ONLINE GAMBLING AND CASINO GUIDE

A Novice’s Bewilderment at the Poker Exchange

Exchange Poker sounds interesting, but I’m a bit puzzled. In exchange poker, instead of playing the hand yourself, you place bets on hands that compete in a pot. You may place new bets in each betting round and, which is a bit exotic, even before the hole cards have been dealt.

In the refined environment of a modern stock exchange system you can put in “buy and sell orders” at prices more or less close to the current market price.

In Betfair’s poker exchange, with trading being done in games such as Exchange Holdem and Exchange Omaha, the buy and sell orders are called Back and Lay bets, respectively. You’re betting on whether the hand will win or lose the pot. Each of four participating hands can be bet upon; as long as the hand isn’t dead, meaning that its winning chances are exempted.

The idea behind Exchange Poker, and which makes it sound so charming, is that you don’t compete against an unbeatable house. You lay and take bets against other players, just like traders on a stock exchange. Or a shrimp exchange for that matter.

Of course, the house takes its share of your “business” in the form of a brokerage, or provision. Still just like a regular stock exchange. Or weather exchange.

When entering the poker exchange, you naturally dream of finding players making incorrect bets. With your extensive poker experience you’ll be able to judge the situation more or less instantly and find bets that lie off the main track. This far, though, this wish has not come true.

But my bewilderment comes from a technical detail. As soon as a new board card has been dealt, the order list is filled in an instant with Back and Lay bets at the exact correct odds as well as two or three steps away from the correct odds (but in the “wrong” direction if you’re looking for an edge.) Obviously, no human player can be that quick, neither in calculating the odds nor in placing the bets.

So my question is: who lays the bets? Is there an automated “market maker”? And, if I take one of those bets, with whom am I dealing?

I don’t know that yet. But stay tuned and we’ll see if we can get behind the scene of this new online gambling theatre.

And surely, there MUST be some skewed bets to profit from…

/Spinner

Bookmark this post:       

This entry was posted on Monday, April 2nd, 2007 at 1:49 am and is filed under Casino, Exchange Poker. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.