Competition to find Europe's top betting exchange user

Betting exchange iBetX have announced the launch of their first handicapping competition, which will start on June 26th 2004. Betting exchange punters from all over Europe will compete against each other for the title of European Handicapping Champion, plus a guaranteed minimum £10,000 first prize.

The European Handicapping Championship will be held entirely on line and will be based on UK race meetings. The qualifying rounds will be held on 25th and 26th June. All punters will start with a 10,000 point fund with which they will use their skill and judgement to back, lay and trade horses. At the end of the two days the 25% of punters with the greatest number of points qualify for the semi final which will be held on July 3rd and 4th. The final will be held over three days of UK racing to be held on the 10th, 11th and 12th July.

Entry to the competition costs £100 and punters can have multiple entries if they wish but each entry is managed separately and cannot be aggregated. Punters also have the option of entering the competition at the semi final stage at a cost of £400. The prize structure will depend on the number of entrants, however the first prize of £10,000 is guaranteed by iBetX regardless of numbers of entrants.

IBetX's Imraan Malik commented:

"Betting has always been a competition between individual punters, and between punters and bookies. The European Handicapping Championship takes this a stage further, enabling serious punters to play against each other for the title, and for the prize purse, for an individual entry fee of just £100. It's about which punters are the shrewdest judges of form, conditions and how to grow their purse."

More details of this competition are available here.

Government to reject key Joint Scrutiny Committee Recommendations?

An article in the Sunday Times on May 23rd suggests that Tessa Jowell is set to reject calls by MPs to curb betting exchanges. This it is observed will anger the racing and industry and bookmakers and also pit her against Chancellor Gordon Brown who announced his intention in his budget speech to study ways of raising revenue from these websites.

If true, this is great news for betting exchanges and their heavy users, who faced the prospect of having to be registered, and possibly having to pay a racing levy and tax on winnings, under the recommendations of the Joint Scrutiny Committee. It is to the credit of Tessa Jowell and her department that they have kept a cool head, have focussed on the facts, and have not been swayed by the media hysteria and the bookmakers' campaign of propaganda and misinformation which followed the Fallon and Fox cases.

Betfair on The Money Programme

The increasing profile and importance of betting exchanges and Betfair in particular will be reflected by a forthcoming episode of the Money Programme which will include a major feature on Betfair and sports traders. The episode in question will be screened on June 2nd at 7.30pm on BBC2.

Racing back on screen

At The Races, the satellite television successor to Atheraces is set to launch on June 11 showing an average of two meetings a day throughout the summer. This will be a huge relief to the betting exchanges who it is suggested may have lost 25% of their racing turnover while ART was off the air. It will also be a relief to the in running fans amongst their members and particularly those who traded professionally on these races.

The return of Big Brother

Not only is this an endurance test for the competitors, at nine weeks it is an endurance test for Special Bets specialists. With plenty of outside money coming into the market there should be opportunities galore! It all kicks off this Friday 28th June. This is definitely a market where research can pay dividends. There is a brilliant directory of BB5 links at the following site:

http://www.sirlinksalot.net/ukbigbrother.html

New features on Sporting options

As this edition of Bet Exchange News went to press Sportingoptions announced two new features. Firstly bets can now be placed on the system and deleted automatically by the user. This will be particularly useful for users who bet on outright markets such as the Premiership as they will be able to programme their bets before the start of a key match would could affect the odds on the outright market.

The other feature is the ability to leave bets on the exchange after an event has gone in running. One possible application for this would be if you wanted odds of 4.0 on your team to win, but the odds were only 3.0. You could leave the bet to go in running into the match. If after 30 minutes there has been no goals scored it may be that the odds will have moved to the level you want and your bet gets matched. Of course if a goal gets scored or a player gets sent off in the meantime then all bets, yours included will be cancelled.

Sportingoptions have also launched a free competition for Euro2004 which will see a lucky member win £500. To enter they just have to predict the two finalists, and also as a tiebreaker predict the number of goals that will be scored in the first group phase. If you are already a member of Sportingoptions you will have received your invitation to enter. If you have just joined or are just about to join you need to send them an email at info@sportingoptions.co.uk to get submit your entry before June 12th.

