In-running betting – betting during a live event – is a major phenomenon these days and has opened up an outstanding new range of betting opportunities for punters
Cast your minds back to the year 1990. New Order are top of the charts, England are in the semi-finals of the football World Cup, Gazza’s tears are streaming down his cheeks, Nessun Dorma is playing – it all seems like yesterday.
You ring up the bookies and check the prices of the World Cup final and, just before you place your wager, you ask the bookie if he’s betting the game in-running. He responds with same answer you always get: ‘In running – am I hearing you right? No, no – that will never catch on!’
Roll the clock forward to 1994. The World Cup is heading to the United States and the Stan James credit office is closing up at 5pm. The footie has finished for the day and all that’s on the TV is some garbage USPGA golf event – The South Western Bell Colonial. No one is bothered about that, are they?
Going live
Enter Stan James boss Peter Fisher, the man who brought in-running betting to the UK. He explains: ‘I remember going home and watching the golf. It was a three-way play-off between Nick Price, Scott Simpson and Hale Irwin, and I thought, "If we put up prices on this, I’m sure people would bet on it while they’re watching on the TV." The following week, we bet on the final round of the golf event and it proved quite popular, but very unprofitable.
‘Back then, it was nigh-on impossible for a bookie to bet in-running and make a profit. We had no electronic field book, no internet. We were relying on TV and teletext – and we now know how slowly they update. However, it just got busier and busier, perhaps because of our mistakes!’
The in-running golf betting continued throughout the remainder of the 1994 season, with Stan James losing money.
‘It was very difficult to make any profit in-running,’ says Fisher. ‘We had one external odds-compiler, and I would take the bets on the phone, do teletext and authorise switch payments on my own. I remember coming into the office to do all this one hour after my first child was born – they were difficult times. Finally, we got a computer system after six months and our fortunes started to change slightly.’
With golf cracked, the world was now its lobster (er, don’t you mean oyster? – Ed), but it took a whole year until Stan James finally accepted bets during a football match.
‘In 1995, we decided to trade in-running on football and it didn’t take off at all. There was no interest and it proved very unpopular. We honestly considered scrapping it after just four months, but then it just went bang overnight because of the exploding interest in the Premiership,’ says Fisher.
Today, Stan James is considered the leaders of in-running fixed-odds betting. The company policy is, ‘if it’s live, we bet on it’. ‘Today, half of our sports turnover is done in-running,’ says Fisher. ‘On a sport such as cricket it can be up to 95%, tennis is about 50/50 and soccer is 30%.’
Bet on the go
So why is betting in-running so popular? The main advantage is that you can watch and assess how a particular player or a team is playing, and what you’re witnessing can sway your opinion. How many times have you placed a bet on a football team before the kick-off, watched the first five minutes and thought, what have I done here? With in-running betting, you can join the action when you want and you feel the time is right, which not only means you can make a better judgement during the game, but also means you can correct any mistakes you may have made before kick-off.
The second reason why in-running betting is now such a popular medium is it offers much better value on certain players. Bookies may run up huge liabilities on a particular team. For example, if Manchester United are a pre-match 1/2 favourite to beat Tottenham Hotspur, the bookie stands to lose a small fortune if United win, so as soon as the match kicks-off, it cuts the price to 2/5, offering you better value on the opposition (in this case, Tottenham) and the draw. Obviously, if you like Man Utd, there’s no value whatsoever. However, if you work to the rule ‘back the favourite pre-match, back the underdog or draw in-running’, it will be a value bet. If you do fancy the favourites and they haven’t scored early on, then you’ll get a bigger price in-running, which means it’s often a good policy to wait until after kick-off before placing your bet.
Trading places
Reason three to have an in-running bet is punters have never had it so good, as there’s such a varied number of betting opportunities out there, such as betting exchanges, spread betting and traditional fixed odds. In-running betting is an integral weapon in the modern bettor’s armoury, as it gives you the opportunity to close your opening positions with a profit or loss at any stage of the match. In effect, you can trade the match instead of gambling on it.
