"Send enquires about this paper to our newly acquired private island in the Bahamas." :-)
One of the most depressing things I realized when I learned to count cards, and confer upon myself a small but meaningful advantage in the game of Blackjack, was that the casinos simply ask you to leave if you win too much. That put an upper limit on the rate at which one could win. The folks who figure out slot machines have a much better time of it because it takes longer for the casinos to figure out they are losing money.
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.
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?
the casinos simply ask you to leave if you win too much.
I was actually backed off from the first place I went to after I learned how to count cards while I was losing. If the pit boss or dealers know how to count themselves and identify you as a counter, they want no part of it. In most cases, they'll either "flat bet" you (tell you that your initial bet is your maximum), or they'll tell you that you cannot play blackjack there. Actual barrings usually don't occur until the second or third offense.
I my experience as a card counter they'd just swap in a new dealer who would count themselves and just shuffle whenever the count got really good. Ridiculously unfair and probably illegal but what are you going to do, complain?
I've worked for an online bookie. I've also worked for an outfit that bets (on horses mainly).
The online bookie will indeed ban or limit winning accounts or anyone they suspect of cheating or betting smartly. Anyone betting large amounts dumbly gets taken out to nice dinners etc.
The company that bets on horses bets using exchanges, because bookmakers would tend to kick them out. The abstract of this paper is pretty much 101 to those guys who do some advanced stuff I can't talk about to make predictions.
I went to high school in Las Vegas, so when I went to college everyone "assumed" I could count cards. After realizing it was a losing strategy to tell people that couldn't count, I looked up the basic strategy.
I wrote a computer program to simulate the game and the strategy and had the computer play hands until it was winning consistently. Generally it wasn't so much "counting cards" as it was "counting face cards and 10's, and changing your betting strategy based on that count."
Just thinking about the mechanics of a card deck, face cards, 13 card suits, etc. Turned out to be really useful in playing Bridge as well.
One main difference is that the vast majority of sports betting occurs outside of casinos and "legality". The other huge difference is that the entity making the picks doesn't necessarily have to be the person placing the bets. There is a well established term in sports betting for one who places a bet for someone else, "beard". Fortunately for the bookies/casinos and the few winning bettors, there are always plenty of losing bettors to keep the system afloat and profitable for everyone with an edge.
Ah that's the rub though isn't it. I'm up $500. Do I try to build it to $1000 and then walk away? Do I walk away now? No gambler knows exactly the right time to quit while ahead and the casinos count on that.
There has to be more to this story. I would like to hear the bookmakers side of this. Perhaps the researchers were scripting or triggered some other kind of security tripwire.
Winning $900 split across several different bookmakers is absolutely nothing in the sports betting industry.
William Hill, one of the companies that the researchers claim restricted them is a multi billion dollar company. They aren't sweating small time bets like this.
EDIT: I noticed that the screenshots they used as proof their bets were restricted are for bets on very minor football leagues (Australian semi pro football), its common for betting limits to be lower for games that don't see a lot of betting action & is not proof enough to me that the bookmakers lowered their limits globally
Bookies will limit you no matter what your stakes are. You can get your account closed by placing £10 bets, and even if those bets don’t win!
Bookmakers are on the lookout for exactly the kind of betting behaviour described in the paper: people only betting on the top price, and shopping around for the best odds. If they see that you are only grabbing mis-priced offers, you are unlikely to be a profitable customer to them.
The bet size doesn’t really come into it. Just look at it from their point of view; why keep a customer who is costing you money, however little it is.
My guess is that it’s the manner by which they were winning. Thirty $50 bets per week over five months is over 500 bets. That’s not the long run but winning at an 8.5% ROI over that many bets is probably enough for the house to realize they’re somehow a winning player even if the stakes aren’t huge.
I'd suspect it was less to do with the edge, which isn't especially huge especially over the short run, and more to do with the authors' unusual selection of bets entirely overlapping the bookies' ad hoc analysis of bets they've mispriced. Particularly since the bookies watch each others' odds (as do scripts sold to wannabe arbitrageurs on the internet). Having a subset of winning betters with an information advantage may even help bookies overall if they know who those people are, but they'll want to limit how much they pay out for that information. Especially if the limits are market specific, and the section of the paper highlighting betting limits shows a screenshot of an attempt to place bets on Australian youth association football...
But $900 is pocket money bookmakers are willing to give away: around the time this study collected it's first data points I made more from fewer bookmakers just from intentionally +ve expectation welcome bonuses (and that was after they'd responded to the first wave of people pocketing welcome bonuses by eliminating them... for people from Denmark)
Sportsbooks in general don't mind winning players though, especially big ones. They make money off the vig and move odds to get equal money on each side of the bet so that they'll make money either way.
