter whether betting is “fair”, what matters is whether the public think that it seems fair on the surface.
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The price in the race half an hour after the Grand National also had an SP that was about half the SP of the normal bookies, yet surprise surprise
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Bets shouldn’t just be voided after a race has finished, because BF are worried that the public are going to think that the BF SP is a weak product that offers bad value. Whoever made that original decision to void winning bets should be sacked – he or she is a menace to Betfair and the reputation of the entire exchange industry. It literally was stealing.
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It is the same story with BF – quieter smaller matches with suspicious goings on get settled immediately no questions asked, whereas if they think there is a risk of the public becoming aware of a problem, as was the case with the malfunctioning BF SP on the Grand National, or the blatant “gamble” on Davydenko v Arguello, then something is done. Its politics. I don’t think it has any place in a well run business, or in BF. I look at the propaganda from ZANU-PF in Zimbabwe, and the election-stealing going on at the moment, and I cannot tell the difference between the high farce of the Zimbabwean information ministry & the Herald, and the stuff that BF come out with.
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The most noteable quotes from the BF trap bet bet mismatching robot, which was switched off after huge protests recently, included how BF were well placed to help people who were the victims of bets put in in error. LOOOOOOOL. Build a trap bet robot that clobbers people, then claim how much you care about your customers by giving the impression that you might help them out if the trap bet robot you built yourself succeeds in clobbering them. Unbelievable.
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I’m not in the “Betfair are sinister and evil” camp, but I do think that their “Ministry of Information” bears remarkable similarities to the media manipulation that takes place in China, Zimbabwe, or anything which Orwell could have envisaged. It is a shame, as it is high jinx, and a lack of transparency, and often active misinformation from both Calvin and Mark Davies, are in the end damaging to BF over the long run. Shame.
Chris – the BF mod is a member of customer services, who as part of his job has to monitor the forum and deal with complaints. BF say that they don’t officially monitor the forum, (otherwise they would be legally responsible for the content posted on it, which isn’t ideal when celebrity X is revealed as having sexual relations with animals etcetera
) , but there is a forum monitor.
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I’ve made my points clear to him, but he’s not a CEO, an IT programmer, a management consultant, or an engineer. His job is to spot rude words on an internet forum.
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There are a range of roles in society for people of all skill ranges and abilities, and some hard jobs will be found to be fairly easy by many people, whilst some easy jobs, will still prove quite challenging to some people. I wouldn’t have thought it is that challenging a role, but I formed the impression that perhaps it is somehow a role that does seem to evidently be challenging.
I have just spotted a bug that may have prevented non-registered people to comment on Midas Oracle. One anti-spam plugin was bugging another one. I will contact the plugin author. That bug may have affected Midas Oracle last week. Non-registered people would come here, they were not able to see the image giving the math equation to perform to be able to comment here. Sorry or that. When such a thing happens, tell me, because I spend most of times as a registered user on Midas Oracle (since I write it), so I am not always aware of what non-registered users see. Thanks.
And now I see that the Gravatars don’t show up anymore in the comments… Another bug…
All bugs are corrected, now. I have contacted all those plugin authors, and they reacted quite quickly. Fantastic WordPress community.
there is a fixed match taking place at the moment
http://sports.betfair.com/Inde.....origin=MRL
Brzezicki v Hernandez
http://www.protennislive.com/f.....tatour.com
IEd, there appears to be change of attitude at Betfair re people betting after the result is known.
The Magician (2)
18 Apr 23:58
Dear xxxxx
The win market in the 1850 at Wolverhampton yesterday was suspended late.
Although your bets were made in good faith, all bets placed or matched on or after 18:55:27 will be voided. An adjustment will appear in your account in the near future.
Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions regarding this.
Kind regards
Betfair Helpdesk
In this case the horse winning the photo finish was backed into 1.2 from 2.4 before the result was announced and the market suspended. The only reason it did not hit 1.01 is because The Magician placed a wall 40k lay at 1.2 to see if anyone knew the result before the announcement, he intended taking the case to the GC. It used to be a regular occurence that these markets were swept to 1.01 before the announcement of the result, but they are now much quicker suspending. As far as I’m aware this is the first time they have voided in such circumstances, but interestingly they have not announced it in the service announcements.
QUOTE
We would like to remind those posting on the forum that offensive or defamatory comments are in breach of the terms of forum use and will result in forum rights being revoked. Forum users should be aware that they are fully and personally responsible for comments they post on the forum – and may be answerable for such comments. In this context, Betfair has not contested previous and increasing court applications requiring us to reveal personal details of individuals making forum postings. Not contesting such applications will continue to be our policy.
As a result, please do not assume that you can post without any risk of your identity being disclosed to either the subject of your post or his/her lawyers. Should you not be able to defend your comments it is very likely that you could face very considerable financial consequences.
