[phillc73]

Betfair merged with Paddy Power, not Ladbrokes.

They probably stopped offering their service in Canada due to unclear licensing and operating regulations for their Exchange product. It has happened in a number of other jurisdictions too. What you need is a good friend or relative in the UK or Ireland, and a VPN.

However there are now other exchange betting options, with at least some degree of liquidity - Betdaq, Smarkets and Matchbook for example.

Professional punters still have ways of getting on, which circumvent the online restrictions. Once all their accounts have been limited or closed with the online bookmakers, the next step is usually a string of agents across multiple locations, working on commission, and placing bets on the punter's behalf. It's still possible to get on for farely large amounts like this.

If horse racing is your game, Hong Kong is where the money is at. Huge totalliser pools (park-mutual) where the size of an individual's bet is unlikely to move the market very much. Now that there is co-mingling with a number of other pools around the world, one doesn't have to be in HK to bet there.

I've recently started having a proper go at the Daily Fantasy Sport option, now that Draft Kings has opened up in the UK and a few other European locations. Moneyball in Australia is also quite good, albeit much smaller prize pools. However, this weekend they just launched a DFS horse racing product which looks pretty interesting.

[eric_h]

Minor nitpick re: horse racing: it's "totalisator" (usually abbreviated as "tote") and refers to the machine that keeps track of the pools and odds, and the term for the betting pool type is "parimutuel".

Fun fact: totalisators were originally mechanical computers that were used to price betting pools around the turn of the 20th century (http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/racetrack-betting-mecha...).

[phillc73]

Thanks for the correction. I put that, and other spelling errors in that post, down to fat fingers on a mobile keyboard.

[GigabyteCoin]

>However there are now other exchange betting options, with at least some degree of liquidity - Betdaq, Smarkets and Matchbook for example.

That's good to know.

But do they impose the same sort of "60% winners tax" that betfair does? Or anything close to that?

Because if so, I wouldn't even bother signing up.

I don't need to gamble that badly!

[phillc73]

The so called "60% winners tax" doesn't kick in on Betfair, according to the linked article above, until you've reached a total lifetime profit of £250,000. Up until that point you'll still pay the normal 2%-5% commission in winnings.

How long do you estimate it will take you to clear £250k profit in Betfair? I'd say sign up and worry about it when it's likely to happen.

[joosters]

Unfortunately the other betting exchanges have far far less liquidity than Betfair, and much of the bets on offer are from bots that are simply mirroring the odds on Betfair (with their own margin added on)

Basically, all the money goes on Betfair because that’s where all the money is. It’s a vicious circle, great for BF and very difficult for any competitors to break in to the market.

[phillc73]

Betfair is for sure the most liquid. Smarkets and Matchbook are growing. I've not used Betdaq.

However, if people are worried about hitting the Premium Commission levels on Betfair, and the other exchanges are mirroring prices, then surely it's worthwhile spreading stakes around.

[the_cat_kittles]

im actually curious how accurate the lines they show are, vs if you used their api. do you know? theres a lot of noise in them as far as i can tell- just wondering if its real or if they are jiggling the numbers around to make it look more appealing.

[chillydawg]

Site Vs API are identical. There may be some extra latency (order of milliseconds) on the site due to render time etc but they both use the same underlying data source.

[the_cat_kittles]

interesting. have you used both? just curious how you know

[chillydawg]

Heavy user of both and I used to work there.

[phillc73]

Do you mean the Betfair lines? I think their market is pretty accurate. More so than many traditional bookmakers, although a lot of them use Betfair to make their own markets now, so there's very little chance of arbitrage between them.

I've written an R library for the Betfair API[1], which I use every day to retrieve prices.

https://www.github.com/phillc73/abettor

[the_cat_kittles]

sorry i meant accurate in terms of what they show on the site vs what you can actually get when you try to trade. someone else answered that they are indeed accurate- has that been your experience?

[phillc73]

The Betfair prices depend on market depth. It's data available through the API, so you can have a pretty good idea of what price you will be able to strike for any given bet size.

My experience with traditional bookmakers has been severely limited or closed accounts very quickly. I haven't used a traditional bookmaker for a few years now, betting solely on the exchanges and 90% of the time with Betfair. I do still have a Corals account, which was somewhat un-restricted through leveraging a contact within the company, but I think my max bet is only £200. As I haven't used it for while, I don't like the chances of it staying that way if I started pumping winning bets through it.

There have been various investigations conducted on Betfair prices, and they are usually a few ticks above traditional bookmaker odds. However, the over round on highly liquid Betfair markets is only 1%-2%, whereas a traditional bookmaker is generally significantly higher, more like 110%-120%, depending on the event.

One way to extract the best results from traditional bookmarkers, as far as horse racing is concerned, is to bet with Best Odds Guaranteed. In this scenario, you'll receive a winning payout at the highest price the selection reached, rather than the price at which you struck your bet. This works best in overnight markets, that is placing bets the night before the race. However, this route is also one of the quickest to restriction and closure.