They're not a "winning player" in the usual sense. The casino wants players to bet on a certain outcome in some cases (in order to reduce risk, presumably) and therefore hands over the winning strategy on a silver platter.
I feel like the casinos just want those kinds of bets to be small. They don't want to over-correct in the other direction. By limiting these players that specifically make these kinds of bets, they reduce the risk of a big amount of money being bet in a short amount of time on the "winning" strategy.
It would be interesting to see where they are making their edge. I wouldn't be surprised if it's on a lot of these minor leagues with more uncertainty, as opposed to stuff like the EPL
I've been trying my luck at tennis betting ( https://matchstat.com/profile/soniman ) and the only strategy that seems to work consistently is finding injured players and betting against them. Good example of an injured player is a player that limps (Andy Murray at Wimbledon this year). The computers don't watch matches so injured players can be overvalued by the models. Also, any British tennis player tends to be overvalued because the books are based in the UK. For instance there is an overweight British player named Marcus Willis that last week was a 1.01 favorite to win at a tournament in Las Vegas; he lost, apparently due to dizziness aka being fat. There are some other patterns that can be exploited but the highest return strategy has to be betting against injured favorites. However, I think that would probably require more tennis watching than I want to do. Maybe I could hire somebody on Mechanical Turk to watch tennis for me and report on players who appear to be injured or take medical time outs.
Maybe you could find a sport where injuries are logged or can be inferred from other data? For instance if a racehorse performs far slower than its typical pace, its odds of losing the subsequent race might be higher.
The whole point is that computers can't use injuries as a data point. This strategy won't work in any sport that can have the injury factor calculated by a computer.
> A few weeks after we started trading with actual money some bookmakers began to severely limit our accounts, forcing us to stop our betting strategy.
Isn't this like literally one of the oldest tricks in the book? I remember reading Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, which talks in part about early 1900's bucket shops, and the same stuff was there even then. Similar stuff is also mentioned in market microstructure textbooks with market makers on one side and informed traders on the other side.
Is rigged even the right word here? It might be, but did the bookmakers have a responsibility to keep accepting their bets? Is it different from claiming that casinos are rigged?
Same here. If you have a strategy that wins you money overall, bookmakers either send you a nice email saying your account is closed as they do not welcome professional players or they just severely limit your stakes (think $20 a bet).
(Will Hill, Interwetten, Betway are exactly the type of bookies that will close your account as soon as they catch on)
Yes, the odds can be exploited and there is a whole bunch of services offering picks, but eventually the sportsbooks catch on and close your account. The sportsbooks that welcome professional players are few and far between and their odds are on point.
Correct -- the market maker (or casino) is under no obligation to take your action. And, why should they be? The penalty for refusing action is that you take your business elsewhere.
I always thought bookies just kept moving the lines until they were making money at the snap of the ball. Their initial line isn't as important as adjusting the line so that there is equal money on both sides of the line and therefore the bookie is guaranteed money due to the small fee they build into the bets. Their profits don't depend on accurately predicting the game's score, just moving the line strategically as more bets come in.
You open things up to select sharps earlier than the general public, with limits. They get the benefit of potentially better lines and you get the information benefit of what the pros think the fair price for any bet is, allowing you to adjust the line before allowing bets from the general public. That's how a lot of the offshore sportsbooks handle it, but it may not actually be legal to do so in Vegas. I don't actually know.
You limit the pot according to what you can afford to loose betting against the sharp. If your odds are alright, the small edge that the odds give the house will play out over the long run. That means astronomic sums of money are needed if you want to allow unlimited bets. Few people would be regularly betting that much. Picking misplaced odds or whatever is exploited is based on luck in the end.
Yes, of course you can beat the "popular" bookmakers.
Once you start beating them ( being profitable in value prices ) they will simply close/ban your account. Nowadays, it happens extremely fast ( in a day or a few hours, depending on your moves ).
It's a well known tactic, and in practice, you cannot do anything about it ( other than keep opening new accounts in new names ).
"Retail" bookmakers are only interested in mugs. If your betting patterns indicate someone who is wise to the market, you will be limited or shown the door. Be prepared to have arbitrage positions pulled out from under you. The game is rigged insofar as the book decides if it wants to entertain your position.
If you want to make money you have to bet against, and be able to beat the books that know what they are doing - The high limit, low margin books like Pinnacle, SBO, IBC et al will happily take you on.
Readit News
One of the most depressing things I realized when I learned to count cards, and confer upon myself a small but meaningful advantage in the game of Blackjack, was that the casinos simply ask you to leave if you win too much. That put an upper limit on the rate at which one could win. The folks who figure out slot machines have a much better time of it because it takes longer for the casinos to figure out they are losing money.