You should also be aware that certain posts and conduct could be contrary to the Protection from Harassment Act 1997 and could give rise to both civil and criminal proceedings. We will have no hesitation in disclosing identities to the police, or civil court, should they receive a complaint.
Finally, please note that Betfair will shortly be making important changes to the way the forum is run. In future, you will only be able to post on the forum if full ‘know your customer’ (KYC) checks for you have been completed.
Thank you to the majority of forum contributors who continue to use the forum appropriately, in accordance with the forum rules and the spirit of open but responsible discussion.
UNQUOTE
http://site.forum.betfair.com/.....ageCount=1
IEd, there appears to be change of attitude at Betfair re people betting after the result is known.
That’s very, very good news for BF shareholders, and the 99% of normal BF customers who aren’t snides/pick off merchants. I was always shocked that Andrew Black was so fierce in his support of betting after the event, and saying he was happy to leave markets deliberately open to provide the service of giving people the chance to have a bet, even if they have no chance of winning.
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If you look at the amount hoovered at 1.01 and upwards on matchpoint of tennis games, there is usually £500 to £1000 won by the matchpoint hooverers who sweep up everything once the match has been finished. This could easily add up to over a million pounds per year. Then you look at BF’s price earnings ratio, and jeez, are they losing some serious cash off their share price,…. its mindboggling.
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Normally, I heard that BF take about 50% of the losers losses, whilst the winning gamblers take about 50%. This figure is about 3 years old, and I have no idea if it is still representative. However, the money hoovered after matchpoint etcetera has commission paid once of 5% max, with 95% or more going risk free to the hooverers. It is then lost out of the system, whereas if it had been retained, the liquidity on BF on future markets would have increased, as the rate of attrition would have been lower, and that hoovered money would instead have been split 50/50 between BF and winning gamblers, rather than 5% going to BF.
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BF’s policy on late suspension, is something that they have never realised, is wiping tens of millions of pounds off their share price. It is absolutely crazy, but it has been categorised in the “turn a blind eye, hope nobody will notice” box, along with the ”"match”" (cough cough) between Hernandez and Brezezicki earlier this week.
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“In this case the horse winning the photo finish was backed into 1.2 from 2.4 before the result was announced and the market suspended. The only reason it did not hit 1.01 is because The Magician placed a wall 40k lay at 1.2 to see if anyone knew the result before the announcement, he intended taking the case to the GC. It used to be a regular occurence that these markets were swept to 1.01 before the announcement of the result, but they are now much quicker suspending. As far as I’m aware this is the first time they have voided in such circumstances, but interestingly they have not announced it in the service announcements.”
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I have met The Magician a number of times (I first met both him and Mark Davies at the House of Lords for the report of the all party parliamentary betting & gaming group inquiry, in feb 2005), and I see about 95% eye to eye with him (he thinks inrunning betting should potentially be banned, whereas I think that it has a place when it is policed effectively). He’s extravagantly intelligent, and has fought very hard against corruption, as I have done.
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I think its brilliant The Magician has done that 1.2 lay and threatened BF with taking it to the GC, Andrew Black has been totally immoral and wrong to push for BF customers to be allowed to be ripped off after the result is known, and the sooner Black’s dubious legacy is eroded, and BF shareholders interests are looked after, the better.
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As for the BF forum post, well, I wonder if the Betfair lawyers will release the names and details of the, erm, BF lawyer who camped on the internet talking about me, my work, and my sex life. It was pretty sad to see how empowered he felt to be hurling abuse anonymously, yet – hilariously – went quiet when he was outed. What a weed.
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The reason it won’t be announced in the service announcements is that all these things will be on a hit and miss, case by case basis. If the Magician has threatened them with taking it to the GC, then they’ll know that the game was up on this market, but policy is usually made up ad hoc with BF. Arguello v Davydenko was voided, but Arguello’s next match in the following round, with identical betting patterns, wasn’t. They don’t know what is in their own interests. As ever, it will be people like me and The Magician putting pressure on them to look after BF shareholders and BF customers, and muzzle Andrew Black and any other pro-corruption and pro-betting after the event voices inside BF.
In-running betting should be banned and will be banned by the Gambling Commission.
It should be crystal clear to anyone by now that betfair are not interested in providing a level playing field. Profiting from- and exploiting the concept of time is high on their agenda.
Together with the complexity of the underlying problems of in-running betting (which no-one seems willing to solve, or even give it a try) there is only one thing left to do for the GC. It will be quick, fair, cheap and effective.
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The 5-sec delay, the bet matching algorithm, Betfair rapid, you name it Jose…
All conceived and nurtured by Betfair to give one group an edge over the other. Betfair have become so accustomed to this that they believe they are entitled to BECOME (surprise surprise) one of both groups, and you can guess which one.
