Betfair changes to football / soccer markets

[Euler]

Cross Market Liquidity Pooling

Over the years customers have often commented on how weak some of our secondary markets are compared with the main markets such as Match Odds. We also understand customers would get more involved in those markets if they could trade out in-play, but they’re concerned the liquidity won’t be there.

To improve liquidity Betfair will shortly be trialling improved matching technology. The goal of the project is to ensure that if you have an unmatched bet, we advertise it to other customers in every way possible. Perhaps the simplest example would be the home team in Match Odds, and the same team -0.5 Asian Handicap. Currently if you place a bet on the Match Odds today, and if it’s unmatched we will only advertise the bet in Match Odds. The same is true of Asian Handicap.

With the new bet matcher, if your bet is unmatched in Match Odds we’ll also show it in the Asian Handicap -0.5 line for customers to match there. The reverse will also be true: if your Asian Handicap -0.5 bet is unmatched, we’ll make it available for other customers to match not just there but in the Match Odds market too. Note that your bet will still only be matched once, with whoever requests the bet first.

That’s a simple example, but in practice the range of bets we will show and match will be much wider. The first sport to see liquidity pooling will be Football and initially this will apply to four markets: Match Odds, Draw No Bet, Double Chance and the -0.5 to +0.5 lines in the Asian Handicap.

To give you a flavour of what the improvement might be in practice, here are some markets from the Europa League match between Krasnodar and Everton, snapshots taken 2 hours before kick-off. The markets displayed are Match Odds, Double Chance and Asian Handicap. The markets on the left are as they actually are on the site today. The markets on the right are as they would be when the new matcher is running. Hopefully the benefit to customers of running markets this way, especially Asian Handicap, will be obvious.

We hope to load the first matches using this new logic early in November, but how widely and quickly we roll this out will depend on how testing goes between now and then. Of course we need to test not only that the logic works as expected, but that performance is good too and above all our customers are safeguarded.

Correct Score

We currently offer all quoted scores from 0-0 to 3-3 in Football Correct Score (C/S) markets, with “Any Unquoted” listed as a selection to cover all possible scores where one or both teams scores four or more goals. In many situations, perhaps where one team is a strong favourite like Barcelona at home to Elche, “Any Unquoted” will be the favourite in that market. It’s effectively an inexact proxy for “Barcelona to win and score heavily”.

We’ve had some customer feedback asking for “Any Unquoted” to be split into three selections, “Any Other Home”, “Any Other Away” and “Any Other Draw”. That would give customers more choice – those who wanted to back just Barcelona to score a hatful should get a slightly better price, while those who still want to bet on (or against) all three outcomes can dutch them.

We are going to trial running correct score markets with those three selections instead of “Any Unquoted” later this year. With football markets offered every day at this time of year there will never be a point where we don’t already have a correct score market loaded on the site, so it won’t be possible to simply switch all markets over to the new selections. That means that we’ll start loading new markets with 19 selections as “Correct Score New”. Already loaded markets will remain as they are now, with 17 selections and called “Correct Score”. Once all correct score markets with “Any Unquoted” have been settled, all correct score markets will have the new template and we’ll rename them all simply “Correct Score” as now.

[mobile]

perhaps am not reading this correctly, but as far as the any unquoted market is concerned I always thought that it was priced to the favourite probability anyway..
I do not see how betfair can claim that you should be able to get a better price backing a heavy favourite, such as their example with Barcelona.
Surely if this market is broken to home-away-draw, then the favourite would actually return a lower price?

[burdo77]

u wont!

it is a load of shit, possibly a way for betfair to make more money trading their own markets....

plus theres no reason why all markets cant be cross matched rather than just a few............

[weemac]

I think you'd expect a marginally better price on Barca home unquoted, because that new price won't include the likes of 0-4, 1-4, 2-4, 4-4 etc. But these scorelines are so unlikely that the difference will be negligible. It will have a more noticeable impact on more evenly-matched contests.

I don't think this change will be very popular, especially with those who like trading AUQ. They will now have to dutch 3 AUQ markets to simulate the current AUQ price.

