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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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Alert Super Comparison - SBP, SP, NV, JT, AE

Posted by Aegist on February 9th, 2007

It is very hard to do anything else when you have 5 different alert services running at once, and very few if any filters on any of them. Just for the record.

Particularly when the Friday night NBA and NCAA games are all about to start. I get 3 or 4 alerts a minute. As great as that sounds, remember, I have no filters on, so it is only great if I have money in all of those bookmakers…which of course I don’t.

But regardless of this, the objective here is to simply compare many services at once. I have Nickel Vacuum, Sports Punter, ArbExpert, SureBetPro and Juice Trading all running at once, and I am just trying to get a feel for how each performs. And a few things stick out. Of the new services, ArbExpert is the only one which is really performing at this time. In fact, I dare say that it is even out performing the two longstanding arb services (SportsPunter and SBP). SBP seems to consistently have the longest list of arbs, with ArbExpert and Sports Punter on pretty even ground for second. Nicke Vacuum continues to only ever have one or two arbs at a time, usually low returns and more often than not with BetFair. Juice Trading did manage to find one arb during the basketball peak hour amongst the few bookmakers I used with them (they only have 9 to select from, and I don’t use all of them. If youdon’t have an account with the bookmaker, then Juice Trading can’t collect the odds for that bookmaker), but until they fix that european and american odds mismatch, their service is very very limited in its application.

Meanwhile, the usage of each alert service is very distinctive and most worthy of mention. ArbExpert and SportsPunter stand out as the best options in this regard too. What both of these services do which most don’t, is they clearly display the extra details which are often important to know with an arb. That is, you can see at a glance 1. The age of the arb, 2. How long until the arb is played out. Every alert service displays the Arb percentage, and they all with varying degrees of accuracy display the sport, country, and league the event is taking place in (although again, ArbExpert displays this most clearly because it displays the actual location for EACH bookmaker, not simply one single general heading). SBP has always irritated me in this regard. They have the most awkward display, everyone who uses it has surely thought exactly the same thing, and I have no idea why they haven’t fixed it…they make it actually difficult to figure out where the sport is being played and what league or tournament it is in. This is the sort of information you NEED to know in order to place your arb quickly!

With all of that said, I know for a fact that both Juice Trading and Nickel Vacuum are targetting their service at beginners at this stage. They are both focussing on simple sports, simple bet types, and focus on arbs which are in essence very hard to make a mistake on. And also, they are starting small and building up, hence the fewer arbs. It is definitely something worth noting about alert services, and something which I probably need to incorporate into the basic summary of each alert service on SAG; a rating system to indicate arbitrage experience required to safely use a system. SportsPunter is currently right up my list of favourite services, but the truth is, you wouldn’t want to start out with SportsPunter if you are just starting in arbitrage. They often find error arbs which you need experience to identify, and they find confusing bet type arbs, for instance they find “Home asian - Away - Draw” arbs (try doing the maths on them!!). ArbExpert seems to be much more reliable than SportsPunter in this regard, so again I guess that means ArbExpert is right up there. As usual, it looks like you need to pay for the highest quality.

ArbExpert - £100/month
SportsPunter - $75/month
SureBetPro - $139/month
Nickel Vacuum - $50/month
Juice Trading - $99 Once Off

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First Impressions of Juice Trading

Posted by Aegist on February 8th, 2007

Juice trading (JT) is actually one of the more novel arbitrage alert programs I have used. It seems like every other alert system uses XML feeds which the bookmakers make available for odds comparison websites to access and create traffic for the bookmakers, instead it logs straight into the bookmakers from your login details and collects the odds that are displayed to you should you be surfing the pages. After using many alert services, I can certainly see the advantage of using the displayed odds in this way. There are too many times I have had an alert service report odds only to go there and have them distinctly different, and yet the alert service continues reporting the wrong odds. In some cases I have seen services report odds on a sport which the bookmaker doesn’t even seem to be offering odds on! I suspect that some bookmakers may ‘display’ odds differently to what odds they have set in order to remove odds which are errors, or odds which they have decided to take no more action on, or for whatever other reason they might want to stop receiving bets on. I believe this is one of the failings of XML feeds (although there are many other advantages to using them).

