Why punters lose heavily on Betfair

[jd_fortune]

This is a little complicated to describe but may save you a lot of money on Betfair. Suppose you were to back a bet in BF at decimal odds of 21 for a stake of 1 unit because you think the true odds are 20 and expect to make a 1 unit profit. It's a 1 in 20 shot so 19 times you would lose your 1 unit stake and then you would win 20 units when it finally hit, which you think means a 1 unit profit for you. Since you have to pay commission on the 20 units of let's say 5% you are paying 1 unit in commissions. It's as if you paid 100% commission on your winnings, the 1 unit profit was completely wiped out. True that if the odds you got from BF were more than 1 unit over the true odds you would make some profit but even if you were getting such good odds that you would make 4 units when the cycle completes but you would still pay out 1 unit (or slightly more) in commission so you would have, in effect, paid 25% commission on your winnings. That's a lot worse than the edge on any game in any casino. You would actually be better off putting your money in a slot machine, 25% commission on winnings is outrageous. And how often are you going to get such great odds that there would be a 4 unit gain pre-commission even possible? Probably never. Lucky if you get 2, in which case you paid 50% commission on your winnings. It works the same way if you lay instead of back, the longer the odds the more commission you pay as a percentage of your winnings. In fact, you actually end up paying commissions ON TOP of your losses if you were wrong and the odds were actually off in the opposite direction, causing you a loss at the end of the cycle. You pay a little less commission on your losses than on your winnings but it's still extra losses. Suppose the true odds were 21 and BF gave you odds of 20 and you backed it because you thought the true odds were 19. 20 times you will lose 1 unit and then 1 time you would win 19 units. You would therefore lose 1 unit on the cycle BUT you had to pay commission on the 19 units you won when the cycle completed and the bet hit. You paid 5% of 19, which is 0.95 units so in reality you lost 1.95 units, almost twice as much. Would you be willing to bet on a coin toss if when you win you make 0.05 and when you lose you pay out 1.95 units? You'd go broke pretty fast that way. So how can you avoid this bottomless cash pit of BF commissions? You have to green up or red up all the time so that your wins and losses occur simultaneously rather than separately as happens when you just back or lay and let the bet run its course. This saves you all that extra commission payment because of the fortunate fact that BF only charges commissions on net winnings rather than raking the total pot like they do in poker. So you only pay commissions on your actual net winnings, not on the winnings that only made up for all the losses early in the cycle as would happen with straight betting. So just forget about "value bets". There is not much value after the commissions take most or all of it. Literally the only way you're not going to lose your shirt in BF is by getting people to take bad odds from you and then you getting better odds from someone else. There's no way you can withstand those compounded commissions on regular bets for any length of time. This explains why pretty much every punter on BF loses huge amounts of money over any significant length of time. The BF odds would have to be vastly off for it to be at all profitable. That's just not going to happen. The starting prices are always very close to true odds, minus a small overround. Nobody is dumb enough to offer vastly inaccurate odds on BF which would result in them losing money. There are, however, a bunch of punters out there who are naive enough to take the bad odds you offer them some time before the event starts or even in-play. That's where your profit comes from, people who actually think they can win long term by simply backing a horse or a team and then sitting there and seeing what happens. They are sadly mistaken.

[MPLouis]

Re: Why punters lose heavily on Betfair I find Betfair odds are sometimes better than bookies, even when taking Betfair commission into account. Betfair can also be useful for trading, but I find it's hard to resist over-trading (which often makes it unprofitable).

[ONEDUNME]