[LAB]

what they should do is just combining the o/u markets with the correct score. So if it is 1-1 in the 70th minute, combine 1-1 and under 2.5 goals.

[aperson]

what they should do is just combining the o/u markets with the correct score. So if it is 1-1 in the 70th minute, combine 1-1 and under 2.5 goals.

I'm pretty sure this is something they will end up doing after the initial trial period. I'm not really a fan of this, it will take away some easy opportunities to take advantage of price discrepancy's between markets such as these, but I guess that's my problem.

As an aside as someone who has been trading the correct score/ O/U markets for nearly 5 years now, (often on the current score), the liquidity is absolutely terrible compared to where it used to be, particularly before half time. Trading some premiership matches now feels similar to how trading a Serie A match used to feel. The England match last night for example was awful.

[steven1976]

Peter,
I'm curious if you think that some of the changes are coming about because bf are monitoring and understanding successful traders accounts and trying to replace traders/scalpers?

Your comments in the blog seem to indicate that they are mirroring something you have done in the past.

Ste

[Euler]

As an aside as someone who has been trading the correct score/ O/U markets for nearly 5 years now, (often on the current score), the liquidity is absolutely terrible compared to where it used to be, particularly before half time. Trading some premiership matches now feels similar to how trading a Serie A match used to feel. The England match last night for example was awful.

I agree the markets have been getting very thin.

[Euler]

Peter,
I'm curious if you think that some of the changes are coming about because bf are monitoring and understanding successful traders accounts and trying to replace traders/scalpers?

Your comments in the blog seem to indicate that they are mirroring something you have done in the past.

Ste

I'll tell you what I think the underlying methodology for the exchange is. If you have some people winning more than others they drain the pool of money a bit too quickly. So it makes sense to have the exchange as efficient as possible. That way people just swap money and as a % of activity, pay more in commission.

Cross matching helps achieve that, but as we all know another effect of this it that Betfair sweep up pennies due to rounding errors.

I don't believe they directly copy strategies but when the 'correct imbalances' in the eco system the payoff for Betfair is pretty large in the scheme of things. While they may pee off some long term customers the net effect over many is very advantageous for them.

[Euler]

Another factor where they have done this, but it's been largely ignored, is on the speed of the web site and exchange.

Go back years ago and you could pelt their servers to kingdom come to get an edge. Then the API came along with limits on what you could do. Quietly caching was introduced, so no many how fast you called the API it didn't make any difference you would just get stale cached data. Speed as an advantage was lost a long time ago.

I'd imagine they have taken the opportunity to do something with the new API but it's tough to comment on that at the moment. I don't know the architecture, but I'd bet a few quid that will influence a few strategies going forward.

[steven1976]

Id agree with your comments and Id imagine most people would also be amazed if the new api offers any improvements in assisting the average trader.

Not sure if i agree with this part however,

"So it makes sense to have the exchange as efficient as possible. That way people just swap money and as a % of activity, pay more in commission"

Surely, the last thing bf wants is people passing around money and taking 5% commission. I would imagine they want the 60% payers to take the money as quick as possible and offer support to them to some extent, so the profits are realised quicker to their balance sheet?

This is why i was wondering if you felt B/F are now going to the next stage of thinking that they can knock out some of the 60% payers who offer liquidity in markets and feel they could replace/replicate to a certain extent themselves similar activity.

[Euler]

If I'm betting 3/1 on an evens shot my opponent will go bust quickly. If we are flipping a coin and paying a small commission when we win, we will both go bust slowly.

[steven1976]

But surely they dont rely on people going bust slowly do they? I'd imagine Betfair are not bothered if player A or B go bust slowly, they want player B to lose quickly so that they load up their account again and at the same time hold out their hand to take 60% off player A for his hard work, to pass onto their share holders.

[Euler]

But surely they dont rely on people going bust slowly do they?

That's generally the model they have in place and their overall aim.

[marko236]

But surely they dont rely on people going bust slowly do they?

That's generally the model they have in place and their overall aim.

If people go bust quickly they will lose interest, but if they lose money slowly they will be more likely to keep puting more money into the exchange.