How JT use this method of collecting odds, is to log in, scan the relevant pages for each individual bet type, collate the odds and pick the best odds for each side in each game and bet type, then list all of the results with the best return up the top. When I saw this output, I was impressed. I liked the fact that you could at a glance see the instant ‘best odds’ of each bet type in each game of NBA. And on the next refresh, the best odds for NCAA, and so on. Juice Trading provides a very good odds collection and comparison service for the purpose of finding arbs, and even more beneficial, good Bonus Hunting odds (as it also displays the negative arbs). I feel confident that when Juice Trading presents me with odds, I can go straight to that bookmaker, that game, and that bet type, and I can be confident that those odds will be accurate. I like that.

Unfortunately there are still a lot of bugs in the program. It is only early days for Juice Trading, and I expect these to be purged very quickly (mostly because they are critical). For instance, the most obvious one is that their calculator (which reports what percentage the arb is) doesn’t convert odds. I am not sure how this was overlooked in the development stage, but most of the results show -2% or so on the return, but some go to -50%, and that is usually because you are getting European odds against American odds. For example Canbet had the best odds at 1.714 for team A and BetCRIS had the best odds at +177 for Team B. The arbitrage there is actually -4.43%, but it was reported as around -30%. This calculating error held true for their calculator too.

So obviously I expect this error will be corrected before this post is even made, but other errors and tweaks really need to be made too. For instance, I don’t yet understand what determines how long the results are displayed for, but for some reason they will disappear randomly. For instance, the JuiceTrading software will collect the odds for NBA from each of the selected bookmakers and display them. It will then start collecting the odds for NCAA. At some (seemingly) random point in between the NBA results will disappear without warning, and you will be left with a blank screen while you wait for the NCAA results to be found. It is frustrating just how often I flick over to JT only to find a blank screen. Which raises another point, there is no audible alert, pop-up or any indication that it has finished collecting its odds and they are being displayed. Perhaps this is only the case because there have been no arbs so far, but even so a simple beep to indicate that there are more odds to look at (certainly an optional one!) would help. I’m quite certain no arber wants to sit at his computer watching software waiting for arbs. I certainly prefer to be doing other things and waiting for my software to TELL me when I need to be busy. So I certainly hope to see JT have some sort of an alert for positive arbs, some sort of option beep to alert people to new lines finished being collected, and having the previously collected odds at least displayed until the next set are displayed, preferably keeping them on the main screen, perhaps displayed below the current odds. Something, anything so that you don’t spend you time with zero information.

That, in short, is my initial impression and comments on JT. I am still to see an actual arb found though, so perhaps some of my concerns on alerts and the disappearance of odds is not a problem when actual arbs are found, but as I mentioned above, I really think that JT could be a very helpful tool for the new wave of Bonus Hunters that are entering the arbitrage marketplace. Getting the perfect arb while bonus hunting is not always possible, but having a complete list of all of the ‘almost’ arbs could help a bonus hunter find exactly the right odds for their bonus rollover without costing too much in losses.

Shane

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New Arbitrage Service - JuiceTrading

Posted by Aegist on January 12th, 2007

A brand new Sports Betting Arbitrage alert system has just entered the market on a couple of days ago, going by the name of JuiceTrading.com.

I will be starting a trial of their software soon, and will provide details and observations of that trial here like usual, but my impression so far is good. They have not only presented a positive public appearance (by simply participating in our fourms so that members can ask questions and get to know them), but they are offering an original method of payment. Their basic package is not a monthly subscription, but instead a one off payment of $99.99. That is cheaper than the average monthly subscription cost of all other competitors.

They also promise an advance package for arbers with larger bankrolls, but as they are only days old at this point, a basic package which is still cheap is a good start, and the advanced package may not be ready for a while yet.

In any case, they are offering a free 1 week trial, so they will be shortly added to the free trial page od SAG as well as the general arbitrage alerts provider list.

http://www.juicetrading.com/

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