Re: Why punters lose heavily on Betfair

This is a little complicated to describe but may save you a lot of money on Betfair. Suppose you were to back a bet in BF at decimal odds of 21 for a stake of 1 unit because you think the true odds are 20 and expect to make a 1 unit profit. It's a 1 in 20 shot so 19 times you would lose your 1 unit stake and then you would win 20 units when it finally hit, which you think means a 1 unit profit for you. Since you have to pay commission on the 20 units of let's say 5% you are paying 1 unit in commissions. It's as if you paid 100% commission on your winnings, the 1 unit profit was completely wiped out. True that if the odds you got from BF were more than 1 unit over the true odds you would make some profit but even if you were getting such good odds that you would make 4 units when the cycle completes but you would still pay out 1 unit (or slightly more) in commission so you would have, in effect, paid 25% commission on your winnings. That's a lot worse than the edge on any game in any casino. You would actually be better off putting your money in a slot machine, 25% commission on winnings is outrageous. And how often are you going to get such great odds that there would be a 4 unit gain pre-commission even possible? Probably never. Lucky if you get 2, in which case you paid 50% commission on your winnings. It works the same way if you lay instead of back, the longer the odds the more commission you pay as a percentage of your winnings. In fact, you actually end up paying commissions ON TOP of your losses if you were wrong and the odds were actually off in the opposite direction, causing you a loss at the end of the cycle. You pay a little less commission on your losses than on your winnings but it's still extra losses. Suppose the true odds were 21 and BF gave you odds of 20 and you backed it because you thought the true odds were 19. 20 times you will lose 1 unit and then 1 time you would win 19 units. You would therefore lose 1 unit on the cycle BUT you had to pay commission on the 19 units you won when the cycle completed and the bet hit. You paid 5% of 19, which is 0.95 units so in reality you lost 1.95 units, almost twice as much. Would you be willing to bet on a coin toss if when you win you make 0.05 and when you lose you pay out 1.95 units? You'd go broke pretty fast that way. So how can you avoid this bottomless cash pit of BF commissions? You have to green up or red up all the time so that your wins and losses occur simultaneously rather than separately as happens when you just back or lay and let the bet run its course. This saves you all that extra commission payment because of the fortunate fact that BF only charges commissions on net winnings rather than raking the total pot like they do in poker. So you only pay commissions on your actual net winnings, not on the winnings that only made up for all the losses early in the cycle as would happen with straight betting. So just forget about "value bets". There is not much value after the commissions take most or all of it. Literally the only way you're not going to lose your shirt in BF is by getting people to take bad odds from you and then you getting better odds from someone else. There's no way you can withstand those compounded commissions on regular bets for any length of time. This explains why pretty much every punter on BF loses huge amounts of money over any significant length of time. The BF odds would have to be vastly off for it to be at all profitable. That's just not going to happen. The starting prices are always very close to true odds, minus a small overround. Nobody is dumb enough to offer vastly inaccurate odds on BF which would result in them losing money. There are, however, a bunch of punters out there who are naive enough to take the bad odds you offer them some time before the event starts or even in-play. That's where your profit comes from, people who actually think they can win long term by simply backing a horse or a team and then sitting there and seeing what happens. They are sadly mistaken.

Quite frankly, you seem to just be telling people to make sure that they allow for commission when they calculate their winnings and I'm not sure anyone on this site is stupid enough not to know that already. If there is, they shouldn't really be using betfair at all.

[ONEDUNME]

Re: Why punters lose heavily on Betfair

Nobody is dumb enough to offer vastly inaccurate odds on >BF which would result in them losing money.

I can assure you that there are plenty of people dumb enough to offer (and take) vastly inaccurate odds on Betfair. Of course, everything depends on a person's view of what "accurate odds" are, which is a major topic in itself.

[HeresTheKey]

Re: Why punters lose heavily on Betfair

This is a little complicated to describe but may save you a lot of money on Betfair. Suppose you were to back a bet in BF at decimal odds of 21 for a stake of 1 unit because you think the true odds are 20 and expect to make a 1 unit profit. It's a 1 in 20 shot so 19 times you would lose your 1 unit stake and then you would win 20 units when it finally hit, which you think means a 1 unit profit for you. Since you have to pay commission on the 20 units of let's say 5% you are paying 1 unit in commissions. It's as if you paid 100% commission on your winnings, the 1 unit profit was completely wiped out.

maybe i m wrong but as far as i know you pay 5% commision only when you win, so the whole concept of 20 bets that "eat" you 1 unit is beyond my comprehension.I mean if you lose your 19 bets out of 20 and you win the 20th you win 0,95 of your unit and that s it.(1 - 5%) my other remark is that for me personally and the bookies that i use(bet365 and pinnacle)is very rare to find better odds from bf.i mean after you calculate the commision. of course i never never buy exactly the odds they sell at the moment.i always try to match a bit better odds, and 90% of the times my bets are matched. pinnacle is a bright exception in the odds comparison half the times, but it s an excpetion that verifies the rule. please correct me if i m wrong.we re here to learn.

