The_Man said:
Nevermind.
I wouldn't say so much scared, but more outright lazy.
Too lazy to sit down and go over the information of how exchanges actually work with credit, commision, making offers, etc, etc, etc...
Find it much more convenient to just log into a book, get the lines and place bets.
I'm sure there is not much to it and is a simple process and would be beneficial to take the couple minutes to go over it as posters rant and rave about these places.
Have some spare time coming up and will probably make time to do so.
Just imagine going to Pinnacle on a Sunday morning and seeing something like Rams +6.5 -106 and Panthers -6.5 +105. That was available at Mansion on Sunday. There was nothing to it, no offers could be made, all you could do is accept an offer. If you accept an offer you pay zero commission for now at Mansion.
Mansion is the better choice for the cheap commission, but Matchbook has more liquidity. Best is to have an account at both. I would say if you have both of those accounts plus Pinnacle, you will get 95-98% of the best price. Both pretty much seem to work "inside" of Pinnacle, where the offers are basically just improvements on the Pinny lines. On occasion with non-football you sometimes see a very slight improvement outside those two books, but its very rare and often on big money lines where a CRIS or Bodog often will offer up a fat dog price.
I am surprised the exchanges haven't gone to two versions, an accept only and a regular version. The accept only would look like any other book, just better prices much of the time. In fact Betfair was looking to do that, I saw a proposal for them in the past. It was going to be offered to casinos in Europe with the idea that they could offer sports betting and all players would do is bet into Betfair's pools and all they could do is accept prices, not offer them. The casino would use software that would build a modest vig into each side for the casino and Betfair to split. To me it seemed like the future of sports betting, especially if Nevada was ever allowed to get into the game.
