Beating the bookies – how the online sports betting market is rigged
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Re: Beating the bookies – how the online sports betting market is rigged
#2Courtesy of slashdot:
https://science.slashdot.org/story/17/10/21/1744218/data-sci...
Re: Beating the bookies – how the online sports betting market is rigged
#3I am confused. If the betting is rigged, then how were the authors able to beat it consistently? What did I miss?
Re: Beating the bookies – how the online sports betting market is rigged
#4I am confused. If the betting is rigged, then how were the authors able to beat it consistently? What did I miss?
That if you keep winning they restrict your account.
> They kept this up for five months, placing $50 bets around 30 times a week. And they were winning. After five months the team had made a profit of $957.50 -- a return of 8.5 per cent. But their streak was cut short. Following a series of several small wins, the trio were surprised to find that their accounts had been limited, restricting how much they could bet to as little as $1.25.
Re: Beating the bookies – how the online sports betting market is rigged
#5Just like the rake or the edge the house advantage of making the rules has always been the reality of betting. Online or offline. Forever. Get too successful and you’re no longer invited to bet.
Asymmetry of information has never been the bookmaker’s most powerful weapon. The book is.
Those who are successful at it accept this reality. They grumble and make peace with it - paying the super taxes and liquidising markets where they’re asked to.
Ultimately however, while it’s interesting to see how they do some of this (and there are plenty of practices not covered in the paper, I assure you) it’s a bit like complaining the DM won’t let you do something in dungeons and dragons - you’re dicing with the god of your domain so the rules can change at any minute.
Re: Beating the bookies – how the online sports betting market is rigged
#6I am confused. If the betting is rigged, then how were the authors able to beat it consistently? What did I miss?
"Rigged" is the wrong word. What it essentially says is that all of the data that a professional could reasonably analyze is already baked into the odds that bookies initially set, and if those odds stayed the same until bets were no longer being taken on the event, sports betting would be consistently unprofitable because of the 10% "juice" that most bookmakers charge. However, the odds do not stay the same. Once they are posted and bets begin to come in, the market takes hold and begins swaying the odds one way or another, because bookies change the odds in order to try to balance their books such that they have little to no actual risk. It is in the swinging of the odds by the market, which has many unsophisticated participants - people betting on a team simply because they live in that city etc. - where money can be made, because there is an incredibly large amount of "dumb money" in the sports betting market.
Re: Beating the bookies – how the online sports betting market is rigged
#7I am confused. If the betting is rigged, then how were the authors able to beat it consistently? What did I miss?
"Rigged" is the wrong word. What it essentially says is that all of the data that a professional could reasonably analyze is already baked into the odds that bookies initially set, and if those odds stayed the same until bets were no longer being taken on the event, sports betting would be consistently unprofitable because of the 10% "juice" that most bookmakers charge. However, the odds do not stay the same. Once th…
No, rigged is exactly the right word. From the paper:
> Our strategy proved profitable in a 10-year historical simulation using closing odds, a 6-month historical simulation using minute to minute odds,
> and a 5-month period during which we staked real money with the bookmakers.
>
> Our results demonstrate that the football betting market is inefficient ‒ bookmakers can be consistently beaten across thousands of games in both simulated environments and real-life betting.
> We provide a detailed description of our betting experience to illustrate how the sports gambling industry compensates these market inefficiencies with discriminatory practices against successful clients.
Re: Beating the bookies – how the online sports betting market is rigged
#8"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.
Re: Beating the bookies – how the online sports betting market is rigged
#9I am confused. If the betting is rigged, then how were the authors able to beat it consistently? What did I miss?
Nobody is in the business of giving money away.
So the bookmaker put controls on how and how much you can bet. There’s a reason why this stuff was illegal for a long time — gambling is always a vicious cycle for the player.
Re: Beating the bookies – how the online sports betting market is rigged
#10There 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