[jd_fortune]

Re: Why punters lose heavily on Betfair Correct, just that many people don't realize how it actually works out. You're right that if you found odds that are more than 5% over true odds that you would still profit even though BF takes a large chunk of the winnings, like if you knew the true odds were 20 and BF offered 22 you would make 1 unit profit. So yeah, I just explained it differently. It did occur to me after I wrote the post that it was simply a matter of finding odds that are off by more than 5% or whatever your rate is. So my post was not a revelation to many people. I guess I was just thinking of it in a different way at the time. Now here's another thing I noticed, which I'm sure many others also noticed but is worth pointing out anyway. You can't profit from strategies like laying the draw in soccer, or anything which relies on the odds changing due to whatever event took place in the game and then backing or laying the same selection after the odds change. All you are doing is taking out a smaller amount of your potential winnings by not going all the way to the end of the game. The winnings and losses still work out the same in the long run. This is assuming that the odds you take are the true odds at the time. You could profit if the odds are off in your favor at the time by more than your commission rate, but you could have done that even if you hadn't made a previous back or lay at all, just waited until those inaccurate odds came up and back or laid it as appropriate at that time. Of course, in BF "exchange games" you will never get inaccurate odds in your favor because they are always the exact mathematically correct odds plus a small overround. You would lose the commission plus the overround, so this only applies to sports in which it is possible that inaccurate odds come up. Exchange games only make money for one person, BF.

[jayalexander]

Has your research been published?

[jd_fortune]

Re: Why punters lose heavily on Betfair

maybe i m wrong but as far as i know you pay 5% commision only when you win, so the whole concept of 20 bets that "eat" you 1 unit is beyond my comprehension.I mean if you lose your 19 bets out of 20 and you win the 20th you win 0,95 of your unit and that s it.(1 - 5%) my other remark is that for me personally and the bookies that i use(bet365 and pinnacle)is very rare to find better odds from bf.i mean after you calculate the commision. of course i never never buy exactly the odds they sell at the moment.i always try to match a bit better odds, and 90% of the times my bets are matched. pinnacle is a bright exception in the odds comparison half the times, but it s an excpetion that verifies the rule. please correct me if i m wrong.we re here to learn.

Yeah, you're probably right. As another poster mentioned, what I described really comes down to only betting when the BF odds are off by more than your commission rate. I didn't think it through very well and made a simple rule more complicated than it needed to be. In regard to using bookies, that would be insane when betting exchanges always have better odds. They're still a losing proposition unless you can get someone to take bad odds from you, bad in excess of your commission.

[jd_fortune]

Re: Why punters lose heavily on Betfair No, because I actually just explained that you need odds that are off by more than your commission rate, but I made it more complicated than just saying that. In other words, I didn't think it through enough before posting.

[jayalexander]

Indeed. Have you been using bet fair long?

[jd_fortune]

Re: Why punters lose heavily on Betfair

Has your research been published?

My last post was directed to you. I didn't put the quote in. I should point out that although my explanation about the commission losses was really just the same as saying "always make sure the odds offered are off from the true odds by more than your commission rate", some people probably didn't know that greening up avoids all of those extra commissions. When you read articles about greening up they only say that it eliminates the swings in your bank that happen when you simply let the bets go through as is. They never mention that it is the only way to avoid paying several times as much in commissions on the same winnings. Somebody may have wrote that somewhere but I haven't seen it before. By greening up I also mean simply staking the same amount on the other side, which results in no winnings or losses except the net ones once the cycle completes. The type of greening up which gives you the same profit every time, win or lose, simply distributes the net winnings over every game rather than getting nothing every game up to the one time when your selection wins and then getting one big lump of profit. That type of greenup is good for people who hate getting nothing most of the time and a bunch now and then. Either way, you only pay commission on the net profit. That means that you don't actually have to wait for BF odds to be off by your commission rate. If the true odds are 20 and the BF odds are 21 you will end up making that extra 1 unit minus only 5% of that 1 unit. You won't lose that whole 1 unit just because the odds were only off by 5%, the same as your commission rate. If you can get two sets of odds that are off by ANY amount, say 0.5%, you will still profit if you green those up. If true odds are 20 and BF odds are 20.1 you will profit. You will make 0.1 unit profit minus 5% commission, making 0.095 unit profit. Granted a rather small amount but if you can put a bet of 1000 units you would make 95 units. So it's just a matter of betting scale. So this is the real power of greening up, being able to profit on literally any deviation at all between the back and lay odds, if you can get a big enough bet in to make it practical.

