Anyone bet on-line here?
xbaggypants
Posts: 2,185 ✭✭✭
in Sports Talk
I want to open up an account where I can play parlays, futures etc. can anyone recommend a good site?
Thanks,
Ryan
Thanks,
Ryan
0
Comments
<< <i>Go to suckers-r-us.com - They are taking donations from gamblers who think they can beat a sports bookie. >>
One of their courses is "How to get a bankroll of a million dollars betting against a sports bookie"
The answer is "Start with a bankroll of two million dollars"
<< <i>
<< <i>Go to suckers-r-us.com - They are taking donations from gamblers who think they can beat a sports bookie. >>
One of their courses is "How to get a bankroll of a million dollars betting against a sports bookie"
The answer is "Start with a bankroll of two million dollars" >>
I can give you advise on where to play if you want to email me.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/sports/othersports/25betfair.html?ex=1212292800&en=330e196a012c447b&ei=5070&emc=eta1
Internet Site Battles the Fix in Sports Bets
By JOE DRAPE
Published: May 25, 2008
LONDON — With Internet gambling predicted to surpass $20 billion in 2008, and with illegal wagering accounting for $150 billion in the United States, by some estimates, the temptation for those seeking to influence the outcome of games has never been greater. Now, a raft of gambling scandals in sports, from cricket to soccer and most recently tennis, has raised an uncomfortable question: Are the games we watch fixed?
Last Monday, a report commissioned by the major tennis governing bodies recommended that 45 matches played in the last five years be investigated because betting patterns gave a “strong indication” that gamblers were profiting from inside information. And those matches, the report said, may be only the tip of the iceberg.
The match fixing might never have been discovered had it not been detected by Betfair, which has revolutionized online wagering since its Web site started in June 2000. At any moment, Betfair’s customers have $360 million on account and are at their keyboards, matching odds with fellow bettors in 80 countries. It is eBay for gamblers, with wagers being made in real time, usually after the matches have begun.
Betfair has become a focal point for the growing list of match-fixing scandals. Over the past seven years, it has alerted dozens of sports about suspicious betting activity, leading to investigations in horse racing, soccer and now tennis.
“You’re at risk of being victimized by inside information if you’re playing these markets,” said David Forrest, an economics professor at the University of Salford in England. “While Internet gambling has offered transparency, it has offered temptation as well. There’s greater liquidity for the cheats, and new forms of wagering and more money than ever. There are more incentives for athletes or officials to manipulate or fix a game.”
The most prominent scandal has involved the tennis player Nikolay Davydenko, ranked fourth in the world and seeded fourth in the French Open, which begins Sunday. At a tournament in Sopot, Poland, in August, Mr. Davydenko went from being a heavy favorite against 87th-ranked Martin Vassallo Arguello of Argentina to being a significant underdog during the match.
Mr. Davydenko’s odds got longer, and more money came in for Mr. Vassallo Arguello, even after Mr. Davydenko won the first set. Mr. Davydenko retired because of an injury with Mr. Vassallo Arguello ahead, 2-6, 6-3, 2-1. During the match, Betfair notified the ATP, the men’s professional tennis association, that its security team had recognized irregular betting patterns. After the match, Betfair voided $7 million in bets, the first time in its history that it had taken such a measure. It turned over all of its data to the ATP.
Mr. Davydenko has denied wrongdoing. He has refused a request from ATP investigators for the cellphone records of his wife and his brother.
The incident, along with the fact that at least a dozen ranked players told members of the news media that they had been asked to throw matches or had heard of similar approaches made to other players, prompted the 66-page report, “Environmental Review of Integrity in Professional Tennis.”
Now many in professional tennis are calling for a global anticorruption body for sport, to run along the lines of the World Anti-Doping Agency. The idea has been embraced by most major sports in Europe.
“Insider trading is a bigger deal in sports than in the financial markets,” said Justin Wolfers, a professor of business and public policy at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, who studies gambling. “We have the Securities and Exchange Commission here. Why not the same for what is a multibillion-dollar sports gambling market?”
