Betfair
| Betfair Group Limited
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|---|---|
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| legal form | Limited |
| founding | 2000 |
| Seat | London , UK |
| Number of employees | 1,350 |
| sales | £ 476 million |
| Branch | Betting exchange |
| Status: 2015 | |
Betfair is a UK company based in London . It operates the world's largest online betting exchange for sports betting . Betfair went public in November 2010 and has been listed on the London Stock Exchange ever since . The number of customers registered with Betfair worldwide is more than three million, of which around one million customers are considered active customers. For German customers, the betting exchange was closed on November 9, 2012 because the business model of the betting exchange with an estimated profit of 2% is not compatible with the new sports betting tax of 5% on every stake in Germany. The company has been a regular bookmaker on the German market since April 2017, and the betting exchange remains unavailable for German users.
Betfair handled more than five million bets a day. The technical capacity allows it to process 4500 bets per second. Every minute, customers transfer an average of £ 3,000 to their Betfair accounts.
Betfair received England's most prestigious business award , the Queen's Award in the International Trade category. The company has historically been a sponsor of Bayer 04 Leverkusen , Manchester United and FC Barcelona .
Company formation and business model
Betfair was founded in August 1999 by Andrew Black and Edward Wray to commercialize the proprietary betting software developed a year earlier. The online platform created in this way enables customers to bet against each other directly online and to agree individual odds and stakes. In this way, customers are no longer dependent on conventional providers of (sports) bets, who include their profit margin in their odds and therefore offer worse odds on average. At Betfair, on the other hand, the odds are created solely through the supply and demand of customers on the so-called betting exchange (comparable to the way stock exchanges work). The technology used is copyrighted and filed with the UK Patent Office .
Similar to eBay's online auctions and unlike traditional bookmakers , Betfair only provides the infrastructure for its customers, but usually does not actively intervene in trading. Since Betfair is not involved in the formation of the betting odds, a profit margin included in the odds cannot - as with classic bookmakers - ensure the company's profit. Instead, Betfair collects a certain commission on every net winnings (maximum 5% of the net winnings).
The core of the business model is the sports betting exchange . Poker and casino offers have also been added in recent years . This is how Betfair has developed into a full-service provider in online gambling.
In October 2009, Betfair invested US $ 5.5 million in mobile game developer Watercooler .
2016 merged the company with the Irish bookmaker Paddy Power to new Flutter Entertainment plc.
Other special features
Lay and back bets
The system of back and lay bets is the core of the betting exchange principle.
The term lay bets called bets where not ON the outcome of a sports competition (or other competition) is set, but HOWEVER . In contrast, means that you z. B. as a bettor determines who does NOT win. In this sense, a lay bet turns you into a kind of “mini bookmaker” by offering the person who places a back bet a rate and, if successful, pays him according to the rate and the stake. If the lay bet wins, the stake of the back bettor is received.
Correspondingly, the betting markets at Betfair are displayed in two colors: the odds for the back bets are highlighted in blue, the odds for the lay bets are highlighted in pink.
A lay bet is won if an event does NOT occur. Example: You bet that Bayern Munich will not win 2-0 on the next match day . The bettor who is convinced of this offers other customers odds for the 2-0 final result and sets the maximum stake. If a back bettor is found at the offered odds, the bet is made online. In this case the lay bettor wins every game outcome with the exception of a 2-0 for Munich. The back bettor only wins if the game should actually end 2-0 for Munich.
The back bet is the traditional way of betting. Here is bet on a game outcome. Back bets only come about if a lay bet has been offered beforehand. The logical principle behind it: A bet always involves two parties. One party counted ON something, the other AGAINST.
Line bets
In a so-called line bet, you bet on the overall result of a certain competition. In contrast to back and lay bets, the point is not to decide against or in favor of the outcome of an event, but rather to predict whether the outcome will be above or below a certain value. For this purpose, there are two ways of doing line bets: buy and sell. If you buy a line at a certain value, you are betting that the end result will be above that value. If you sell a line at a certain value, you are betting that the end result will be below this value. Since line bets have fixed odds, which means that these are not set by the participants, the stake made does not depend proportionally on the result, but on whether you have bought or sold correctly.
The markets
Betfair customers primarily bet on the outcome of sports events. Football, tennis, Formula 1 and horse racing are particularly popular markets. There are also u. a. Political bets where you can bet on the outcome of elections. Betfair also offers special bets where the outcome of a social event is bet, such as who will win the Oscar or which candidate in Germany is looking for the superstar or Schlag den Raab will be successful.
Betfair markets tend to be large in volume and turnover. It rarely happens that no bets are offered on a relevant event. If there is little interest in a betting market, it can happen that bets are offered but cannot find buyers and therefore no turnover takes place.
Legal situation
Betfair operates under the Betting, Gaming and Lotteries Act of 1963. The company is licensed as a bookmaker for England and Wales and also holds licenses in Italy, Malta, Germany, Austria and Australia. Like other private betting providers, Betfair is trying to open up the gaming market in Germany. Betfair refers u. a. on its good reputation in Great Britain and on the expected sharp increase in government tax revenues. Betfair points out that the state provider Oddset operates close to insignificance, and the large majority of customers use foreign online offers for sports betting. On May 3, 2012, Betfair was one of three providers to receive its first betting licenses in Germany.
Web links
- Betting exchange website
- Interview with the Betfair founder
- FAZ interview with Betfair's head of Germany
- The German Betfair blog
Individual evidence
- ↑ Betfair - 2015 an excellent year following profits & revenue jump. In: SBC News. June 17, 2015. Retrieved May 28, 2016 (American English).
- ↑ gluecksspiele.net: Betfair closes the betting exchange for German customers
- ↑ Betfair: Sports betting back in Germany | bet chart . In: bet-chart . April 28, 2017 ( bet-chart.com [accessed May 13, 2017]).
- ↑ Queen's Award to betfair ( Memento from September 2, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Betfair before withdrawal ?: New sponsorship shock for Bayer. In: Express.de. Retrieved May 28, 2016 .
- ^ Manchester United secures new sponsor for three-year deal. In: www.campaignlive.co.uk. Retrieved May 28, 2016 .
- ↑ Betfair agrees sponsorship deal with FC Barcelona. In: www.campaignlive.co.uk. Retrieved May 28, 2016 .
- ^ Andrew Black: Betting on games using a betting exchange system . January 8, 2013 ( google.com [accessed May 28, 2016]).
- ↑ Watercooler raises $ 5.5M to expand social fantasy sports game business , venturebeat.com, accessed August 24, 2018.
- ↑ betfair, mybet and Oddset receive their first betting licenses. In: LuckyLabz. LuckyLabz BG GmbH, May 4, 2012, archived from the original on July 8, 2012 ; accessed on September 3, 2016 .