I used to use the betfair platform until it they blocked themselves from being viewed in Canada for some strange reason right after they were purchased by ladbrokes I believe it was.
Anyways, after playing with them for a few years, I was horrified to learn about their 60% tax on consistent winners that they have dubbed a "premium charge".
Found some sort of edge to exploit and reap profits?
Betfair doesn't even care to talk to you to ask you what you are doing, they will just charge you 60% of your winnings once you go over a certain limit. [0]
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I'm confused, since betfair is an exchange aren't they just taking a cut of the action? Why would they add a heavy tax onto profits which would just drive heavy bettors away?
They do it because they can, and for many gamblers, Betfair is the only place they can realistically keep betting at. Other bookies will restrict winning gamblers’ stakes or refuse their bets, and other betting exchanges have far less liquidity than Betfair. So, successful punters on Betfair just have to grin and bear it...
n.b. The 20-60% ‘premium charge’ that Betfair inflict on long-term winners is different to their standard 2%-5% commission that they charge everyone for any net profit on a market. The premium charge is calculated weekly over a customer’s profit & loss. So its effect is not the same as if the commission was as high as 60% per bet. Like a tax, the PC won’t make a profitable gambler unprofitable, it ‘just’ means Betfair get to keep more of your profits.
It’s also worth pointing out that the standard commission (2-5%) can add up to far more than 60% of your winnings anyway. As no-one wins every bet they place, the commission will become a larger percentage of your net profit. For example, Betfair charge me 2% commission and I ‘qualify’ for their premium charge of 40% - but my betting patterns already result in over 40% of my gross profit going to Betfair :(
It’s not quite as bad as that - see my other comment; the calculation of the charge doesn’t mean you pay 5%+60% commission on winning bets. That kind of fee would be impossible to sustain, no-one has that kind of profit margin on their betting. The commission % charge and the PC % charge don’t work in the same way.
On the flip side, a great many people pay far higher than 60% of their net profits to Betfair... most will have paid over 100%...
Anyways, after playing with them for a few years, I was horrified to learn about their 60% tax on consistent winners that they have dubbed a "premium charge".
Found some sort of edge to exploit and reap profits?
Betfair doesn't even care to talk to you to ask you what you are doing, they will just charge you 60% of your winnings once you go over a certain limit. [0]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2011/jun/29/betfair-premiu...