[jd_fortune]

Re: Why punters lose heavily on Betfair No, in fact I only used it for about a month several months ago and then quit after losing heavily by simply backing or laying horses. I hadn't figured out that you need to green up to avoid massive losses due to commissions. I just recently started using it again, trying to win at soccer. Not doing well yet, down almost half of the $200 I put in there. The odds are pretty tight in soccer. They pretty much have everything calculated out accurately it seems. Quite a shark tank.

[jd_fortune]

Re: Why punters lose heavily on Betfair When I wrote this;

If true odds are 20 and BF odds are 20.1 you will profit. You will make 0.1 unit profit minus 5% commission, making 0.095 unit profit. Granted a rather small amount but if you can put a bet of 1000 units you would make 95 units. So it's just a matter of betting scale. So this is the real power of greening up, being able to profit on literally any deviation at all between the back and lay odds, if you can get a big enough bet in to make it practical.

I meant if you can green it up. You still have to have two sets of odds that are separated by some amount. I tried to figure out a way to do it with just the backing odds or just the laying odds but it seems impossible. If you back and lay different amounts of money on the same set of odds it won't work. You'll still pay the extra commissions. There's no way around it, you need two sets of odds for the same selection that are different. That can be usually be accomplished by never taking the odds on offer but always requesting ones that are separated by some amount, even a slight amount if there's enough liquidity to make large bets.

[jd_fortune]

Re: Why punters lose heavily on Betfair Since you can profit by greening up even a slight difference between back and lay odds, all you really have to do is keep putting in requests which are just ahead of those already on offer, even if you have to go to the point where there is only one odds increment between them. They can't go any closer than that so there is always profit to be made as long as there is good liquidity and you are working a selection which is popular, like the favorite, so that you can be pretty sure that both your back and lay requests will get filled. In fact, you could even profit at exchange games that way. How you would get your stake close to the front of the line I don't know though. I guess whoever has the fastest bot gets the front position.

[jayalexander]

You do know that if you place your bets through the multiples market that you don't pay commission? The downside to this is that you'll only get sp.

[Aidymac]

Re: Why punters lose heavily on Betfair

I can assure you that there are plenty of people dumb enough to offer (and take) vastly inaccurate odds on Betfair. Of course' date=' everything depends on a person's view of what "accurate odds" are, which is a major topic in itself.[/quote'] Correct. If you are a value seeker and an ante-post punter, Betfair is the only place to be. An example: Hamish McGonagall is top priced 18/1 with Coral for the Nunthorpe, on Betfair you can plenty on at 38/1........ 5% commission does not even come into your head when you evaluate the prices, the value difference is enormous. A lot different if you are backing fav's though, sometimes when you take off commission it can be a tad shorter than the firms. But in general, Betfair offers far more value.

[jd_fortune]

Re: Why punters lose heavily on Betfair

You do know that if you place your bets through the multiples market that you don't pay commission? The downside to this is that you'll only get sp.

Interesting. Must be because there is a built-in overround in the SP because the odds come from the regular BF odds displayed by other members trying to get matched. Since there is always an overround, when you combine several of those overround odds together to produce a multiple you get a compounded overround in the end. The minimum overround is 1%, because that's the minimum odsd increment which can be found in lowest odds selections. So if you strung 5 of together you would get a 5% overround. Even combining two bets into a multiple would produce a 2% overround.

Multiple bets, unlike single bets, are struck directly with Betfair. However, the odds offered are based on the odds available on the singles exchange at the time of bet placement. You cannot ask for your own odds for multiple bets and multiple bets are never unmatched.

