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A few more updates on several Alert Services

Posted by Aegist on September 28th, 2007

I have spoken to Nickel Vacuum and confirmed that their service is now offline permanently. As such I have moved it into the extinct services category.

ArbExpert have previously contacted me and informed me that they have added FonBet and Matchbook to their service, and have updated their calculator to reflect the changes in Betfair and BetDAQ commission rates. This was all done very promptly after Betfair removed their flat 1% fee, and it is good to see such attention to detail in an alert service. The SureBetBookies database has also been updated to reflect changes in their bookmaker list.

ArbitragePro are announcing that they will be increasing their fees by 10% at the beginning of November. Their monthly subscription will now cost £154 while 3 months will cost £415. Their part time plans of 20 hours and 65 hours will cost £22 and £65 respectively.

Zero Risk Arbitrage have also indicated that they have some changes in the wind, but nothing solid to be announced yet.

SportsPunter, as ever, has added several new improvements to their service in the past few weeks. One improvement allows users to set upper and lower limits on their arbitrage filter and audible alerts, and set those limits specifically to 3 way and 2 way arbs. Another is a tweak in the comparison between 2 way odds and 3 way odds for golf, rugby union, handball and futsal, so that 3 way odds will not be mixed with 2 way odds in error, while the ‘Home Asian - Draw - Away’ arbs will now work for these sports. It also factors in the ‘dead heat rule’ for draws in those 2 way markets.

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Gamblers Paradise 14 Day Trial and Cleaning the Alert Services List

Posted by Aegist on September 19th, 2007

Gamblers Paradise have recently started to offer all new members a 14 day free trial. Old members who have only had a 1 day trial can email trial AT gamblers-paradise.net and request to take the full 14 day trial if they wish. The new trial is an opportunity for their members to try out a number of new features which they have added to their service, as well as set up the old features. These include:
· Setup own bookmaker filter in MY-Accounts on-the-fly. Filter: “Filter (xx) bookies from My-account”
· Setup own exchange commission on-the-fly. Filter: “Deduct commission from My-account”
· Share your blog comments
· Install and test the offline Firefox extension module
And to play with the filters like:
· Switch between: Normal screen (more information) and PRO screen (1 line / Surebets)
· Toggle between 6 different color styles
· Toggle between full odds history, %-changes or none.
· NEW: Toggle between 9 different alert sounds
· NEW: Speaking numbers instead of alert sounds!
· NEW: Remove sports you don’t want (current 21)
· Display only Surebets over xx%
· Show/Remove risky bets (different sport rules)
· Show all/only new Surebets
· Show 2way Surebets only / All Surebets

The Alert Service List - Spring Cleaning

OK, so its Autumn/Fall for most of the world, but where I live it has just gone spring, and it turns out SAG’s alert service list really needed some spring cleaning. All of the alert service which were listed in the “Inactive Alert Services” category were all in fact no longer functional. I have moved them all to “Extinct Alert Services” and have started contacting all of the companies in the alert service list trying to ensure every other alert is still active, taking members and responsive to attempts at contact. I have already found that Nickel Vacuum is not currently taking new subscribers (not sure of the details yet, I will update on this soon). So the alert service list will be being updated quite a lot over the coming few weeks.

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CSI Arbitrage’s CarbonA and Finding Arbs

Posted by Aegist on September 16th, 2007

Update to this article:

Since posting this article CSI have spoken to me again, and assure me that they do in fact have their own arbs feed. How CarbonA works, I am told, is that it can be interfaced with any other alert service, so that those arbs are displayed in CarbonA. As such, their clients are all provided with their own default feed, plus the option to supplement their feed with any other service they want. CSI then subscribes to that service as a user on behalf of the client and that clients CarbonA will now have arbs supplied from those alerts. So the fact that SportsPunter arbs was being used in CarbonA does not mean that it doesn’t have its own feed, but simply that it was only getting SportsPunter arbs at that time.

Original article follows:

Incredibly disappointed I am.

After a couple of weeks of quite thoroughly investing my time into this matter it seems like nothing is ever as it seems in the world of arbitrage. Shortly after writing an article about Cohen Strachan Investment’s CarbonA, where I basically say that having spoken to numerous people that work there for several hours that I think everyone seems completely sincere, I find out that there was one ’small fact’ which was never revealed to me, which I think would be quite obviously worth mentioning.

CarbonA doesn’t find it’s own arbs, it takes data from other arb services and uses them.