From its office above the Thames, Betfair has been the de facto watchdog for sports. Computers glow 24 hours a day, and televisions beam in snooker, basketball, soccer and horse racing, among the sports on which Betfair offers 4,000 kinds of bets a week.
Betfair’s founders, Andrew Black and Edward Wray, whose backgrounds are in the stock market and investment banking, say they have built a better mousetrap. More than a million customers of the Web site, Betfair.com. wager against each other, setting their own odds and paying a fraction of what traditional bookmakers charge.
As Internet gambling has boomed from a $6 billion industry in 2003 to the more than $20 billion wagered today, according to the Maine-based research firm Christiansen Capital Advisors, Betfair’s revenue has grown to $372 million, from $64 million in 2003. Last year, by taking 2 percent to 5 percent commissions on winning bets, Betfair posted profits of $64 million, according to its annual report.
Its founders wanted to transplant the fundamentals of investment banking to sports. Now, Betfair handles 15 million transactions a day, or more than all of the European stock exchanges combined. Sports betting is legal in Britain; 8,000 betting shops are licensed and regulated by the government, as are the Internet gambling sites based here.
Betfair offers betting on major sports based in the United States, like the N.F.L., the N.B.A. and Major League Baseball. But it does not take any wagers from the United States or China, Japan, Hong Kong or India, places where online gambling is illegal. The men’s singles competition at the United States Open was the most popular tennis event on Betfair in 2007, with $307 million bet.
What Betfair brought to gambling was transparency. It has agreements with 32 sports governing bodies and is seeking more, promising to share in real time any unusual betting activity.
“We can tell you every single bet ever placed and who made it, from what funds and where those funds are going,” said Mark Davies, a Betfair managing director and a former bond trader. “It is a complete audit trail, and we want to share it with the governing bodies of sport.”
But many sports governing bodies have refused Betfair’s offer, Mr. Davies said, including the International Olympic Committee. During the 2004 Summer Games in Athens, Betfair matched $80 million in wagers on Olympic events. A spokeswoman for the I.O.C., Emmanuelle Moreau, said that the committee had taken proactive measures to address gambling threats. She also said it expected to have a system in place to be alerted to irregular betting before the Beijing Games in August.
“I have been told by one sport that they did not want to sign an agreement because they did not want to know the level of corruption that existed,” Mr. Davies said. “But it exists, and we’re just showing what has always been there.”
Still, others say that Betfair’s “in-running bets,” which may not necessarily affect the final outcome, are ripe for manipulation.
This month, for example, the British Horseracing Authority charged nine people, including a prominent trainer, Paul Blockley, and a jockey, Dean McKeown, with corruption, saying they shared inside information that their horses were not going to run well. The bettors, including five racehorse owners, had put money on horses to lose, which Betfair permits.
“Betting corruption existed before Betfair,” said Paul Scotney, the director of integrity services and licensing for the British Horseracing Authority, which has disciplined more than a dozen jockeys, as well as trainers and owners, with the help of Betfair’s data. “But Betfair offers other, and more, ways of cheating.”
More worrisome for Mr. Forrest, the economist and co-author of a recent study, “Risks to the Integrity of Sport From Betting Corruption,” are sports like tennis, in which a player can deliberately lose the first set against an inferior opponent so that the odds rise, then go on to win.
“It is a greater incentive for an athlete or official to participate in this type of manipulation,” Mr. Forrest said. “It is within their control, and they do not have to lose the match.”
Jenny Williams, the chief executive of the Gambling Commission, which regulates Britain’s gaming industry, said her agency was gathering information about in-running betting and its pitfalls.
“The jury is still out,” Ms. Williams said. “You can produce a theoretical risk, but we need to determine if it is going on.”
How many of the world’s sporting events are fixed? By virtue of the fact that match-fixing is a crime and most gambling is illegal, most economists and sports officials hesitate to guess.
The United States is hardly immune. Last Friday, federal prosecutors asserted that the N.B.A. referee Tim Donaghy admitted to betting or providing inside information to gamblers on more than 100 games, many of them that he had officiated. The league said Mr. Donaghy was a rogue referee, but there are enough instances of gambling scandals in the world to suggest that match-fixing is also part of the American landscape.