Speaking odds increments, you will be better off trying to greenup odds of just over 10 than the low odds of the favorites. That's because the minimum separation between the back and lay odds is the odds increment itself. Odds between 1 and 2 have increments of 0.01, meaning between 0.5% and 1%, the 1% being for the odds closest to 1 and the 0.5% for those closest to 2. The percentages gradually increase until when you get to odds of 10.5 the increments are 0.5. That's almost a full 5% of 10.5. Of course, since that's the maximum increment the percentage goes down as the odds increase from 10.5. However, you would have to go all the way up to odds of 50 before the percentage goes down to the 1% increments of odds near 1 and all the way up to odds of 100 before it got down to the 0.5% increments of odds near 2. So my philosophy is to look for odds of 10.5 up to maybe 15. Might be hard to match both back and lay bets though unless it's a popular event. An interesting thing here is that if you have a discount on your BF commission so that it's 2.5% instead of 5% then you could actually profit by simply backing or laying a selection at odds between 10.5 and 19. Since you probably don't know which one, the back or the lay odds, are closest to the true odds, I guess you would have to find selections that have only 1 increment between them and then staking both. Whatever you lost on one because it was off true odds in the wrong direction you would make up on the other one because it would have to be equally off in the favorable direction.

[jd_fortune]

Re: Why punters lose heavily on Betfair My math could be wrong on that. Since it's only the 5% increment between the back and lay odds you may only make 2.5% on whichever bet wins, the back or the lay. In which case you would come out even or a slight loss because .5 isn't exactly 5% of 10.5 but actually only 4.76%. However if there are 2 increments between them it should be profitable if you can get back or lay odds matched at those odds by requesting rather than clicking available odds. Since you can't be sure which is closest to true odds, if you can't get both the back AND lay requests matched and have to let the bets run as is, you would have to hope that you can get roughly equal numbers of back and lay requests matched over time, even though it may be only one at a time. If it's roughly equal numbers of both getting matched then it will even out regardless which was closest to true odds. If you always get more of one than the other matched then it could be a problem.

[jd_fortune]

Re: Why punters lose heavily on Betfair Actually the odds increments do get higher than 0.5 when you go above 20. I was looking at a shortened list apparently. The full list is here http://help.betfair.com/contents/itemId/i65767327/index.en.html At odds of 55 to 100 the increments are 5, almost 10%. Hard to get odds matched at that level though, I would think.

[jd_fortune]

Re: Why punters lose heavily on Betfair Come to think of it, nobody on BF is going to offer odds that are true odds so if there's a back button on there with say odds of 11 close to the start of the event you can be pretty sure that the true odds are at least 1 increment over that figure, so it's automatically almost 5% (4.55%) under true odds. With a discounted commission rate of 2.5% you could simply get your stake in there behind everybody else's and if it gets taken then you will profit. Or if you knew what the true odds would be you could put a request in there really early 1 increment under true odds and everybody else would have to get behind you. Nobody is going to go ahead of that and offer true odds. It would have to be a sport other than horseracing though, because it's too hard to figure the true odds on that. Something like soccer is easier to calculate. Just go to soccerstats and you have all the information you need right there. Since you're looking for odds between about 1.5 and 15 you would have to go concentrate on a category that has high odds, like correct score. For instance, you know that 0-0 only happens about 1 in 12 games, so the odds are going to be about 12.

[jd_fortune]

Re: Why punters lose heavily on Betfair I meant between 10.5 and 15, not 1.5. Sadly, haven't made 20 posts yet so I can't edit.

[Simmo]

Don't worry im sure you'll have enough posts in no time.

[Aidymac]

Re: Why punters lose heavily on Betfair

Come to think of it' date=' nobody on BF is going to offer odds that are true odds so if there's a back button on there with say odds of 11 close to the start of the event you can be pretty sure that the true odds are at least 1 increment over that figure, so it's automatically almost 5% (4.55%) under true odds. With a discounted commission rate of 2.5% you could simply get your stake in there behind everybody else's and if it gets taken then you will profit. Or if you knew what the true odds would be you could put a request in there really early 1 increment under true odds and everybody else would have to get behind you. Nobody is going to go ahead of that and offer true odds. It would have to be a sport other than horseracing though, because it's too hard to figure the true odds on that. Something like soccer is easier to calculate. Just go to soccerstats and you have all the information you need right there. Since you're looking for odds between about 1.5 and 15 you would have to go concentrate on a category that has high odds, like correct score. For instance, you know that 0-0 only happens about 1 in 12 games, so the odds are going to be about 12.[/quote'] I really don't have a clue what the hell you are talking about!

