Saturday 4 March 2017

You Win, You Lose, You Just Can't Choose

As anyone who pays them knows, once you hit Betfair's Super Premium Charge threshold, it's no simple task avoiding them. 

One Tony Hargraves, someone I am not familiar with, though some readers may be, claimed this week to be avoiding Premium Charges by "losing in chunks in Betfair" while his "wins are in Betdaq, Matchbook, Pinnacle" - not Betfair.

What an absolutely genius idea! 

I'm quite amazed that nobody has thought of this before.

Well of course they have, and it's nonsense, and perhaps Mr. Hargraves does't actually pay Premium Charges, because with logical thinking like that, he probably doesn't make any money.

The problem with his "strategy" is that it doesn't work. 

It is simply not possible to choose where you win and where you lose - and if you could choose where and when to lose, you'd save yourself money and never place those losing bets in the first place! 

The laws of probability mean that if, for example, you backed short priced favourites (say 1.11) somewhere other than Betfair, and layed the outsider on Betfair at 10.0, in the long-term, your win rate would be around 10% and would total the same in money terms, if not in frequency, as the non-Betfair bets winning around 90% of the time.

There's no way to guarantee a loss on Betfair, even if you wanted to.

Assuming a 100% book, whatever you back or lay, in the long-term you'd break even there, and be down the commission. 

I'm not sure what Tom Makinson is doing by telling tales and "reporting" this to Betfair. It seems a bit like telling the pit boss that someone is writing down the results of the roulette spins. So what? 

What Tony Hargraves is attempting to do is perfectly within the rules, and I'm sure Betfair welcome this type of a punter and his flawed "strategy".    

1 comment:

Jamie said...

He has dropped crumbs but not actually explained how he avoids premium charge. It has taken different guises from losing on Betfair and winning on another exchange, to trading on someone else's behalf using their account. If he is making good money trading and avoiding the PC then my feeling is as he is part of the vendor team that provides the Bet Trader software from Racing Traders and he also does them day trading courses also, aIl can only assume that a deal has been struck between vendor and Betfair. Otherwise I can't see it myself.