In 2006, for example, Mr. Wolfers, the Wharton professor, after reviewing 16 years of college basketball results, found that point shaving had occurred in about 1 percent of the games. A Stanford economics student, Jonathan Gibbs, suggested in an undergraduate thesis that similar forces may be at work in the N.B.A.
In fact, the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s gambling survey of 21,000 athletes released in 2005 found that 35 percent of male athletes and 10 percent of female athletes said they had bet on college sports in the previous year. Of the 2,132 Division I football players surveyed, 1.1 percent (23) reported accepting money for playing poorly in a game. Of the 388 Division I men’s basketball players surveyed, 0.5 percent (2) reported such conduct.
A total of 2.3 percent of the Division I football players and 2.1 percent of the Division I men’s basketball players surveyed said they had been asked to influence the outcome of a game because of gambling debts, and 1.4 percent of the football players and 1 percent of the basketball players acknowledged actually affecting the outcome.
Mr. Wolfers said there was more to worry about in American sports, on which more money was bet illegally and without regulation. “There is a greater potential for corruption,” he said. “Bad guys are going to get away with more stuff unless we channel it into a legitimate economy.”
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<< <i>Go to suckers-r-us.com - They are taking donations from gamblers who think they can beat a sports bookie. >>
Who said anything about beating the bookie?
Is building a $100 bankroll by starting with $200 really much of a problem?
<< <i>
<< <i>Go to suckers-r-us.com - They are taking donations from gamblers who think they can beat a sports bookie. >>
Who said anything about beating the bookie?
Is building a $100 bankroll by starting with $200 really much of a problem? >>
That would depend on the time frame, and on the individual. Someone gambling and turning $200 into $100 every week, earning say $25,000 a year with a wife and children to support, I think most people would view that to be a problem. Some super rich businessman earning 100 million dollars a year, turning 2 million dollars into 1 million dollars every year from gambling, then that may not be considered a problem. However, I haven't known any gambler whereby their gambling wasn't a problem - just a question of degree.
The bigger problem which most don't understand, even those in the middle of it, is the addiction part of it. You often see on poker commentary from online poker losers that they were winning at say the 1/2 level, but then they stepped up to the 10/20 level and got annihilated. The big problem with gambling addiction is that a gambler usually isn't satisfied with the "high" from one level after extended play, and just like a drug addict who needs larger doses to get better highs, the addicted gambler needs to bet larger amounts of money to receive a better adrenaline rush thrill. Even a $50 a week gambler, if they perceive themselves being hot, will often start betting more to of course try to win more money but also to get a better high.
Of course, most online poker losers don't understand that the reason also their bankrolls get crushed when they were winning at lower levels and then stepped up to higher levels, is that the accumulative effect of the rake simply catches up to them faster at the higher levels, and the random luck they were fortunate to experience at the lower levels starts evening out. There are other reasons as well such as skill levels and other factors.
Actually, when pursuing healthy endeavors, there's nothing inherently wrong with this behavior. This mind frame which is probably hard-wired in most human beings especially in the United States, helps us to strive for a better life through working harder and smarter at our jobs and businesses...even on topic to this forum, buying more expensive baseball cards gives us an adrenaline rush thrill of sorts, and at least that's healthy because we get the thrill and we basically have the value in the card and hopefully the cards will increase in value.
The problem with gambling is we are dealing with events whereby there is a negative expectation and/or eventually a negative certainty...the more we do it the worse it gets. I think this is fairly clear. The bottom line is that there are very few gamblers, if any, who would be satisfied just betting a little bit of money for a long period of time.
If a gambler betting strictly $50 a week on his favorite football team, the $50 he can easily afford and it doesn't interfere with his quality of life, and he doesn't ever stray from that, then most people wouldn't view that to be a problem. But I don't know any gambler who has ever had the discipline to do that, especially when they perceive themselves to be hot - Gambling by its nature is a very addictive activity.
