Kai wrote: ↑Fri Oct 02, 2026 5:21 pm
alexmr2 wrote: ↑Thu Sep 17, 2026 6:03 pm
The forum also seems to be quieter than previous years which often leaves me wondering what are other people are up to these days and if there are more or less people trading overall?
Less people trading for sure, which will obviously impact forum activity as well. I think it's a myriad of factors, roughly in this order:
- Derek was the main post seeder
- daily banter and strategy talk moving to more convenient platforms like Discord
- BF leaving country after country
- liquidity and edge decay over time
- lack of fresh blood/newbies
- forum's racing bias
- rise of prediction markets
- affordability checks
Can only speak for myself though. I'm not a Bet Angel user so don't have much in common with others, and honestly there's not much incentive to post without Derek.
Think I may have suggested some forum upgrades or alternatives couple years ago, can't remember what exactly anymore, it's probably in the suggestion section. But honestly, I have no idea really how phpBB communities can move forward and thrive, some challenging years ahead because of all the factors above. It's probably getting a bit archaic for the younger generations.
I think we've reached an interesting point in the market. The hype that was around Betfair trading has been squashed a bit for a number of reasons. But also, a lot of people who are popular characters can't continue the facade endlessly, so blaming declining liquidity as an off-ramp for reducing their profile in the area has become quite common. But that in itself means that there's a little bit less general chatter about Betfair trading and less newbies.
One of the things we've noticed is that Bet Angel users that have been around for a while still continue to be around and are quite strong, but just sort of tend to get on with it. There's not much need to engage as much as they used to, and as pointed out above, there is a lack of newbies. We see far fewer new trialists coming into the space than we did a few years ago.
I don't think the riser prediction markets have changed much, to be honest, because they have quite a few problems themselves, including accessibility and settlement. They're not directly aligned, but there's still an awful lot to play out in that area.
Affordability checks have no doubt had an impact and dissuaded newbies, especially because you need a reasonable bank to be able to trade, not to start with, but if you want to scale.
I think you can see the decline elsewhere more than you can on this forum. This forum is still reasonably busy, but most of the other Betfair trading forums have completely collapsed to the point where they're getting no posts at all.
My summary would be: people are willing to stick the effort in, and established players are trundling along just fine, but some of the lack of chatter is just due to the lack of new people coming into the space. I actually think prediction markets will encourage people into the space rather than pull them away. We've sort of seen that with the Betfair markets in general, where markets that appear on prediction markets seem to have got a liquidity boost.
We are actively looking at upgrading the forum and adding new features and stuff, but that's going to take a fair bit of time to do. That may help conversation.