[jd_fortune]

Re: Why punters lose heavily on Betfair

I really don't have a clue what the hell you are talking about!

Nothing to be ashamed of. I just post what's on my mind and if you get anything out of it then good, if you have no idea what the hell I'm talking about then I guess my posts didn't help you. Seemed clear enough to me. The odds increments between 10.5 ans 20 are 0.5. Therefore the increments are about 5% of the odds themselves. Since only crazy people would offer odds that are the true odds or over (for a back bet), they have to offer odds that are at least one increment below the true odds. Therefore if you put your stake into that same odds pool and it gets matched then you will profit if your BF commission is below 5%, which is not uncommon. Mine went down to 2.5% when betting on horses for a few weeks. You wouldn't have to worry about anyone putting in higher odds because they would make no money that way, so all you need to worry about is that your stake gets matched. If you're the last person who put money in then you might not get matched. So what? You didn't lose anything. I realize that this may be obvious to many but some may not have considered it in terms of how the varying odds increments affect your profitability. My point is mainly that if you choose to trade in BF sports then if you concentrated on the low odds selections, the favorites, you would have to be certain that you would get both back and lay bets matched because the odds increments are so small that if you only got the back or only the lay bet matched you could easily lose money. With the higher odds, the increments are such a large percentage of the odds that you can actually be profitable even if only the back or lay gets matched. If they both get matched, all the better, but it's not necessary if you have a BF commission rate substantially below the standard 5%. I know that most traders try to follow the trends of the odds but that's very difficult to do successfully. They could go pretty much any direction unless you know for a fact that they are currently way off what they will eventually go to and in what direction they are off. My proposed method is simply to concentrate on the odds categories that will have a built-in profit margin even when they get to the final odds right before the event starts due to the odds increments restricting people from getting too close to the true odds, as they do in the favorites categories, and thereby making you risk not getting back and lays both matched and having to play the single bet out and losing money because it was off from the true odds by such a small amount that your commission is actually larger than the profit margin. Suppose a favorite had back odds of 1.60 and lay odds of 1.61, which is possible due to the increments at that level being only 0.01. Even though the back odds are below true odds by 0.01, that's only 0.625%. If you could only get the back bet matched and played it out with a BF commission of 2.5% you would lose money. If the true odds are 11 then the closest anyone can offer without losing money is 10.5, because the increments at that level are 0.5. They can't offer odds of 10.99. Even if only your back offer got matched you would end up making money just playing it out. See? Simple right?

[gampas]

Re: Why punters lose heavily on Betfair Betfair says "Dont Settle for Less" I only use them under Duress Premium Charges Apply Which can reach the sky And they increase with every success It is no surprise that punters lose on Betfair. The recent advertising campaign by Betfair is misleading. It looks at the last Premiership season in England and claims that Betfair was better than Bet 365 on 178 of 250 winning outcomes better than Ladbrokes on 173 of the 250 winning outcomes and better than William Hill on 187 of the 250 winning outcomes. The false impression given is that Betfair is generally better than the high-street bookmaker. Nothing could be further than the truth. I downloaded all the data from www.football-data.co.uk (a highly recommended site by the way). The average overround of the best prices of the leading bookmakers that it uses for the Premiership last year was 100.5%. The average overround for Betfair prices, after allowing for the 5% commission that they correctly show (as their target audience will be those that do not currently use Betfair) is 105.5%. On average, the Betfair price is about 5% worse than the main bookmakers, after commission. In the 380 matches last year, Betfair was best price in 0, yes zero, of these, so it was clearly never best price on the winning outcome either. So, the advert is a complete con, using a clever comparison to deceive the customer. And the above is disregarding Premium Charges, which successful players incur, and other charges for using an API etc. Perhaps the motto should be changed to: Don't Settle for Less Use Betfair for Chess!

