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It’s unproffesional for a start Glenn – I intended backing a horse a month or so back at Lingfield, off the track a while 14/1 in the RP tissue only to see £5 at 5.6, £4 at 5.8, £2 at 7.0 to back the evening before. No chance of me getting any sort of decent price the following morning and so it proved.
Don’t you mean to lay? You could have spoofed the price out if there was nothing on the lay side.
It is so easy to see that the real problem with present day racing in the UK and Ireland IS the Exchanges.
Even so, few are prepared to come out and admit it openly, while, several out-spoken types, hide behind a tirade of anti-bookmaker sentiment that serves no useful purpose but does cloud the issue.In fact,
It turns out that these anti-book spluttergutsa) need the bookmakers for their arbing trades
and
b) despise the ordinary "person to person" players, whose promotion was supposed to be the very ethos of the Exchange.
Talk about the bankers and the politicians!We have a nasty situation in racing, that plays right into the hands of the insiders laying their known non-triers.
Very few Exchange players would be willing and able to stand a full-book of lay bets in every race, imo.Meanwhile, we stand idly by, as the racing game struggles in a battle for survival, that will be likely lost..
I do. Lost count of the number of times I’ve gone to bed dreaming of maximum bets only for the early BF/paper price to have vanished before pricing up time, and as you say it’s for peanuts on BF- wish I could form a Betfair union and tell all the pathetic fiver merchants to
Leave it!
until 11a.m. ….
It’s a long time since I read anything quite as arrogant and self-centred as this.
It’s unproffesional for a start Glenn – I intended backing a horse a month or so back at Lingfield, off the track a while 14/1 in the RP tissue only to see £5 at 5.6, £4 at 5.8, £2 at 7.0 to back the evening before. No chance of me getting any sort of decent price the following morning and so it proved.
Don’t you mean to lay? You could have spoofed the price out if there was nothing on the lay side.
That is indeed what I meant – it was there to lay rather than to back
Carvillshill wrote that he was "under the impression that Hong Kong has a tote monopoly" and that""no-one gets closed down by a tote."
That was exactly my point, and one of the reasons why the serious punters operate in Hong Kong not here.
Why we and Ireland, alone among the racing countries of the world, put up with the ‘service’ provided by the bookmaking industry is beyond me. Just habit I guess, or ignorance of the alternative.
It’s very useful for the bookmakers and their apologists in the media to have near at hand the dismal examples of our own hopeless tote and the French pari-mutuel. If the proper alternatives, exemplified by the Hong Kong or Japanese totes, were presented as examples of how a tote monopoly really works, everyone would soon wonder why we ever went down the route of legalising an industry which is essentially a gigantic parasite on racing in particular and society in general.
Totally agree Zorro- I actually thank the Aussie system of off-course Tote, on course Tote and bookies is perfection but it’s very hard to put the genie back in the bottle now…
Some extremely thinly-veiled ‘I’m a big punter me, I’m fed-up with the smaller punters’ comments on here.
Thought we were passed that, but hey-ho.
Well, not from me. I’m not a big punter.
Thanks carvills. Seems we’re on the same side.
Nothing wrong with smaller punters ROF, just those smaller punters who ruin the prices for everyone else!
I don’t really see where you’re coming from Gus. My point, as TDK says, is that if punters big or small had the patience to wait until pricing-up time then everybody could take advantage of the ricks that occur. The fact that small amounts of money are matched on the early BF markets increases market efficiency and hence makes life more difficult for all punters, from a fiver to a grand.
Who really benefits from Betfair putting their markets up before everyone else?
Not Betfair – the amount of commission they get from early trade would be virtually insignificant in the grand scheme of things (<5% of a few hundred quid being matched)
Not value seeking punters, who will fight over the pennies to make a much more efficient line for the bookies..
The only
real
winners are bookmakers, particularly the lazy ones, who get an accurate tissue for free…
There appear to be some very curious points of view on this thread. Since when did the opinion of the ‘£5 punter’ merit such serious consideration by the bookies? If those small stakes punters taking these early prices are by definition ‘mugs’ then why are the bookies so keen to find out what they are backing before forming their own books? If, in fact, they are ‘shrewdies’ then it’s curious that they would want to advertise their interest in a horse before it could be backed to a decent stake?
The reality is that the market speaks through volume of money not through the opinions of those backing horses at 9pm the night before.
You are completely wrong. The bookies as TDK says are mostly lazy sods and price up using the early Betfair markets as their tissue. This means that the backing and laying of small amounts whether by shrewd or clued-up punters overnight and in the morning has a big impact on the early prices.
You are completely wrong. The bookies as TDK says are mostly lazy sods and price up using the early Betfair markets as their tissue. This means that the backing and laying of small amounts whether by shrewd or clued-up punters overnight and in the morning has a big impact on the early prices.
If bookies are really pricing up based on the small amounts traded on Betfair overnight then there should be huge opportunities for a ‘shrewdie’ such as yourself to take advantage of what effectively amounts to mug-punters making their book.
Totally agree Zorro- I actually thank the Aussie system of off-course Tote, on course Tote and bookies is perfection but it’s very hard to put the genie back in the bottle now…
Hardly perfection, a lot of racecourse bookmakers are some of the biggest thieves going who would be even worse if they only had the Tote in opposition, no ew betting, big overrounds, under the odds, mysterious gambles on horses that have bolted two circuits etc.
A betting exchange run for the benefit of racing and a Tote would be preferable.Agree with that Yeats, especially the last line.
Carvillshill, agree about the genie and the bottle too. But shouldn’t we be trying to stuff him back in?
If you’re travelling in the wrong direction, it doesn’t matter how far you’ve gone. You have to turn round.
Totally agree Zorro- I actually thank the Aussie system of off-course Tote, on course Tote and bookies is perfection but it’s very hard to put the genie back in the bottle now…
perfection in theory perhaps but in practice it seems the Aussies are having similar problems:
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