So when you buy CarbonA from CSI for $16,000, you are actually getting a software add-on to one of the other more commonly available alert services. It was taking arbs from SportsPunter, but when SportsPunter found out about this, they closed down all of the CSI associated accounts and stopped taking new membership for a brief period of time. Last I have heard, CSI are now looking at using a commercial licensing available from Tip-Ex. That is, they will pay Tip-Ex a larger than normal fee to gain the right to re-sell Tip-Ex’s arbs. SportsPunter costs $75 USD a month or $510 USD a year, while Tip-Ex costs €120 a month or €1000 a year.

In light of another article I recently wrote warning about the risks of paying for non-subscription based services, I think this perfectly highlights risk #3 in that article. That is, the risk that the arb feed suddenly and mysteriously stops. If CSI stop paying Tip Ex’s commercial license fee (or whatever arbs data feed they end up settling on), then what happens to the expensive CarbonA? It becomes a useless husk of a program.

Boy I hope that never happens, for the sake of all of their clients.

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Dominate Sports Betting E-Book

Posted by Aegist on September 15th, 2007

When I received an email from Dominate Sports Betting (DSB) many months ago requesting link exchange, advising of its affiliate program that I should join up with, and generally request help promoting its E-book (along with a list of about 30 different websites who received the same email) I glanced over the website and rathly harshly decided that I couldn’t be bothered. I am normally not that quick to judge, but websites that look the way DSB look, really turn me off. It is one of those typical sales websites, with big red lettered headings telling you how you can make THOUSANDS of dollars every week! and yellow highlighting on important sentences which tell you how you can’t lose, how you can make hundreds of thousands of dollars every year, and all of the other important sales phrases. It has a key video demonstrating how easy it’s techniques are, and pictures of highly emotionally charged athletes and stock brokers! All coming together to make a perfectly stereotypical sales page. And I hate them. Sorry, but I just do.

I don’t know why all of these sales pages seem to all look the same. I get the feeling that they all bought “The Rich Jerk” e-book or something like that, and the recommendation in that e-book was “Make more websites like mine and sell e-books. That’s how you make money online.” and so the internet is overflowing with websites which all look the same and all sell e-books which are basically nothing more than advice which has been collected from free websites, packaged into a PDF, then resold. And the regular emails received from DSB which basically amounted to “Help me market my product”, combined with the 90% sales website (10% - “Help me market my sales website”), came across as a textbook rendition of this tried and tested “How to make money online” strategy. Get a product which you can sell (E-books are great, because they are free to produce), make a website which sells the product, get traffic to the website. DominateSportsBetting has done well. 10 out of 10 for following the rules of internet marketing.

The e-book though! The e-book is what I am meant to be reviewing! Should you buy? Will it help make you fortunes? Will it enable you to make €5000 a week?

Before I start to actually review the e-book, it should be pointed out that I have never had a high opinion of e-books in the first place (as if that wasn’t obvious by my opening couple of paragraphs in this article). It even says in our FAQ in response to the question “Should I pay for an Ebook on Arbitrage Trading?“, I have provided the answer:

“The very purpose of this website is to provide a complete guide for Sports Betting Arbitrage. This website is intended to replace the need for those E-books. Many people have told me that they wish they had found SAG before they paid for “X” E-book, because SAG covered everything that was in the book. The second advantage the free Internet and this website has over an E-book, is that they interactive. We have Forums where many users ask questions, exchange stories, and provide help for each other. Arbitrage trading is an experiential learning process. No static text will ever provide you with everything you need to know.”

So obviously I am starting from a belief that the information being Sold in these arbitrage e-books is freely available anyway, so the price tag isn’t worth it. What really irks me though, is that in the few e-books I have seen, the price tag isn’t the only profit they are making. Half of the time it seems like the e-book is just the next stage of the sales process, where they then proceed to try to sell their affiliated alert services and bookmakers. DSB is no different. They have affiliate accounts with OddsAndBets, ArbSeek, ArbAlarm, and numerous bookmakers on their website which they are trying to sell to their readers. There is nothing wrong with that of course; indeed that is how SAG works, but that is what annoys me. Everything that SAG does is done for free. SAG provides all of its information with no demands placed on the user whatsoever, just an earnest hope that the user appreciates our work, and supports the site by using our affiliated alert services, bookmaker links, e-wallet links and supports our advertisers. We don’t even discriminate between the services which have affiliate programs, and those which don’t. So when the DSB e-book lists its preferred alert services and only lists one with affiliate links, I am curious as to whether the deciding factor was the quality of the service, or the commission paid.