The bigger problem is that when gamblers get cold, a number of them will chase their losses believing that the next bet or series of bets could get them even. I know a gambler who for many years gambled and lost, but stayed within his means and never overextended himself and never got into debt - then one weekend while in the proceedings of going through a divorce and he was a bit depressed, he had a sports betting cold streak beyond belief...a "perfect storm" for him...his normal $50 bets, started turning into $100, $200 bets and then into the thousands. In this one weekend he wound up losing over $30,000 in which the last time I spoke to him about it, he was still paying off the debt and more especially from interest on credit cards.
Steve
<< <i>we are dealing with events whereby there is a negative expectation and/or eventually a negative certainty... >>
Are you talking about gamblers or Cubs fans?
I'm not a big time gambler, I have opened an account and have been spending $10 a day betting on baseball. I couldn't stand losing anything more than that a day. So far I'm 6-1 with my bets and I'm up $25. I can never see myself get to the point where i would be "chasing" my money, I would just end up shutting my account down. I have two little girls and would never want to put my family under the stress of having no food because I lost it all betting on sports.
RYan
Website
<< <i>Very well written Steve, I agree with pretty much everything that you have stated above.
I'm not a big time gambler, I have opened an account and have been spending $10 a day betting on baseball. I couldn't stand losing anything more than that a day. So far I'm 6-1 with my bets and I'm up $25. I can never see myself get to the point where i would be "chasing" my money, I would just end up shutting my account down. I have two little girls and would never want to put my family under the stress of having no food because I lost it all betting on sports.
RYan >>
Ryan - I never rooted against a gambler in my life, so just be careful with this. For a lot of gamblers out there, they had a similar attitude in the beginning, and then sometimes it took months or sometimes it took years, but before they could fully comprehend what happened, they wound up dead broke and in debt.
I'll leave you in this thread with an article which may help you understand what sports gambling is all about. Best regards!
Sports Betting Handicapping
Many sports bettors look down on horse race bettors as real suckers. Many sports bettors have tried horse race handicapping and wagering. Their bankrolls quickly got crushed. They quit horse race handicapping and wagering because it is such a sucker’s game. To quit being a customer of horse racing was a smart thing to do.
Sports betting is not as much of a sucker’s game as horse race betting, but sports betting nevertheless still is a sucker’s game. Horse race betting with its huge 20% takeout house edge on each race quickly annihilates your money. Sports betting will annihilate your money also but not as quickly because the house edge is not as high as in horse race betting. But being a better bet absolutely does not mean that it is a good bet. Sports betting is still a bad bet.
Your basic premise of certain financial death by gambling against a house edge is favoring the poison of sports betting over the other poison of horse race betting, simply because it will kill your bankroll slower. Sports betting is still monetary poison and will always kill your bankroll. There is nothing in sports betting that can be done to save your bankroll except to not bet. Your bankroll is saved by not betting.
Sports betting and horse race betting are exactly alike in the fact that you absolutely do not have any control over the outcome of any bets. In fact, sports betting is exactly the same as horse race betting in that it does not matter how skilled of a handicapper you are. The monetary results of betting on sports or horses is the same as betting on random numbers. This is unlike gambling games of real skill such as poker and gin rummy whereby you can control the outcome. Card games are discussed in another chapter. There is not any skill involved in sports betting and this fact had better be realized or your bankroll is doomed. You absolutely can never predict the outcome of sports events with enough accuracy against the house edge to break even let alone ever make money. Nobody on this earth can make money betting against a sports bookie. You had better believe that.
Sports bettors are even bigger "geniuses" in analyzing games after the games are over than are horse race bettors in analyzing races after the races are over. Horse race bettors usually quickly forget about the race that was just lost and then move on to the next race. Sports bettors sometimes will mull over the game that was just played. They will think about the various situations and problems that happened in the game that caused the bet to win or lose. They may reflect on the game for some weeks, months or longer believing that this may help to handicap another game down the road. They may even remember the game for next season or for years to come, thinking this may help to evaluate the game plans of a coach or the tendencies of a team. This is a form of Monday morning quarterbacking. The expression "Monday morning quarterback" got this name because most professional football games are played on Sundays. Then on Monday after the games are over, everyone is a game analysis expert when they have all of the game scores. When the games are over, only then is any sports bettor a sports handicapping expert.
