Sports betting
Sports betting is the activity of predicting sports results by making a wager on the outcome of a sporting event. In the United States, the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 makes it illegal to operate a scheme except for in a few states. In many European nations bookmaking (the profession of accepting sports wagers) is regulated but not criminalized. The NCAA has threatened to ban all playoff games in Delaware if the state allows betting on college sports.[1] New Jersey, which is also interested, has been similarly threatened. [2] Proponents of legalized sports betting generally regard it as a hobby for sports fans that increases their interest in particular sporting events, thus benefiting the leagues, teams and players they bet on through higher attendances and television audiences. Opponents fear that, over and above the general ramifications of gambling, it threatens the integrity of amateur and professional sport, the history of which includes numerous attempts by sports gamblers to fix matches, although proponents counter that legitimate bookmakers will invariably fight corruption just as fiercely as governing bodies and law enforcement do. Most sports bettors are overall losers as the bookmakers odds are fairly efficient. However, there are professional sports bettors that make a good income betting sports, many of which utilize sports information services.
Notes
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Carr–Benkler wager
Yochai Benkler speaking at UC Berkeley Boalt Hall School of law on 27 April 2006.
Nicholas Carr speaking at the VINT Symposium held in Utrecht, Netherlands on June 17, 2008.
The Carr-Benkler wager is between Yochai Benkler and Nicholas Carr about whether the most influential sites on the Internet will be peer-produced or price-incentivized systems.
History
The wager was proposed by Benkler in July 2006 in a comment to a blog post where Carr criticizes Benkler's views about volunteer peer-production. Benkler believes that by 2010 the major sites will have content provided by volunteers in what Benkler calls commons-based peer production, as in Wikipedia, reddit, Flickr and YouTube. Carr argues that the trend will favor content provided by paid workers, as in most traditional news outlets.[1][2][3][4]
References
- ^ "What is the Carr-Benkler wager?". The Guardian. "On the two sides: Nicholas Carr, a former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review; and Yochai Benkler, a professor of law at Yale University whose book, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, suggests that new types of collaboration let people be more productive than profit-seeking ventures."
- ^ Fox, Justin (February 15, 2007). "Getting Rich off Those Who Work for Free.". Time (magazine). "In other fields, it's not so clear. In a critique of Benkler's work last summer, business writer Nicholas Carr speculated that Web 2.0 media sites like Digg, Flickr and YouTube are able to rely on volunteer contributions simply because a market has yet to emerge to price this "new kind of labor." He and Benkler then entered into what has come to be widely known in Web circles as the "Carr-Benkler wager": a bet on whether, by 2011, such sites will be driven primarily by volunteers or by professionals."
- ^ Carr, Nicholas. "Calacanis's wallet and the Web 2.0 dream.".
- ^ Benkler, Yochai. "Benkler on Calacanis's wallet.".
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Bookmakers
Bookmakers on a greyhound race course, Reading, UK
A bookmaker, or bookie, is an organization or a person that takes bets on sporting and other events at agreed upon odds.
Range of events
Most bookmakers in the United States bet merely on college and professional sports, though in the United Kingdom and Ireland they offer a wider range of bets, including each-way betting on golf, football and tennis, and especially horse racing and greyhound racing. They also specialize in novelty events such as betting that there will be a white Christmas, the outcome of political elections and reality television contests.
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Betting strategy

A betting strategy or betting system is a structured approach to gambling intended to counter the inherent bias held by the house in casino and card games and by bookmakers in horseracing and sports betting. A successful strategy should increase the odds of winning in order to produce long term profits from a pursuit which under normal circumstances will only ever result in a long term loss.
All betting systems are predicated on statistical analysis, seeking to exploit the rare circumstances when the odds are in the favour of the player. Though the basis of all risk is fundamentally the same, betting systems vary in relation to the rules and circumstances of each particular game. The most established betting systems include:
- Card games - Card counting
- Roulette - Martingale
- Horse racing - Hedging, Arbitrage
- Sports - Handicapping[citation needed]
Links
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Betting exchange
Horse racing at Arlington Park, 2007
The term betting exchange is used to describe a form of bookmaking in which the operator offsets its risk perfectly through technology, such that the effect to the customer is that customers are seen to bet between themselves. Coined because of its apparent similarities to a stock exchange - it is often defined as "a stock exchange for bets" - it is therefore commonly seen as a peer-to-peer gambling website, when in fact it is more closely described as "many-to-many" (i.e. most bets are not strictly one person on one side betting against one on the other). Equally, it is often suggested, or commonly believed, that the operator is merely acting as a broker between parties for the placement of bets, rather than a bookmaker, although the reality is that bets are being accepted and offered simultaneously through the exchange's technological interface. Since it is only the exchange operator who holds a bookmaker's licence in most cases, the legal and licencing requirements invariably dictate that the legal contract for all bets be with the operator itself and not between customers. Most betting on a betting exchange has been a form of fixed odds gambling, although recently the phenomenon was also briefly established in the sports spread betting market.
Links
- BBC article on how betting exchanges work
- Bloomberg article on betting exchanges
- Tactical Trader article about betting exchange trading
- An analysis of the betting exchange industry
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Arbitrage betting
Betting arbitrage, miraclebets, surebets, sports arbitraging is a particular case of arbitrage arising on betting markets due to either bookmakers' different opinions on event outcomes or plain errors. By placing one bet per each outcome with different betting companies, the bettor can make a profit. As long as different Bookmakers are used for arbitrage betting the Bookmakers do not have a problem with this. Each Bookmaker will still make profit due to their calculations.
In the bettors' slang an arbitrage is often referred to as an arb; people who use arbitrage are called arbers. A typical arb is around 2%, often less, however 4%-5% are also normal and during some special events they might reach 20%.
Arbitrage Betting involves relatively large sums of money (stakes are bigger than in normal betting) while another variety, betting investment, means placing relatively small bets systematically on overvalued odds most of which will lose but some win thus making a profit.
The best way of generating profit, which has been established in Britain via sports arbitrage, consists of 'key men' employing others to place bets on their behalf, so as to avoid detection and increase accessibility to bookmakers. This allows the financiers or key arbers to stay at a computer to keep track of market movement.
This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.