[froment]

Re: Why punters lose heavily on Betfair Gampas, I don't know what is the purpose of your campaign against betfair, but I don't believe your statements are correct at all. Would you, please, share that table that shows worse odds on Betfair than on other bookies for every single match last season? I have just compared now 1X2 odds for 3 matches on Betfair and bet365, and odds on betfair after commission of 5% are significantly better on 5 out of 9 outcomes; in 3 outcomes they are similar, and only in one out of 9 instances, bet 365 offers better odds! Overround at betfair after commission of 5% is between 103.70 and 104.30 %, while that at bet 365 is between 105.60 and 106.90 %. One does not have to use API; as for premium charge, you are free to make 250.000 GBP profit before becoming eligible for PC, and I highly doubt any of high street bookmakers would allow you to take that amount off them before restricting your account! So, I said, your story looks to me just like groundless rant. In addition, would you, please, try not to post the same posts in the future in different forums, one place would suffice! :ok

[Aidymac]

Re: Why punters lose heavily on Betfair Best price i could get on Slade Power for the Sprint Cup was 16/1 with the firms.. £10 @ 16/1 is a profit of £160 Went onto Betfair and i got £2.50 @ 21.0, £2 @ 20.0 and £5.50 @ 19.5. That is £50, £38 and £101.75 profit which adds up to £189.75 profit. Take 5% off £189.75 and you are left with £180.26! That is £20.26 more for my £10 than i would get with the firms, after commission. So please elaborate how you lose out on Betfair?

[Simmo]

Re: Why punters lose heavily on Betfair

Gampas, I don't know what is the purpose of your campaign against betfair, but I don't believe your statements are correct at all. Would you, please, share that table that shows worse odds on Betfair than on other bookies for every single match last season? I have just compared now 1X2 odds for 3 matches on Betfair and bet365, and odds on betfair after commission of 5% are significantly better on 5 out of 9 outcomes; in 3 outcomes they are similar, and only in one out of 9 instances, bet 365 offers better odds! Overround at betfair after commission of 5% is between 103.70 and 104.30 %, while that at bet 365 is between 105.60 and 106.90 %. One does not have to use API; as for premium charge, you are free to make 250.000 GBP profit before becoming eligible for PC, and I highly doubt any of high street bookmakers would allow you to take that amount off them before restricting your account! So, I said, your story looks to me just like groundless rant. In addition, would you, please, try not to post the same posts in the future in different forums, one place would suffice! :ok

Froment, I think Gampas is saying that Betfair wasn't best price for any matches, out of ALL the bookies (from footballdata.co.uk) combined. So Betfair may well have been better than bet365 for certain matches, but it was never the best price overall when you take the rest of the bookies into account as well.

[froment]

Re: Why punters lose heavily on Betfair

Froment' date=' I think Gampas is saying that Betfair wasn't best price for any matches, out of ALL the bookies (from footballdata.co.uk) combined. So Betfair may well have been better than bet365 for certain matches, but it was never the best price overall when you take the rest of the bookies into account as well.[/quote'] Thanks! You're right, we have just clarified it in the other thread! :ok

[inept]

Re: Why punters lose heavily on Betfair First i want to point out that im not a professional but i have used betfair for a long time and i have learned alot of things along the way. for a start YES, if all odds on betfair were correct ie. flipping a coins odds are even and if you back or layed that coin flip at evens you would lose money as that 5% commission would cause you to lose. but it does not mean you cannot make money from betfair. everyone looks for systems, my favorite part of this forum is looking at the systems as i find it interesting but to find a system that will make you money for the rest of your life is near on impossible. but lets take hugh taylor for a great example. in 2011 Hugh Taylor made a £302.64 profit in his bets, HE MADE MONEY FROM THE BOOKIES. he used his knowledge to find horses that odds were higher than they should have been and backed them. now im sure if you backed these horses at SP you might lose a little money as the fact that so many people follow his bets means that odds for the horses he posts fall and lose most if not all value. but he still made money. the problem is not that theres no money to be made in betfair but that your picks are not right, or your bank is not big enough to deal with the losses that will happen. there was a month that hugh lost over £100 and you bank needs to be right to deal with the inevitable losing streaks but the proof of your picks is over time. what you say is not true. sticking with your bets is profitable if your good at finding bets with value, they are out there and people are making money from them even if your not.