A look at the in-running opportunities on the betting exchanges during the Aston Villa versus Middlesbrough Premiership match on 5 March showed there were a number of times when punters could have made a substantial profit by playing arbitrages on Betfair and Betdaq (the two leading exchange sites). I followed the game in-running from kick-off to fi nish and I noticed at least eight times when punters could guarantee a profit without any risk for serious money. You could back fewer than 2.5 goals (a bet on there being fewer than three goals in the match) at 1.40 (2/5) on Betdaq approaching halftime for £500 and lay fewer than 2.5 goals (fewer than three goals) at 1.35 (4/11) on Betfair. The final score was 2-0 so if you had done both of these trades, you would have won £200 on Betdaq (via your £500 bet at 1.40) and lost £175 on Betfair (via your £500 bet at 1.35), netting you a £25 profit before commission. This kind of arbing scenario occurred at least eight times during one live game.
Record breakers
Most of the in-running trading today is done on the peer-to-peer betting exchanges, where the exchange takes a small commission from the winner. Betfair is the world leader in exchange betting and if Norris McWhirter were around today he would be paying a visit to Betfair’s Hammersmith offices, where world records for in-running betting are being set all the time.
‘The most traded event in-running for us was the fourth cricket test between South Africa and England in January,’ says Betfair spokesman Tony Calvin. ‘£21.5 million was traded on the fourth test alone, which is a quite staggering figure.
The second highest in-running betting event was the US presidential election, which would have smashed the cricket record if the exchange had been allowed to accept bets from US citizens – but it wasn’t.’ Football is still Betfair’s main in-running sport, despite the fact that a football match doesn’t appear in the top in-running betting events. ‘The two main markets on football are the match odds and the over and under 2.5 goals markets,’ says Calvin. ‘On an average football match, we would expect to double turnover in-running, but in games with massive fluctuation [due to a sending-off or a team making a big comeback from a huge deficit], a lot more would be traded in-running.’
Cricket and tennis are two sports where Betfair also sees a huge amount of money traded. Calvin highlights tennis as the sport that has shown the biggest in-running growth since Betfair launched in 2000. ‘Tennis is such a fast moving sport, every point changes the prices and the in-running betting is down to sheer volume of TV exposure – tennis is on all the time,’ he says.
Nagging doubts
Horse racing still has the biggest turnover in betting in the UK today, but in-running betting on the nation’s favourite betting sport hasn’t really taken off. The only place you can have a bet once a race has started is on the exchanges, not for the want of the others trying, mind. Fixed-odds bookmakers have tried to bet in-running on the Grand National, but not with any great success. Even the exchanges see limited volume. ‘I would say that only 10% of our racing business is traded once the race is off,’ says Calvin.
However, one of Betfair’s greatest stories came when Tony McCoy fell off a mount and some wise guy put up £10 on McCoy’s mount at 1,000/1 when it was on the deck. Some unknowing punter took the £10 wager at 1000/1. McCoy promptly remounted and won the race, costing the wise guy £10,000!
Stan James has no intention to bet in-running in horse races, despite the sport representing 35% of its market share. ‘The logistics of it just don’t work for us,’ says Peter Fisher. ‘In a six-furlong race, it’s hard to trade in-running, as prices change every second.’
For us punters, the future has never looked rosier. Whether you like fixed odds, spread betting or the exchanges, my advice would be to make sure you have more than one account with a firm, as there’s money to be made if you shop around. Give yourself enough in-running betting options to ensure you can find a good price once the action is under way.
The future is in-running. However, let’s face it, it would be fun to go back in history and have an in-running bet on the epic sports occasions that we all remember from past days. Imagine a wager on the Bjorn Bjorg versus John McEnroe epic 1981 Wimbledon final, or what price would Liverpool have been in the dying seconds before they lost the League Championship to Arsenal on that unforgettable night in 1989?
Can you imagine?
And I would have certainly been a layer in-running of Fujiyama Crest, Frankie Dettori’s seventh leg on that famous day at Ascot in 1996 when he recorded seven winners. On second thoughts, perhaps I’m glad in-running betting wasn’t around after all…
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