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.
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...).
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!
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.
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.
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.
I've written an R library for the Betfair API[1], which I use every day to retrieve prices.
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.
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 :(
They get you hooked thinking they are only taking 5% or whatever it was... and from pretty much everybody who bets there, they do only take 5%.
But all of the "smart money" gets taxed at 60% when they inevitably take all of the losers money who only paid 5%.
So in essence, they are doing exactly as you suggested... "they're just taking a cut of the action." But it's a 65% cut!
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%...
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.
You're still right though, the odds aren't that great and once they get a hint you're doing something weird you'll get thrown out.
There's card-counting software called Casino Verites (IIRC).
So if they are involved it would be more likely related to contracted services and such where you could pad the actual cost by a large amount and no one is going to look too closely.
Published blackjack odds depend on "dumb" reshuffles. If the house is "smartly" reshuffling the deck to reduce house payouts, then the published odds do not match the real odds, which is illegal.
Imagining that the physical deck is a virtual deck does not make it so. In an RNG-populated/virtual deck, there is a small but still real chance that, for instance, 20 aces could be dealt in a row, which is why game programmers use techniques like shuffle bags to prevent that from happening. An "infinite" physical deck, that was actually "infinite", would suffer from the same problem, and would need a physical solution, which would affect the odds which the casino is legally obligated to publish and adhere to.
Exactly, so, if counting cards if forbidden (I'm not arguing if that is right or not), then having that statistical foundation isn't useful. As a different comment suggested, reshuffling at a fixed point (say, after one third of the cards have been dealt) should solve the problem in practice, also preventing the house to use counting in a meaningful way.
But a dishonest casino could do the same card counting that players can do, and reshuffle when the count favours the players.
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.
Other people simply like the social aspect of a lot of games (craps, poker, blackjack, roulette) and the excitement/thrill of seeing some big winners. You know in the long run you are losing X%, but still go to burn hours and have some fun.
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.
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.