The sports betting Monday morning quarterbacks will always say, "If I only had that one extra piece of handicapping information, then I would have won that bet. If I only knew or anticipated the tendencies of that team a little wiser, then I would have won that bet. If only that pass receiver would have just caught that one important pass, then I would have won that bet. If only that pitcher had not given up that one homerun, then I would have won that bet." You must understand that it does not matter what events happened in any of those games or all the other games which are bet. You will always get ground out of your money.
In sports betting, all of the situations are random as far as making money gambling against a house edge is concerned. You cannot possibly accurately predict these games to overcome the house edge betting on them. Despite any of your perceptions, you are simply making random bets on random games of random athletic occurrences with random results. You believe that you have become a handicapping genius when picking a couple of football game winning blowouts by twenty-one points or more. Sooner or later you will also pick a couple of losers by twenty-one points or more. You can never realistically predict any of these occurrences ahead of time. It cannot be done.
You cannot ever predict sporting events with enough accuracy to beat the bookie. Even the very best teams can lose to the very worst teams. You will lose money betting on good or bad teams, home or visiting teams, and favorites or underdogs. Teams get hot streaks and cold streaks. Maybe you believe that you can win betting on hot teams and betting against cold teams. But you really cannot have a clue when these streaks will start or stop with enough predictability to make money betting against the house edge. It just is not possible. You are getting beat and always will get beat out of your money not because of your handicapping but simply because of the house edge.
All of the already known given information about a sporting event is already built-in to the point spread, over-under and all other forms of sports bets. So what it boils down to is that you are simply betting on random numbers against a built-in house edge which makes it impossible to ever win money. You may have what you sincerely believe is an exciting piece of new information such as a key player injury or a sudden inclement weather report which could alter the outcome of the game. But you cannot really know beforehand, even if the information is accurate, how it will affect the outcome of the game with enough accuracy to overcome the house edge. Key players get hurt on teams all the time and enough of the time the team may win anyway because the other players on the team step-up and actually play better for awhile. Teams that never won before on a muddy field can suddenly win on a muddy field. All of the new information along with your hunches, intuitions and feelings about a given game are all meaningless betting against a bookie. It does not matter whether you studiously analyzed all of the stats and trends then came up with some conclusion or whether you just feel lucky. In the long-run you will always lose money and in the short-run also if betting on enough games.
Sports bettors should believe that sports handicapping is actually just about as unpredictable as horse race handicapping. Human athletes have physical problems as do horse athletes. Of course the legs of racehorses are more fragile. Compare your own physical life to the physical life of a professional athlete. Physically, sometimes you have good or bad days without any real explanation for the differences. Sometimes you just wake-up with a headache, cold symptoms, muscle pain, etc., or maybe it was just something you ate. Professional sports athletes are the exact same way and more so. With a rigorous schedule of many practices and playing many games in a season, they are constantly prone to physical problems. Especially the arms of quarterbacks and pitchers, as well as the knees, feet and other body parts of key position players. Most times even the athletes are not really sure how they will perform in a game. They may be mentally prepared and in top physical shape but a knee cartilage may just about be ready to blowout. Even while warming up before a game, the athletes are never really certain how accurate their arms or how strong their legs will be throughout the game. Take a full team of football players, baseball players, basketball players, etc. Now just how are you going to possibly know the physical conditions of all these players? Performances in past games are a guideline but all that information is already built-in to the point spread and various odds.
The sports bookie oddsmakers in Las Vegas will have more information than you could ever possibly have, even on your home team. They know when teams are hot or cold and adjust the odds lines accordingly. They try to adjust the odds and point spreads so that they get equal betting action on both teams. They make money regardless of which team wins or loses. The bookies have gotten very rich off of gamblers because they are effective in getting equivalent money on both the winning and losing side of a betting proposition such as a point spread on a game. The bookie will win in the long-run and you will lose in the long-run. The long-run turns into the short-run if betting enough games.
An important point that you must realize is that the bookies could even have a margin of error but with the house edge they will still win your money. You think that with a computer programmed with a boatload of statistics and trends that you can outsmart them. There is not any chance of that happening. The absolute certain unpredictability of the physical conditions of the athletes as well as the weather conditions and little idiosyncrasies that occur throughout each game makes it absolutely, totally, completely impossible to beat the bookie house edge.
