I will be starting with a less than huge roll and I'm wondering whether to attack the hypersquare books right away or wait. I think it should depend upon how they handle winners who doesn't bet the max on every bet.
Will someone who bets <100$ on non-arbitrage stuff like futures and props be allowed to play for a while, or is the treatment basically independant of wager size? It they are, you should hold off on attacking the really stringent ones until you can make the most of every wager, right?
Alternative thought process: if you actually HAVE a winning model, you should exploit every edge you can as quickly as possible since every +EV wager will enable bigger bets in the future.
Probable correct answer: "attack them whenever their $50 free-play matters the most, i.e. straight away". Althought knowing how square books treat small betting non-arbers in general is very useful information anyway so I'd be happy to hear any thoughts.
Stan and Victor will often limit you within around 20-50 bets regardless of stake size if you are getting value lines.
The big, UK firms (Paddy, Ladbrokes, William Hill, Coral, Sky bet and Betfred) will leave you alone for a long time if your bets are sub £50. However, all of them will run through winning accounts of any amount a couple of times a year so don't expect to last too long. Most of these guys are also huge suckers for muggy looking bets, so throw in some accumulators or bets on virtual sports etc and you can often last a lot longer.
Bet365, Boylesports, bodizzle and Sportingbet (despite the latter now being owned by Hills) sit somewhere in between this - quicker to limit than the big high street firms but also not as quick as Stan.
Unibet and 888 share a back end trading system/team and usually have identical prices (some in play stuff aside), although it looks like 888 is soon to go it alone with its own trading floor by the looks of some recent, consistent variations, changes in limits and mainstream sports sponsorship. Both were pretty lax for limiting (but had tiny limits in the first place), probably due to a rev share model which favoured turnover too much for the trading team, but have seemed to improve of late.
The Asian firms have big limits for football and nothing else and have recently also started limiting certain player types, but a micro arber can get on fine on their lines for the time being.
Betfair/daq/pinnacle all fine at those limits but you probably don't have an edge against them on anything liquid.
Last edited by Wamy Einehouse; 04-22-2014 at 05:32 PM.