| Is this a waste of time then for the serious gambler?A couple of years ago, I noticed a little post to the rec.gambling.blackjack newsgroup by a gentleman who signed himself Evgeuni Jourine. It was an interesting little article about his experiences with online casinos, a form of gambling I had never tried owing to doubts about getting paid. I liked it enough to post it on my website. You may think, "I've no academic background." Well, you don't need one. In fact, that may even be a disadvantage. I've a little secret for you. Great discoveries are not made in laboratories in the R&D section at Microsoft. They are made by hobbyists, wasters, people who should be doing something else.This was the statement that sent dread through the heart of sports bettors and damn near killed the offshore betting industry, and dealt a body blow to the credibility of online gambling. To the casual observer, the fact that an offshore sportsbook had folded and taken its clients' money with it was something less than an oracular revelation. After all, e-casinos and sportsbooks fold on an almost daily basis. It also might seem to a casual observer that anyone who signed up with an unregulated offshore operation was a fool parting with his money. The truth is more complex than that. There was money, serious money, to be made from offshore betting. And this was partly due to Aces Gold. They offered a range of attractive sign-up bonuses and promotions. Chief among these was "no-juice" wagering. The deal was roughly this: the house took no profit on any bet. Normally with a "straight-up" sports wager, the most popular type of bet on U.S. sports, you bet on team A or team B to win at 10 to 11. Usually the teams are not completely evenly matched, so to reflect this the underdog is given a points advantage, or "spread", to even things out. For example, you could bet an underdog at 10 to 11 at -3, which means that if the underdog lost by only 2 points your bet would win. Conversely, if you bet on the favourite and they only win by 2 points your bet would lose. Now, Aces Gold paid even-money, 1 to 1, on straight-up wagers. This is the sports betting equivalent of a blackjack 2-1 promotion, and effectively it was free money to those in the know, a big secret no one wanted to discuss publicly. Even if you knew nothing about sports, even the rules, you could make money. How? Well, by a method known as "middling". That involves finding bookmakers who disagree on the spread. Say bookmaker A thinks team A is a 2 point favourite and bookmaker B thinks team A is a 4 point favourite. You bet equal amounts on team A with bookmaker A and team B with bookmaker B. If you bet the same amount and the actual result is that that team wins by 3 points you will win BOTH wagers. If you don't the wagers will largely cancel out, but you'll lose 5% in vigorish. Middling should normally only be attempted by the statistically minded who know the probability of a certain point spread occurring for a given sporting event, because many point spreads don't occur often enough to make middling profitable. Aces Gold changed all that however. You were taking no risks on their wagers. And, because other sportsbooks, such as Gameday, copied their strategy, you could middle a game and take on absolutely no risk, and still win both wagers if the result should fall between any conflicting point spreads. |
Tiger 1 home gamble1 gamble2 gamble3 gamble4 gamble5 gamble6 gamble7 Tiger 2 Tiger 3 Casino and other Advertisers |
||