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Hi jhopper
I hope you don’t mind me jumping in and answering your question. There’s a couple of resources you should check out if you’re interested in arbitrage.
http://www.arbbest.com Read the forums here (you’ll need to register first, it’s free to register). You’ll learn alot about the mechanics and the pitfalls of this type of betting.
If you’re still interested after that, I recommend the guidebook at http://www.zero-risk-arbitrage.com The book’s about 49 pounds from memory, but well worth the money if this game interests you.
For anyone else here who’s never heard of sports arbitrage, or even financial market arbitrage ( generally not available to the general public because of the the infrastucture and millions needed to be worthwhile), I’ll try to give a brief explanation.
An arbitrage situation occurs in sports betting when we can back all possibilities on an event and make a profit regardless of the outcome.
Eg. Let’s say we have a two outcome match, say tennis. Let’s say Leighton Hewitt is playing some guy not as good as him so Leighton is the favourite. So we shop for prices at online bookies for a while and find the best price we can get on Leighton is $1.50.We’ll call this bookie Bookie A. This means if Leighton wins, our return will be $1.50 for every $1.00 bet. So if we bet $500 and Leighton wins we’d make $250 profit. Now let’s say we find another bookie that happens to have a really good price on the outsider, Bookie B is offering $3.30 on the outsider. Now we plug in the odds into our spreadsheet (Really easy to construct, if anyone wants I can post up the formulas). Let’s say we’re going to wager a total of $2000.
Bet $1375 on Leighton at $1.50 with Bookie A. Potential return = $2062.50
Bet $625 on the outsider at $3.30 with bookie B. Potential Return = $2062.50
Notice our return is 2062.5 no matter what the outcome of this match is. We wagered a total of $2000 so no matter what happens, we’ll make a profit of $62.50
This sort of situation occurs everyday. However, there are pitfalls. One, it’s damn hard work to find the situations. With hundreds of online bookies with hundreds of different sporting events every day, it can be quite tedious searching for arb opportunities.
There are also good reputable online bookies where your money is safe, and not so good bookies around. The arbbest forum is a good place to start your research to sort the good from the bad. http://www.sportsbookreview.com/ is also pretty good.
There’s a few more points which I’ll continue on with if anyone’s interested, but right now I need to sleep.
By the way, for those that don’t know. Betfair is a betting exchange where punters can bet against each other and betfair acts like a broker. They charge 5% of your profits on a market, but your commision rate will go down as your volume increases.
It’s a bit like the options market, where one person/s thinks a stock or commodity is going to go up and the other/s thinks it will go down. If the buyer likes the price the option has been written for, a trade is executed.
If you’re any good at trading the financial markets, you could probably make a killing trading the betfair markets and your profits are tax free [biggrin]. Raceplay’s trading example is a good one where the horse has dropped from 4.00 to 3.00.
Just be aware anyone contemplating signing up with raceplays, that he would have access to your betfair acct. login details. It would only take a couple of minutes for him to empty your acct. into either his own betfair acct. or into a bookie acct.
Also note that allowing a third party to wager on your behalf with your acct. is against Betfair’s T&C’s.What he says about trading, laying, etc. is all possible but I certainly wouldn’t trust a complete stranger with $5000 of my money. He might be legit. But you have to ask, if he’s getting those sort of returns, it wouldn’t take long to turn any amount into a considerable sum, so why not just keep it all to yourself?
Unforunately, anyone in Perth that was keen to see this will miss out. The Perth leg has been cancelled. I was about to book 4 tickets about a week and a half ago and noticed the Perth details were missing from the site. When I queried Marsvenus on this, they said it had been cancelled due to lack of ticket sales. It was obviously Marsvenus that was put in charge of promoting the seminars because it wasn’t promoted very well. Last time Peter came to Perth, over 1200 ppl showed up.
Very disappointed. I hope Peter will come back to Perth sometime, although he did say he didn’t like coming here because of the distance.