The biggest shock though, was the discovery that their description for ArbSeek (one of their alert service options) was very very familiar…I’m going to have to quote an excerpt from the e-book for this:

“Arbseek is relatively new on the scene of Arbitrage. It seems to have put together quite a comprehensive piece of arbitrage trading alert software which not only does the usual arbitrage discovery and alert, but also maintains a history and portfolio of your bets, your profits and your progress. This is the only software I know which possesses this feature. It has the ability to filter arbs based on sports, bet type, bookmaker, min-max profit, and min-max time away from event. It also has its own browser interface which allows you to trade the arb from within the software. When you find an arb you want to bet on, you set the calculator up (distributing the profit equally, rounded, or speculating on the winner) as you want, then click on the ‘place bet’ button which launches the browser to the relevant bookmaker sites with all of the information for the arb stored in frames. When the arb has been placed, you press the ‘Complete’ button, and the arb is updated into the portfolio of your account.

The ArbSeek software costs €10 for 3 days, €50 a month, €135 for 3 months or €500 a year. A demo version is also available for free which restricts all displayed arbs to a profit of 0.5% or less.“

Compare with our description of ArbSeek from SAG:

“ARBSeek is relatively new on the scene of Arbitrage. It seems to ahve put together quite a comprehensive piece of arbitrage trading alert software which not only does the usual arbitrage discovery and alert, but also maintains a history and portfolio of your bets, your profits and your progress. This is the only software I know of which does this. It has the ability to filter arbs based on Sports, Bet type, bookmaker, min-max profit, and min-max time away from event. It also has its own browser interface which allows you to trade the arb from within the software. When you find an arb you want to place, you set the calculator up (distributing the profit equally, rounded, or speculating on the winner) as you want it, then click on the ‘place bet’ button which launches the browser to the relevent bookmaker sites with all of the information for the arb stored in frames. When the arb has been placed, you press the ‘Complete’ button, and the arb is updated into your portfolia for account keeping.

The ArbSeek software costs €65 a month, €150 for 3 months or €500 a year. A demo version is also available for free which restricts all displayed arbs to a profit of 0.5% or less“

Hmmmmm very familiar indeed….The “ahve” typo on the first line is fixed (thanks for that, I’ll fix that on my website right away!), and the end of the third sentence is changed to “…which possesses this feature”, and the copy they have is the original pricing version (which I have since updated in line with a price change at ArbSeek) but I think DSB have to work harder than that to separate their work from the source. Technically you could say that this is illegal, but I’m more inclined to just be Flattered by it. Perhaps the second edition might be kind enough to reference SAG, and maybe even have a link to us! Assuming the opening sentence to DSB e-book is true (and I assume it is, who would lie about this? ->) and “The Dominate Sportsbetting E-book is becoming a worldwide success, with thousands of sales every month.” maybe a link to SAG would really help me out! I only get thousands of Visitors each month, of which only the smallest percentage convert into affiliate referrals. And I even have great rank in Google with reference to the most sports arbitrage based search terms! Prior to that obvious instance of plagiarism though, I had noticed a few lines here and there which sounded familiar, but haven’t bothered to look them all up. In general most of the text is their own original work, but as you will see by the end of this article, there is nothing particularly ‘new’ to any of it.

The thing that I find hilarious though, is that I basically made a self-fulfilling (inverse) prophecy! I wrote so very long ago “This website is intended to replace the need for those E-books” and then in the next generation of e-books on arbitrage, you find SAG inside them! I guess SAG didn’t replace them, so much as integrate into them!

I’m still laughing that the owner of DominateSportsBetting offered me a free copy of his e-book to review it, not realising that this would happen….

Anyway, back to the reviewing!

I won’t nitpick the typo errors (we all have them, but the word is “Lose” (opposite of win), not “Loose” (opposite of tight)) and gramatical errors, but the first half of the e-book sounds exactly like the standard arbitrage e-book. Arbitrage is betting on all outcomes, its easy to do, you can make money, here is an example of how easy it is, hooray!

“The concept is as easy as that. Is there any risk? No. Is it legal? Yes. Does it require exceptional skills? No. Can you make more money than at aregular job? Definitely!“

The opening half is just like the sales page really, but without the colours. It builds the reader up into a frenzy, eager to get into arbitrage, ready to make their thousands of dollars! Commendably, it at least gets a guesstimate about the funds required to start arbitraging reasonably accurate, however I think its predictions on how the following months of profit proceed is exceedingly optimistic. It goes through its affiliate alert services that it wants you to use, and of course references its affiliated bookmaker listing available for free on the website (why hide such useful information?). It mentions the need for online ‘banks’ like Moneybookers, PayPal (affiliate links provided) and Neteller (no link provided, just their email address so you can get the friends referral bonus (and they can get their referral commission)).

