alt Hacker NewsI worked at a quant sports betting trading company, on occasion it would send the employees to place annonymous few grand bets at physical shops because it's such a problem getting people to continue accepting your bets if you are any good.
And found out that the more you bet, the more percentage commission you pay to exchanges like Betfair, which is quite contraintuitive - commission goes up with volume, not down.
I also learned a few tricks of the industry - when you open an online account they look up your address on Google Maps to see what kind of place you live in.
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> it's such a problem getting people to continue accepting your bets if you are any good.
Why don't they just use those people to adjust their odds faster for everybody else ? Or do they limit the size you can bet rather than just banning you ?
> I also found out that the more you bet, the more percentage commission you pay to exchanges like Betfair, which is quite contraintuitive - commission goes up with volume, not down.
I guess they try to cream the most addicted people, seems quite intuitive to me.
I thought the point of bet exchanges was that you're betting against other users, so the exchange doesn't have to care how good you are or how much you're betting. Why would they add friction for high rollers? Old bookmaker habits, or they're more than just a platform provider and are participating in the markets?
Are you able to tell us more about your operation? Size, scale, profitability etc?
How were you compensated? You mention 'shops', so I'm guessing this was in the UK?
Could you not just bet with the Asian bookmakers? (sbo, pinnacle, ibc etc.)
My betfair commission was heavily discounted back in the day, but that was only on volumes of ~£50,000 a day, and a fair bit more on weekends. Nevertheless their commissions were outrageously high, but the scale of the liquidity they had available was amazing.