Twitter Watch: Arbers are they value or not?

A bit of discussion on twitter about arbers.  Not sure I was able to express myself properly in a tweet.  I can understand that an arber or even a pro bettor (or originator) can *sometimes* be giving you actionable or profitable information.

I keep getting hit on such and such team, maybe I should adjust my ratings/odds.  Thanks for the info.  Going forward I will now be more confident in my prices take bigger bets and make more money.

Or I have a huge liability on the local home team favourite.  I might be prepared to take a negative EV hedge to balance the book a bit.  Now I can offer the arbers an arbable and value price for them.  They take some.  Great, thanks, I've hedged my risk a little which will allow me more stable and constant profits.

But sometimes they are not giving you anything useful.  The example I used was that of setting prices for overs/unders.  To take advantage of bettors bias you want to set a short price on the over.  You pay out less money on the most booked side, more profit for you.  However, now the under is a little big (and arbable).  I don't need an arber to tell me the price is too big - I already know - I don't want to share my extra profit with them for my clever strategic pricing plan.

There are other cases too and its not just me who think it.  AKBets talk a lot about taking sharp customers and sharp money, and I am sure they do.  But they have some markets they offer, I can only guess that they think their customers want them.  But they dont need to be told that their prices on it are soft over and over again.  They have no plans to improve, which is fine.

With the in-play stuff too, maybe all the arber is telling you is that your tech, your live feed is slower than theirs or others.  Maybe you have plans in the pipeline to improve, maybe its not worth improving the latency, but either way you gain no value by paying the arber repeatedly to tell you that your feed is slow. 

For caution I have documented two situations where I believe the arb/pro info was useful, and three where it wasn't.  Its not straight forward and might be different treatment of arbers depending on market and situation.

Its a lofty ambition to be best at the lot, best at trading on EVERY sport, best at tech.  Fair play to anyone taking on the challenge.  Wouldn't want it to be me though.

 



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Deconstructing WDL and O/U 2.5 goals odds.

Input odds below (in decimal): Home Odds: Draw Odds: Away odds: Over 2.5 Odds: Calculate Params See also Elo Reverse Calculator . Dixon Coles Dixon Coles is a method of generating probabilities on football matches.  It is related to Poisson but adds a correlation for low scores.  It seems to be one of the most accurate public methods.  It requires three parameters lambda, mu and rho.  rho describes how related low scores are.  lambda and mu represent the average goals the home and away team are expected to score. In this calculator I have fixed rho = -0.13 (more info here  and here ) and I simply do a brute force search varying lambda and mu to find the values that has the lowest error from the Win Draw Lose and Over 2.5 odds entered.  I use the WDL odds and Over/Under odds as they are the most liquid betting markets and you can usually read a very accurate estimate for these off oddschecker or the exchange.   The soluti...
Read more

Chrome Extension 1000

Image
Donations now accepted If you have enjoyed using this extension and want to show your appreciation then click "Buy me a coffee" below, otherwise continue further down to read about our features! This started off as just a personal project.  I got full value from the effort that I put in already.   The effort included a few days coding initially and a day or two here or there to fix and add features, perhaps a full working week but fragmented all over the place.  In total it is now about 150 lines of code.   The reward was learning some javascript, learning about chrome extensions, earning some cred on twitter, and getting to connect with different people.  And of course I am actively using it and can identify potential betting opportunities myself. However surprisingly many have found it useful and some have asked for a way to say thanks.  So here it is. Feature Request (01 February 2024) - only available to manually install due to gambling exetn...
Read more

Elo Reverse Calculator

Image
Input odds below (in decimal): Home Odds: Draw Odds: Away odds: Calculate Params Elo Elo is simply a way of rating teams.  The ratings can be used to compare teams and generate probabilities for head to heads.  The probability one team will beat another is just a function of the difference in their rating. p = 1/(1+10^(-diff/400))  The tweet further below from ClubElo introduces another parameter r to take account of draws. Elo: The Hard Way The process is better described on eloratings.net  and clubelo.com .  If you visit these sites you can see it is quite complex.  Basically you initialise all teams to 1000 points for example.  Then you need a history of results and update each teams ratings depending if they win, lose or draw.  There are nuances to worry about, home field advantage, big wins, inter-league adjustments, k-factor weightings, etc. Elo: The Easy Way Say someone has already rated the teams, and also they have tak...
Read more