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SportsPunter and Surebet Zone updates

Posted by Aegist on October 14th, 2007

Sportspunter

Sportspunter’s surebet alerts service is once again accepting new customers after its recent closure, but there has been a significant price increase (almost double). Sportspunter has been consistently upgraded and added to ever since I was introduced to it over a year ago, and no doubt it will continue to improve. This is the first price increase since the inception of the service, and the improvements since that time have been great. The main reason for the change in price is to bring it in line with the sort of price one would expect of a professional service, while other considerations include a desire to not have the service flooded with ongoing new registrations, which would effectively result in a reduction of the quality of the unique arbs found by Sportspunter.

The new prices are (off the Sportspunter website):

An initial two week cost of $AU50, $US46, €33, £23,
Weekly: $AUD50, $USD46, €33, £23; OR
Monthly: $AUD160, $USD145, €105, £70; OR
Quarterly: $AUD440, $USD400, €285, £195; OR
Half Yearly: $AUD780, $USD710, €505, £350; OR
Yearly: $AUD1400, $USD1270, €905, £625

Surebet Zone

Surebet Zone has had a number of additions and improvements lately. They have added Betfair to their bookmaker coverage, and with that opened up a range of lay based arbitrages in their alerts. To accomodate this, their calculator has added back/lay functionality as well as personalised commission calculations which can be edited from your filters screen. They have also made it possible to filter all bet types, and they have added a colun on the surebets screen which indicates the percentage variation in the odds for this arb from the average odds across all other bookmakers. Obviously this is a way of helping users to avoid placing palpable error bets.

Having now settled in, Surebet Zone has set its price at 29 per month, which makes it one of the most cost effective alert services available.

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Support SAG at Wikipedia – Betlines Added

Posted by Aegist on October 4th, 2007

Sports Arbitrage Guide is designed to be an all purpose, comprehensive guide through sports arbitrage. I think it has succeeded reasonably well in its goals, providing a unique, informative, thorough, impartial source of information on arbitrage. But it is all my own work, so maybe I am biased. This is where all of you come in.

Is SAG a good source of information? Does it inform people about sports arbitrage reliably? Thoroughly? Honestly? I would like to hear some feedback below in the comments on what you actually think of SAG, so that if there is something better I could do I will know about it. As well as that, if you do happen to believe that SAG is quite possibly the single most relevant website online with regards to sports arbitrage trading, then please go to the wikipedia entry on arbitrage betting and participate in the discussion there, and/or add a reference to SAG in the main article.

There has been a link to SAG from the ‘External Links’ section of that article for over a year now, but for some reason someone has repeatedly removed the link in recent months, calling it link-spam. So, either I have done something wrong with SAG and it isn’t at all what I intended it to be, or there is just one guy with a chip on his shoulder. I have started the discussion on this topic in the discussion section of the article, I have expressed why I think SAG is the most relevant website online to be referenced as an external link from the article on arbitrage betting, and now I will leave it up to you, the users and readers of SAG to agree or disagree with me, and to add the link to SAG back in, or leave it forever out of the wikipedia article.

Betlines

I have recently added Betlines to the Alert Services page. An interesting looking service, it is reasonably cheap ($100USD for its most expensive level) and it provides a unique angle on surebetting: Inter-market surebets and inter-market surebet calculators. Now, I have seen inter-market surebets before with SportsPunter. Outside of Sportspunter though, I am not aware of any other service which finds arbs of this nature.

Inter-market surebets are surebets which are created from odds provided on the one sporting event (as usual) but from different bet types. So normally you will have, say, 3 way odds and the surebet will be made from a bet on the home team, a bet on the away team and a bet on the draw. A simple example of an intermarket surebet, would instead be betting on the home team 3way odds, and then betting on the away team with a +0.5 handicap. The 3way odds and the asian handicap odds are different markets, yet combined they still cover all potential outcomes, thus they are a true surebet.

That is a simple inter-market surebet, and I think a few services will deal with that particular setup. SportsPunter was the first service I encountered that started dealing with more complicated inter-markets, such as the Home 3way – draw 3 way – +/-0.25 Asian Away. That particular setup of a surebet involves calculating the results of a draw where half of one of the stakes will be returned, and therefore makes the entire calculation far more complicated than usual. Betlines seems to take the whole inter-market surebet concept all the way though, and has gone out of its way to set up a whole series of complicated surebets which no other service even attempts to look at, and more importantly, it actually has a list of calculators set up which can handle the more complicated arbs.

I think in the current marketplace of arbitrage alert services, inter-market surebets are increasingly important to factor in to your trading.

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CSI Arbitrage’s CarbonA and Finding Arbs

Posted by Aegist on September 16th, 2007

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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SportsPunter Server Crash and Server Upgrade

Posted by Aegist on March 22nd, 2007

I have received a reply from Daniel at SportsPunter which has explained what happened, and that every subscriber will be given an extra week to their subscription (to make up for only two days offline, sweet deal!).

Basically they had scheduled a server upgrade but in the days leading up to the server upgrade, their current server crashed. Since the site was offline anyway they decided to just rush the server upgrade through at the same time to actually save on total time offline. Unfortunately during the upgrade the city in which the server was hosted suffered a major power outage (a major power cable was cut) and what should have been a simple upgrade turned into 2 days worth of trouble as the ISP staff were over-extended with numerous support calls from their other customers trying to get their websites back online too.

So basically, it was a server crash which lasted longer than it should have, but on the positive side they now have a better server, and all members get an extra week for the price of only 2 days (and only 2 days in the most quiet period of the week).

Daniel also assures me that no data was lost during the server crash or the upgrades.

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SportsPunter Is Back Online

Posted by Aegist on March 21st, 2007

SportsPunter is back online, only a few hours after my post earlier. By the looks of things they have recovered the site from an earlier backup. Their arbitrage service is running as normal. No doubt there is still a lot of work going on behind the scenes as they try to catch up the old copy of the website with the most recent changes and bug test etc.

More news to follow no doubt.

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