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If betfair were an arms manufacturer, they would distribute their guns all over the world. Then have people fight each other knowing who would win in advance. Every greedy & braindead person in the UK (that should include everyone except a few) would immediately go shopping to see where he/she can buy the best gun in town…
Congratulations… you have all become victims of the rich and powerful and of a non-existent society. Make sure you close and seal the coffin when you die.
The whole issue simplifies to a single basic fact:
Betfair have excercised, and (see their own forum statements!) intend to retain their “right” to control and even freeze the timeliness of their Customer’s efforts to get their bets and lays matched. Purely so that they can extract profit from the “if then” nature of that Customer-to-Customer process! If time is frozen, money can be abstracted without risk at all…… and betfair state publicly ( rather boastfully in fact!) that they are a zero-risk bookmaker.
Unfortunately “zero risk bookmaker” does NOT mean zero risk” for the Customer….in fact it actually means that ALL of the risk ( and ALL of the associated losses) are borne by the Customer.
On the one hand, betfair advertise on TV that they are different to conventional bookmakers in that they facilitate person-to-person betting, yet on the other they insist that they are bookmakers and have every “right” to skim monies covertly from those very Customers who are encouraged to trust them to be of High Integrity, and referee their activities fully to the Rules published and policed by the Gambling Commission.
No doubt betfair ( and possibly other exchanges: we should not assume that betfair are unique, even though a virtual monopoly) would like to return to the “good old days” when the only Rule in town was their own inglorious, oft-quoted, “caveat emptor”, viz: anything goes.
Those same days when on Betfair’s own forum cheats boasted about their unrestricted, unrestrained ability to defraud bone fide betfair Customers via Prior Knowledge ( striking “bets” but AFTER one party to the bets knew the Result)……… some ( or is that many?) of us long-term betfair Customers remain convinced that Dirty Washing Day is inevitable, and carefully preserve copies of those conveniently forgotten postings; timed, authored and dated.
Adonis
and, incidentally, what do the Gambling Commission tell an interested, taxpaying Public about their attitude to it all?
NOTHING!
It’s about time that the GC realised that their salaries and business meals are paid for by us Taxpayers and Exchange Customers….. Keep us in the dark, and we’ll start flinging the manure around!
There again, maybe we’d be better served just dumping the GC and asking the FSA to take over responsibility for our Welfare?
Adonis
Why don’t the Betfair Traders get together and set up an Association – the Betfair Traders Asosciation (BTA). After all it is our commission that pays for the exchange.
Was this another example of a Betfair insider at work, posting on somebody’s blog in response to criticism of the company?
Sources, who wish to remain nameless, have suggested to me that the poster going by the name of Johnn is a Betfair insider.
Whilst this is indeed an unsubstantiated allegation at this point in time (source will soon provide IP address of said poster), it would certainly seem that the language of the poster is both partisan and aggressive for somebody who is not associated with the company;
“I think you’ve seriously got the wrong end of the stick on this one Harry. It might have taken a couple of days to calculate what doing the right thing was, but they did say they’d do the right thing straight away. Your version of events isn’t what happened and I had a lot of bets on that market. I’m sure you know what you’re doing, but making allegations when you’ve got your facts wrong can be a very expensive business to get into.”
Link: – http://betfairquestions.blogsp.....ation.html
@Rab Bibater: BTA = Good idea.
@Rab Bibater: “Johnn is a Betfair insider”. I don’t know whom you’re talking about. But I think we agreed on the fact that here’s a free zone, with people of all stripes having the constitutional right to comment. Why on Earth would we forbid people working at a prediction exchange (betting exchange) to open their mouth on a damn blog dedicated to prediction markets (and betting exchanges)? Everybody has the right to speak for their values, or to state facts.
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As for unmasking people, mister “Rab Bibater” (or whoever hides under this pseudo) should understand that that same thing could be done to him. And then I would state some hypothesis about what the real name of that commenter is. (If one lives in a glass house, one should not send stones.)
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I can’t understand why some people would silence some other people. Isn’t there free speech in the UK?
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The anti-BetFair has the right to speak out, here. Then why would the pro-BetFair be silenced? Sounds like Stalin’s method.
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The betfair insiders are everywhere, or so it seems.
Adonis and I were banned on “Punter’s Lounge” within 2 hours.
Not that we did anything wrong, we certainly didn’t break any of the forum rules.
Or maybe it was because betfair advertise there.
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Either way, I’m not particularly fond of the tactics of certain people who are continually trying to silence me. The only result will be that my determination to get my opinion across will grow with every ban.