Big winners and losers on Betfair

US golfer Joey Sindelar became the latest winner to be matched at 1000 on Betfair when coming from way off the pace to clinch the Wachovia Championship in a play-off. Some lucky punter had £2 on the PGA tour journeyman at those unbelievable odds of 1000 when he looked down and out at the halfway stage of the tournament, yet he overcame a double-bogey seven at the 10th hole of his final round on Sunday to seal the unlikely victory.

Elsewhere, throughout the month, there were some big winners and loses in the Division two play off between Bristol City and Hartlepool as Hartlepool came from a 1-0 deficit with 3 minutes left to win the game 2-1. Bristol's injury time winner would have delighted punters who had backed them at such prices as 130 (£22 matched), 120 (£10) and 100 (£6) on Betfair.

As I put the final touches to this newsletter, Kevin Blackwell was confirmed as the new Leeds manager, much to the delight of the punter who backed him at odds of 600 on Betfair, netting him a return of well over £2,000 from a stake of just £4.

By the time you read this you will probably know who has won the European Champions League. Regardless of who wins there will be punters celebrating wins at massive odds as Porto have been backed as long as 270 and Monaco as long as 390 to win the tournament.

Greyhounds: Derby bet 'the biggest ever'

Written by Jonathon Kay and published in the Racing Post 09/05/04 and reproduced here with their kind permission. To view this article and thousands more like it visit the excellent free cuttings library at www.racingpost.co.uk

HEAT 21 of the William Hill Greyhound Derby on Friday, won by Harry Findlay's odds_on favourite Escholido, saw what is thought to be the biggest single bet offered on leading betting exchange Betfair in the site's history.

The action started mid_afternoon when a telephone caller to the firm's London HQ put in an order for pounds 500,000 at 2.1 (11_10) and the same punter subsequently topped that with another pounds 400,000 at 2.04. The rules of Betfair mean that the would_be punter must have had at least that total of pounds 900,000 in their account to have attempted to place the wagers. Little was matched of those original bets, but there was plenty of business done at around the 1.98 mark before the requests were cancelled at around 7.30pm.

Ultimately, Betfair matched pounds 192,000 at prices ranging from 2.26 down to 1.67 at the off, a staggering amount for a non_televised greyhound race and the firm's spokesman, Tony Calvin, said:

"We have millions queuing up to back football teams near the end of in_running football matches, but from personal experience this is the biggest individual bet I've ever seen.

"There was quite a buzz when first half a million and then another pounds 400,000 suddenly appeared in a market which, until that time, had seen around pounds 1,000 matched.

"It's an incredible amount of money, and it wasn't just for show because it was a realistic price being asked for, that certainly had a chance of being matched. Outside of someone like Kerry Packer in Las Vegas, it's one of the biggest stakes I've heard of."

For his part, Findlay declined to be drawn on whether he was responsible for the betting frenzy on Betfair, but did admit to landing a "massive touch".

He said: "I didn't make any secret of the fact that I think the world of Escholido and how much I fancied him, yet hardly any `judge' put him up.

"And I only started fancying him more and more when I got to the track as Coomlogane Royal franked his Peterborough form with a brilliant run in an early heat and then it became more and more obvious that there was something like a three lengths advantage on the outside. In the end, he ran exactly how I thought he would by winning easily."

And Findlay admitted that he is a massive fan of betting exchanges. "You can get six figures on a hot favourite when the race is covered by Sky and I've no doubt that, in 10 years time, Betfair and greyhound racing will be massive bed_partners because they are made for each other.

"Tom Kelly (chief executive of the Association of British Bookmakers) recently said that Betfair raised integrity questions in greyhound racing which is obscene because for three years now there has not been a single problem with any of the Sky races."

Just for good measure, Findlay was yesterday involved in syndicates who held two of the four winning tickets in the Scoop 6 bet. "I'd be delighted to hear from the other two before the bonus race next week," he said.