The e-book continues on with the usual stuff, covering basic mathematical theory, frequently asked questions, and continues to over-sell the concept and refer to it as ‘risk free’ the whole time. And then, at the end of all of the usual stuff, the e-book abruptly finishes on a high by selling you the next product, The DSB Members Card! Only 50 Euro once you have signed up through their affiliate link to OddsAndBets! Oh dear.

One final point before I conclude this: after talking about arbitrage being risk free all book, no effort was made to explain how to avoid the risks! There was a *very* brief mention of some of them (not all of them) in a dot point summary, and they were kind enough to tell you that when you buy the membership card you will have access to the articles which tell you how to avoid them, but that was all! Someone buying this e-book and using it as a resource for their arbitrage trading would completely fail when it comes to tennis, baseball and hockey rule mismatches! They would know nothing about them. The e-book made absolutely no effort to explain *how* to trade sports arbitrage in the end.

Conclusion

Well, what I took from the Dominate Sports Betting e-book, was that I can be proud of my efforts with Sports Arbitrage Guide and SureBetBookies. There is basically nothing in DSB which isn’t covered in one form or another in my sites. I was really hoping to learn something from this e-book. I was really hoping it would actually go into details about how the professional traders make their extra cash which us newbies don’t yet know (yes, I am still a newbie). But it simply didn’t. It told you what arbitrage was, it provided affiliate links to alert services, e-wallets and bookmakers, it briefly touched on calculations, answered some common questions, and then sold you some more stuff. If anything nice could be said about it, it would be that it is basically a much more concise version of SAG. When the day comes that I actually finish the fourth section of SAG, the ‘Arbitrage Trading’ section where I plan on going into detail as to how each trade should actually be made, outlining the common mistakes, rules of thumb, tricks etc, I wonder if that sort of advice will start turning up in e-books too?

So is it worth it? Well I’ve submitted an application with their affiliate program, when I get accepted I’ll put their link up here right away and you can buy it! Until then, feel free to just send €30 to my Moneybookers, PayPal or Neteller account and then you can read through SAG and SBB at your leisure (contact me here to find out how!). You can even log into our forums (or arbforum, I don’t discriminate) straight away (no need to pay another €50 for membership!)

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Sports Arbitrage Alert *Service* Subscriptions - Why single upfront payments are risky.

Posted by Aegist on September 15th, 2007

We have recently added a new category to our complete list of Arbitrage Alert Services titled “Non-Subscription Based Software“. This was added because a couple of companies have recently started selling software in this manner and it seemed appropriate that they be distinguished on this fact. The three entries currently in this section charge no ongoing fee, but instead require one single upfront payment. In some sense it may seem like a sound investment; it is easy to rationalise that the profits made from arbing will eventually pay them off and you will be able to continue arbing for free for the rest of your life if you wanted… but there are quite a few concerns which need to be pointed out when considering taking a non-subscription based offer.

For instance, what happens if:

1. Arbing is not what you thought and after a month or two you want to quit?

   This is the most obvious risk for all newbies to sports arbitrage trading, and probably the most common problem. Arbitrage can easily be made to sound very enticing. It is easy to make it look like arbitrage is free money for anyone who wants it, and many companies use that methodology when trying to sell their software. Reality of course is very rarely ideal, and the hands on experience of arbitrage could take all of the excitement out of the idea. Within a month or two the average person just isn’t interested anymore. If you are using a subscription based service then you simply stop paying the monthly fee and move on, no loss incurred (even your trading balances are usually intact, which is one of the best aspects of arbitrage!) However if you are using a non-subscription based service, and you have just paid a huge upfront fee for the software; you’re stuck with it. Refund policies rarely cover “I don’t want it anymore” and you are now out of pocket for the entire fee paid.

2. You gain experience and start to realise that the software isn’t as good as you first thought?

   This is a general risk which most people new to arbitrage will never think of. If you don’t know what arbitrage really is, how it really works, and don’t have years of experience doing it, how could you possibly know what is good quality? Making something look all shiny and fancy is much easier than making something work well. If you are considering paying a huge upfront fee for some software, you better know it is high quality, otherwise you could be basically giving away good money for nothing. If there is no decent trial period where you can have a chance to see how well it really works for yourself, then that is definitely a good reason to be concerned. Similar to the first concern, there is very rarely a refund policy for “It’s not as good as I expected.” If you were in a subscription based service, you could simply stop paying your subscriptions and move to a better service. When it comes to one off payments though, you are trapped and have to accept the product you have paid for. You could complain to the company providing the software, but what real incentive do they have to improve their service? They already have your money and there is no financial incentive for them to invest in improving things when they know that their product can still bring in new clients who know as little as you did when you started.