You must understand that even if the vastly remote, basically impossible chance existed that you were a bit smarter than the Las Vegas oddsmakers, you would still lose anyway because of the house edge. Your bankroll would still get ground out. But get back to reality. The chance of you being smarter than the Las Vegas bookies or the local illegal bookies who get their odds from Las Vegas, to overcome the house edge, just simply is not going to be possible. So forget about it!
With the randomness of sporting event outcomes given the various statistical betting lines, you can never beat the bookie. It does not matter if you buy more stat sheets, spend more time handicapping, gather more information, listen more intensely to the TV and radio trying to find that key piece of news before the bookie does, or buy some good luck charms. It completely does not matter because you will never overcome the house edge. You had better realize this fact right now. Do not fool yourself now or ever with thinking that your handicapping will get better and then maybe someday you will win at sports betting.
You must be convinced of the fact that betting on sporting events against the bookie point spread and odds is exactly the same as playing random numbers. Playing random numbers is exactly the same as flipping coins. To make it clearer about sports picks being random picks, use this coin flipping example. You must try this at least once. Start with a mythical bankroll of $5,000. Flip a coin and call it heads or tails. The betting is the same as with a bookie. If you bet $100 and call it right, then you win $100. If you bet $100 and call it wrong, then you lose $110. Whatever amount you bet, when you lose then an extra 10% is lost. Keep score on a notepad or calculator. Concentrate and try to get lucky or just bet hunches whether the coin flip will be heads or tails. Bet more money if you feel hot or lucky. Bet any which way you want to. Do this for an hour. You will begin to notice the exact same patterns as if you were betting on games. You will win two or three in a row, lose a few, get hot and win five in a row, lose a few, go a little cold, get hot again, go back and forth with wins and losses, etc. But after an hour, you will see what happens to your bankroll. Your bankroll will be down almost guaranteed. If miraculously you are winning money then keep on flipping. Your bankroll will eventually be crushed. Eventually on the notepad or calculator the balance will be $0.
It should be crystal clear that you cannot win money flipping coins giving up an extra 10% for each loss. But unfortunately for all sports bettors, their money is lost exactly like this coin flipping scenario. You may get ahead or immediately lose with the coin flips starting out. But always eventually sooner or later and usually sooner, the random coin flip heads or tails will even out. Just like your random sports picks will even out. But paying that 10% extra for each loss will not even out your bankroll. It will level it like a steamroller to a flat $0 every single time without exception. If some bookie only charges 5% for each loss instead of 10%, you still never will be able to make money against the house edge. Even a 1% bookie house edge would eventually annihilate your bankroll.
Some of the most annoying, loud mouth liars on the face of this earth are the "pay per call" sports tout handicappers on TV and radio and also those selling sports betting newsletters. For a given amount of money, any amount of which is too much, they make you pay for the privilege of losing your money on their picks. Of course they always over the long-run and most times the short-run, will lose at the exact same rate that you will lose. These sports touts know that you and they can never beat the bookie. Yet they continue to lie about their percentage of winners simply to make money from your phone calls or subscriptions. Sports touts are further discussed in other chapters.
You have a choice. You can follow the guidance of this article or you can continue the foolish, hopeless task of trying to beat the sports bookie. Not following this guidance will definitely, without any doubt, cost you many thousands of dollars to eventually learn the lesson that you have just read about. Be smart and hold on to your hard earned money. Do not ever make another bet with a sports bookie. Tell yourself and forever mean it that the sports bookie betting days are over and good riddance.
Now that you know how utterly futile and hopeless is the sports betting game, you simply cannot in good common sense pick-up the phone to make a sports bet. You cannot place a bet on the internet. Just do not do it. Always remember that the very next bet will be the continuation of a losing streak. Even if you start out winning it does not matter because you will always lose. You must resist betting on sports. You must extinguish that urge. That is your only chance to win. Be smart and enjoy watching the games knowing that it is impossible to make money betting on them. Have real lasting fun by being a good sports fan. Here’s rooting for you to stop or never start sports betting.