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I tried registering here after my first post but it said “IP-adress banned”, making it the 4th time in less than 2 months that I have been banned. It’s probably an error this time but you can imagine how I must feel. I’m really a gentle and nice person in reality who is not afraid to tell the truth the way I see it. Because what else is there ?
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Let’s see what happens on here.
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… I just read your post Chris, as I was typing this. I think you’ve answered my “question”.
Chris,
I like the cut of your jib.
Free Speech is a priceless benefit of a Free Society, not to be taken for granted (or abused). Your commentary earns due respect.
I have always accepted the right of opposite opinion to express theimselves – as long as their viewpopint and expression is legal. Thus, I have no issue with any Betfair “insider” criticising my opinions as long as it is fairly, honourably and openly done.
In my book, it is honourable to declare an interest bias (eg: I make it clear that I am a betfair Customer, and a punter. I expect any Betfair insider wishing to engage in dialogue to ALSO declare their true position.)
Unfortunately, such declarations are rare indeed – with the exception of those insiders recently “outed” on betfair’s own, comment-screened forum.
(The one I was banned from for asking awkward questions and citing certain aspects of Betting Integrity and their relationship with Time. And for upsetting a betfair business affiliate ( from Bet Angel) who consistently posed as a bone fide Customer instead.)
Life can be problematic for those interested in truth!
Have a great week all; and, if you are, stay lucky!
Adonis
It’s an interesting debate whether posters should declare their interests / identify themselves.
We are talking about the boundaries of freedom of speech, where does it start and where does it end ? In this case, where does it start ?
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It starts with a certain responsibility of every individual. We cannot have total freedom of speech without it. A politician for instance can say many things, but he should be aware that certain remarks could cause fear/panic amongst the public because of the influence he has.
It’s different for a betfair employee. It is the honourable and right thing to do to say who you are when you’re posting on the betfair forum. Again, we cannot have complete freedom of speech without people taking responsibility.
It’s not something you would expect from betfair employees or the betfair management for that matter, because anything outside the scopy of betting they are having a real hard time of grasping. So next time when they decide to ban someone from the forum because their undercover agents can’t handle the debate, maybe it’s time for some reflection. Maybe not, and we should just accept the fact that freedom of speech is a somewhat alienated concept in the UK. Yes… I did mention the UK. Because it’s not just individuals who have certain responsibilities, companies do as well!
@medemi: (Replying to your first post)
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Were you banned from registering on Midas Oracle?
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Hummmm…. We use 2 anti-spam plugins… WP SPAM FREE and SABRE. They are supposed to deter spammers.
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If they throw you out, that’s maybe they think you’re using the IPs of a spammer. i don’t know, I need more info on that to understand.
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If you want to be registered, then I could do it manually for you, if you wished. Just contact me by e-mail, and I’d do.
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As of today, I have pruned comments that were pure spam. The other reason I would exclude someone is that if that person would insult or defame. I haven’t had the case, yet.
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@Adonis: I quite agree with your comment.
@medemi: I agree with your statement that a commenter should disclose his/her interest(s).
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Comments were open only to registered users, at the origin, on Midas Oracle. I have recently decided to open the comments to anyone, which is what most blogs do. However, that opens the possiblity for people to come here and spam us (thus my anti-spam plugins that might also catch good people), and for people to come here anonymously (giving a pseudo).
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In fact, it’s not fully anonymous, because the the administrator sees the IPs of the commenters. I don’t monitor this info closely. However, you’re seen that “Rab Bibater” (or whoever hides behind that pen name) has access to this info, too. In his recent comment, he claims to have a “source”. Well, his “source” is our WordPress software, that’s all. Somebody’s registered inside Midas Oracle and has the required authorization has access to the comments panel and thus to the IPs. If “Rab Bibater” persists in his approach to unmasking other people, then his access to the IPs can help unmasking him, too. It’s just a question of equity. Everybody should be on the same basis, here.
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Anyway, that is crazy discussion.
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Hey, folks, we’re not going to have like 10,000 comments on that page. Taht makes a too long page. Maybe at one point, a new post should be created about BetFair and the discussion would be continued there. (Well, already, we have had other BetFair pages, but people seem to stick to here.)
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@Rab Bibater: “Sources, who wish to remain nameless”
Your “sources” can only be the WordPress system used by Midas Oracle.
Or God.
Thanks for the offer Chris.
I will be doing more reading than talking in the next couple of days/weeks.
There’s a lot of stuff on here. Let’s see if I can navigate through all of this.
When I feel I should register I will send you an e-mail.
For your information, the discussion on BetFair seems to have moved to this post:
http://www.midasoracle.org/200.....s-betting/
Conspiracy theorists and BetFair undercover agents are all welcome there.
A betfair facebook app? that sounds about as dangerous as my mobile app when I’m in the pub!
Anyway hope you get a response from betfair on this soon!