Hacker News Reader

Comment by adsfasdf23f23f | Hacker News Reader

Am I correct to understand that it is not possible to determine the payout for winning at the time of placing a bet, since the proportion of bets could change? Payouts are determined when the book closes, not based on the ratio when the bet is placed?

View on HN

Correct, they use parimutuel betting, where all bets are placed in a group pot and the winners are paid their original stake plus some portion of the losers' stakes. This means that bitbookie doesn't have to set betting lines (probabilities) for all the events, which is something that takes a lot of skill and effort. Essentially it's easier for those who are not familiar with sports betting to say 'I pick team A to win' as opposed to 'I think team B is going to lose, but not by more than 7.5 points, so I should bet on them even though they're the worse team" that is a common play in spread betting.

Very cool. Thanks for the explanation.

A problem with this is it gives a huge incentive to bet as late as possible. You know where the money is you have more information about the event and so your bet can be better placed. Unfortunately this will mean there isn't any point betting later either as people will not have bet earlier.

Bitbet attempts to solve this by giving a higher weight to earlier bets. Not sure how well that works but the site seems to be used.

The best way to think of this is that there are no odds at all. All money goes into a pool and is shared evenly amongst the winners. That's it. The fewer people* that bet on the winner, the larger their share.

Talking about the odds while the betting is open is really talking about what the payout would be if the event occurred with the current pool.

*It is of course about the amount of money, not the number of people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com