3. The arbs stop being delivered, or The quality of arbs decline over time?

   The fact which most people don’t realise with alert services, is that it isn’t the software package you are really buying. What you are really paying for, is the ongoing ’service’ provided by the owner of the arbitrage alert feed to continue providing high quality arbs. With most alert software, the software you have or the website you log into is just a the ‘client side’ of the whole package. The real work is done on the ’server side’. That means that the real work being done on a server somewhere else, and the results are simply being displayed in your software or on the web page you view. So it is very important that the service side aspect of your alert software is maintained because without the server working, your software is completely useless. This is very important because the software which runs on the server side of an arbitrage alert service is still just stupid software blindly doing what it has been programmed to do, and in every case this will requires constant human attention to ensure it is finding the right odds for the right sport at the right bookmaker for it to work. It can’t do this itself because the work that it is doing (finding odds from many different bookmakers, standardising them into a comparable format, calculating arbitrages and presenting the data to clients) is based on information which is constantly changed. So when Bookmaker A decides that they want to do a complete redesign of their website, the alert software pulling odds from their website will need to be recalibrated to find the odds in their new design. And when Bookmaker B decides that they are going to move their XML feed (where odds are provided to most odds comparison websites etc) to a new server, the alert software will have to be pointed to that new feed. Or if Bookmaker C changes the naming protocol for all of the sports, will the alert service still be able to match up odds for that bookmaker with all of the other bookmakers for each particular sport and market?

   Bookmakers are very dynamic. They change regularly, and there are a LOT of them out there so there is continuous ongoing work in ensuring that your alert service works well. That is why most alert services require ongoing monthly fees. You aren’t paying for the software alone, you are paying for the continued performence of the software. You are paying to make sure the server which provides the alert software with its arbs keeps working! Which brings us to the bigger concern raised in this point: What happens if the alerts simply stop coming? The company which sells you alert service software for thousands of dollars goes bankrupt for unforseeable reason (or disappears for any reason for that matter) and they have to remove their server which does all of the real work for alert service software? The software which was worth so much is now worth nothing. Without the stream of arbs being fed through to your client side software, all of its fancy features, calculators, clever displays and functions are completely worthless.

   As with the previous two points, having already paid for the product, what incentive does the company providing the software have to maintain the quality of their arbs? With a subscription based service, if their quality drops you can quickly and easily move to a better service. If the company goes out of business and their arb feeds stops, you have no recompense and worthless software. If you are paying on a monthly basis though, then you have not lost anything other than maybe a months fee (at most). There is no real way of knowing for sure than any of these scenarios won’t happen, either accidentally, purposefully, or through complete apathy. Regardless of the cause though, the risk to the consumer is real and must be taken into account.

When it comes down to it, you may be certain that concern #1 is not a problem for you: you are certain that you want to arb for the rest of your life. Maybe even point #2 doesn’t apply: you are already experienced and the demonstration/trial you had of the product proved that it was the best software on the market. Point 3 though is inescapable. You have no control over it and the risk will always be there.

When you are looking at a non-subscription based service, you are basically betting that you will get its value out before one of the above risks are realised. As most arbers are risk adverse (the very idea of arbitrage is to reduce risk to a negligible level) I expect that most would prefer to take the ’surebet’ option and avoid the risk altogether. Of course in the end it does depend on the cost. For example, JuiceTrading is one of the programs in the “Non-Subscription Based Software” field, but its cost of only $99 means that it only needs to work for less than a month before it pays for itself in comparison to the monthly subscriptions which usually cost around the same per month anyway. It is when the cost is significantly higher that the extra concern is warranted.

To just conclude the point of this article, I think it is worth contrasting the above risks, with the benefits that come with paying an ongoing monthly subscriptions.

When you need to pay for each month as it comes:

1. You have influence

   To ensure ongoing profit the provider has to keep his customers happy. If the service declines in performance, then many customers will leave and it will have a very real tangible impact on the profit of the provider. Thus there is a lot of incentive for the provider to maintain a high quality feed and to ensure their customers are happy.

2. The business model is much more stable

   Most people know that it is easier to keep a customer than it is to find a new one, so services which make ongoing profits from each individual customer they already have are much more likely to stick around longer than business which are constantly fighting to get new customers in order to make a profit. Non-subscription based services have no other product to sell to their current customers, so the customer they have already worked so hard to get, are now worthless to them.

3. You have freedom to choose

   As long as you have only paid for a month at a time, at the end of every month, you can pick a different service. You are never locked in, and even if things go wrong, you can only lose a small amount of money. Freedom, drastically reduced risk, and no concerns.

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