Bloomberg posted an article yesterday about the rapid rise of “in running” sports betting in the online world. In running wagering allows for betting after a game has started – whether it be on an individual play, a quarter, or the remainder of a game. The growth of this form of sports betting has been remarkable and is projected to continue. Bloomberg writes:

For the bookies, in-running betting has become their biggest growth area. Five years ago it was considered a niche product, offered only by one or two bookies looking to differentiate themselves. Bookmakers now say in-running betting accounts for up to 30 percent of their revenue and that it is growing rapidly. Several predict it will account for half their business by 2010.

This new trend seems to fit the overall cultural trend of shrinking attention spans and increasing availability of “on demand” access to entertainment services. In a global society that demands instant gratification and a generation raised on 30 second youtube videos, the rise of in game betting should hardly come as a surprise.

The article also addresses the potential downsides of in running wagering including the problem of time delays in broadcasts and mentions the recent murder of a chinese couple involved in a plot to exploit this issue as covered previously by iBet.pro.

In running has brought its own issues for bookmakers, mainly because the televised feeds that they receive in their offices (and the ones you receive at home) are delayed from the live match. It is normally only about three seconds but, in some cases, it can be 10 seconds or longer.

This means that bettors can sit at racecourses, football grounds or even the Olympics with a laptop computer and a wireless connection and get bets on the match before the bookmaker sees it on TV. Most bookies now have a small delay in their bet acceptance procedures to help guard against this, but if the delay is big enough they will find themselves taking bets after something crucial has happened.

British police are currently investigating the deaths of a Chinese man and his girlfriend who allegedly employed spotters at British soccer matches to beat in running bookmakers in China and Southeast Asia, according to news reports. They are said to be investigating reports that Zhen Xing Yang had been murdered by either bookmakers upset at his scheme or by some of the spotters, who it is claimed he failed to pay for their work.

On an unrelated note, today is the first day of the 2008 NFL season – good luck to everyone placing a wager. You may want to read this article to remind you of how not to handle your betting.

A new trend I’m seeing these days are public gambling sites offering “Sure Thing” bets based on the principles of arbitrage, once reserved for hedge funds and financial markets.

Sure thing bets are a lot different than the “guaranteed” picks of the old days. In the old days a handicapper simply would promise that their picks would win or you wouldn’t pay. This can be hazardous to your wallet in a very short period of time. These days the picks that are identified require you to bet at two different sites or with two different individuals on an exchange. Becuase the variation of the odds are so great, no matter which team wins the match, you will be certain to make money – even when you subtract the vigorish commanded by the sportsbook!

Anyway, here is a list of links to sites offering “Sure Thing” bets. I haven’t been sufficiently motivated to set up the many sportsbooks accounts I would need to take advantage of these situations, but I’m starting to rethink that philosophy. On one hand it seems to be that a sure bet kind of defeats the whole excitement of gambling and turns it into a boring financial instrument such as a savings bond. On the other hand, that new Tesla Roadster would really look great in my garage Perhaps this will be the subject of a future post…

• Betbrain
• OddsExchange
• OddsExplorer

Dr. Mike Orkin is a Managing Scientist at Exponent, a publicly traded scientific consulting company headquartered in Menlo Park. Mike has numerous research publications in game theory and probability theory and has written data mining and simulation software. He is a nationally known authority on odds and gambling games and has appeared on numerous TV and radio shows to discuss gambling and odds, including CNN, NBC’s Dateline and ABC’s World News Tonight.

ABSTRACT Certain gambling games, such as roulette and craps, are games of pure chance: In repeated play, luck disappears, and the persistent gambler will go broke. Other gambling activities, such as betting on sports or the stock market, may involve an element of skill. One way to measure this is to compare the results of a gambling strategy with chance: A skillful strategy should produce long-run results that are better than would be achieved by someone who is just guessing. One can also compare a gambler’s losses with chance to see if the gambler is doing worse than chance would allow. I will discuss two recent projects that illustrate these concepts:

• Automated data mining software discovers that the Baltimore Ravens are 17-3 versus the point spread when they lost their previous game and their opponents played their previous game on the road. Do situations like this give clever gamblers an edge or are such strong win-loss records merely random flukes?

• A gambler loses $30 million betting at an online casino. Is it possible to lose this much just by chance or is the gambler being cheated? Or maybe the gambler is part of a money laundering scheme.