[hanasu]

Correct, they use parimutuel betting, where all bets are placed in a group pot and the winners are paid their original stake plus some portion of the losers' stakes. This means that bitbookie doesn't have to set betting lines (probabilities) for all the events, which is something that takes a lot of skill and effort. Essentially it's easier for those who are not familiar with sports betting to say 'I pick team A to win' as opposed to 'I think team B is going to lose, but not by more than 7.5 points, so I should bet on them even though they're the worse team" that is a common play in spread betting.

[glomph]

A problem with this is it gives a huge incentive to bet as late as possible. You know where the money is you have more information about the event and so your bet can be better placed. Unfortunately this will mean there isn't any point betting later either as people will not have bet earlier.

Bitbet attempts to solve this by giving a higher weight to earlier bets. Not sure how well that works but the site seems to be used.

[ChuckFrank]

Very cool. Thanks for the explanation.