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Macdonald Kamuchira Sports Correspondent
YOUR story on the betting industry in this country last week made some very interesting reading and I am a former bookmaker and I have been in the trade for close to 30 years.

I have also been a punter for almost the same period.

Your article was widely discussed among the sports betting fraternity.

I will briefly take you through the process of pricing for both local and foreign horse racing and sports betting.

1) Betting odds for all sports and international horse racing, that is UK , USA , Hong Kong , Australia , New Zealand , Dubai etc, originate from a company called Betradar in Switzerland.

2) Betting odds for all horse racing from Zimbabwe, SA, Mauritius and Kenya originates from the KwaZulu Natal Bookmakers Association in South Africa and is processed for feed to bookmakers by a company called Betdata.

3) Sports and horse racing betting software from Betradar and Betdata is then packaged for commercial use by a company called Turfsport in Cape Town.

4) Turfsport is the software used by 99% of all betting shops in Southern Africa as it opens , locks and result events as they start and finish all over the globe.

So, going back to your article, bookmakers get the same odds at the beginning.

But they have to compete for the market by offering the best to their clients, for example when a team is 6/10 to win one might offer 13/20 or 7/10 to attract clients to his business, 6/10 means 60c for every dollar, 13/20 means 65c for every dollar and 7/10 means 70c for every dollar and so on.

The system allows you to reduce the price to say 5/10 or 4/10 depending on how much you will have laid on that team.

There are situations where demand for the same team is so overwhelming such that the price moves from 6/10 (60c) to 1/7 (14c).

So in that case as you shorten the price of one team you adjust outwards the price of the other from say 3/1 which means $3 for every dollar to even 10/1 and this is done to attract punters to the other team in a process called making a book or balancing your book, hence the term Bookmaker.

If demand is at an international scale, say in big markets like Hong Kong, UK etc Betradar monitors these big moneys and adjust prices in the feed for onward transmission to other bookmakers around the world.

That rare discrepancy you highlighted about mismatch in prices is caused by how much one is holding as risk or exposure because at times races and matches are fixed and if you don’t adjust your prices you can get wiped off easily.

On the issue of pools, big race meetings are co-mingled with other countries like Hong Kong, UK , SA, Zim and Australia to make one big pool.

Winning tickets are then drawn from the pool to make up dividends per ticket.

What a bookmaker cannot do is to pay above the pool and bookmakers have set limits displayed around their shops, this is designed to protect their businesses against gambling sharks who avoid the tote.

If they put thousand dollar bets in a tote pool it pays less.

But paying below displayed rules is illegal that is where the Gaming Board or the Bookmakers Association whips their members into line.