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.