An excellent post.

[Torello]

So it seems like this.

1) They are betting that a player WONT be the first to score.

2) They bet on each of the 20 players who will start, say risking $180 to win $10 (example numbers only)

3) They expect to win $190 for each of the 19 players who DONT score first, and lose $180 on the player who does, booking an automatic profit no matter who scores, pure arbitrage.

4) The website allows them to leverage themselves infinitely because it sees their bets at automatic profit. They can keep betting until no other bettor takes the other side (the betting seems to be matching against other bettors, not directly against the house). Some of them leverage themselves very highly, booking a supposed large profit.

5) A bunch of the players they bet on dont play, so those bets are just voided no win/no loss, but this means that the $190 guaranteed win on the non-scorers is down to like $120.

6) I think if one of the subs that no one had bet on had scored they all would have made a bunch of money because all their bets would have won, and none lost, but instead one of the original projected starters scored, meaning they all had to pay out $180 on him, while only making $120 on the other bets, multiplied by however many times they managed to leverage themselves. I guess some of them lost way more than they actually had in their accounts.

7) ???

8) THE OPPOSITE OF PROFIT

[Oski]

The OP over there found a %140 overround on laying "who will score first". However it was actually about %100 because a number of the entries were not playing.

Then a bunch of people covered all the action by laying the bets. The "overlay" quickly moved to around %100 (or, it would seem the market corected itself).

However, wasnt' the table now strongly in favor of betting all the players to score first. In other words, these people created the exact situation they were hoping to exploit, but for the other side.

There was a little talk of this being a "windup" or a scam. I think more attention should have been paid to this; once the suckers started snapping up all the "can't lose" action, it created a lock for the opposite side.

Anyway, I understand this is all old, etc., but it was an interesting read.

[Resistance]

[ ] A free lunch