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...
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.
I was actually backed off from the first place I went to after I learned how to count cards while I was losing. If the pit boss or dealers know how to count themselves and identify you as a counter, they want no part of it. In most cases, they'll either "flat bet" you (tell you that your initial bet is your maximum), or they'll tell you that you cannot play blackjack there. Actual barrings usually don't occur until the second or third offense.
There's card-counting software called Casino Verites (IIRC).
Dead Comment
Very loudly:
"Aha! You should have shuffled the cards! Messed up the count didn't you!"
Sunglasses on and just walk away.
The online bookie will indeed ban or limit winning accounts or anyone they suspect of cheating or betting smartly. Anyone betting large amounts dumbly gets taken out to nice dinners etc.
The company that bets on horses bets using exchanges, because bookmakers would tend to kick them out. The abstract of this paper is pretty much 101 to those guys who do some advanced stuff I can't talk about to make predictions.
Good luck!
The entire lure of gambling is that some players can make money. The house always plays that up.
But if the house always wins, that hope they're selling disappears.
I have always thought about learning to count cards, instead of say learning a new language.
Can't you just go to another casino until they kick you out, and repeat?
Do you actually make money now that you can count?
I wrote a computer program to simulate the game and the strategy and had the computer play hands until it was winning consistently. Generally it wasn't so much "counting cards" as it was "counting face cards and 10's, and changing your betting strategy based on that count."
Just thinking about the mechanics of a card deck, face cards, 13 card suits, etc. Turned out to be really useful in playing Bridge as well.
Deleted Comment
Winning $900 split across several different bookmakers is absolutely nothing in the sports betting industry.
William Hill, one of the companies that the researchers claim restricted them is a multi billion dollar company. They aren't sweating small time bets like this.
EDIT: I noticed that the screenshots they used as proof their bets were restricted are for bets on very minor football leagues (Australian semi pro football), its common for betting limits to be lower for games that don't see a lot of betting action & is not proof enough to me that the bookmakers lowered their limits globally
Bookmakers are on the lookout for exactly the kind of betting behaviour described in the paper: people only betting on the top price, and shopping around for the best odds. If they see that you are only grabbing mis-priced offers, you are unlikely to be a profitable customer to them.
The bet size doesn’t really come into it. Just look at it from their point of view; why keep a customer who is costing you money, however little it is.
But $900 is pocket money bookmakers are willing to give away: around the time this study collected it's first data points I made more from fewer bookmakers just from intentionally +ve expectation welcome bonuses (and that was after they'd responded to the first wave of people pocketing welcome bonuses by eliminating them... for people from Denmark)
I feel like the casinos just want those kinds of bets to be small. They don't want to over-correct in the other direction. By limiting these players that specifically make these kinds of bets, they reduce the risk of a big amount of money being bet in a short amount of time on the "winning" strategy.
That's... interesting.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-09-22/soccer-clubs-obvious-m...
Isn't this like literally one of the oldest tricks in the book? I remember reading Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, which talks in part about early 1900's bucket shops, and the same stuff was there even then. Similar stuff is also mentioned in market microstructure textbooks with market makers on one side and informed traders on the other side.
Is rigged even the right word here? It might be, but did the bookmakers have a responsibility to keep accepting their bets? Is it different from claiming that casinos are rigged?
(Will Hill, Interwetten, Betway are exactly the type of bookies that will close your account as soon as they catch on)
Yes, the odds can be exploited and there is a whole bunch of services offering picks, but eventually the sportsbooks catch on and close your account. The sportsbooks that welcome professional players are few and far between and their odds are on point.
Suppose your book is balanced, and you have $25,000 on each side. Then a new bet comes in, size $250,000, on one side of your book -- what to do?
Or, more simply, when you set your initial line, what do you do when a known sharp immediately wants action on one side?
Once you start beating them ( being profitable in value prices ) they will simply close/ban your account. Nowadays, it happens extremely fast ( in a day or a few hours, depending on your moves ). It's a well known tactic, and in practice, you cannot do anything about it ( other than keep opening new accounts in new names ).
Try beating a betting exchange.
If you want to make money you have to bet against, and be able to beat the books that know what they are doing - The high limit, low margin books like Pinnacle, SBO, IBC et al will happily take you on.
> During that period we obtained an accuracy of 47.% [sic] and a profit of $957.50 across 265 bets, equivalent to a 8.5% return (Table 1, Figure 3).
For some reason the "ok but how much did you ACTUALLY MAKE?" is always my favorite part of this kind of business or economics literature.