Any news on the launch date yet?

I took part in the beta and am looking forward to trading some real BTC on the platform. Have been waiting for a decent bitcoin betting exchange for far too long...

1% commission is very attractive given current alternatives. Put me down for the beta please.

Nice, been waiting for something like this for awhile. Will check out the beta.

Has anyone been using the TRON-based casinos? They have created a number of dedicated tokens that entitle users to a share of profits, some with quite significant market caps.

Good breakdown here: https://www.cryptogamblingnews.com/best-tron-casinos-2019-top-tron-gambling-dapps/

This is an interesting one. I remember sports betting in the early 2000s and the state of most sportsbooks was pretty dire. It was always a nightmare to find the market you wanted to bet on, the UI was horrible. It is basically where we are at with the vast majority of crypto sportsbook today.

It does seem the tide is beginning to turn though...

I've just noticed that BetBTC.co has switched away from the exchange model and is now a straight up sportsbook.

Interesting move, but disappointing to see so little love giving to us exchange users crying out for somewhere we can trade sports with BTC.

More details here on the switch here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=856175.1840

Please could someone talk through the referral program and exactly how it works?

This raises a bigger philosophical question of what exactly is gambling.

It could be argued that when I was playing poker full-time, I wasn't really gambling. Sure, luck impacted whether or not I won on any particular day, but I played several million hands over a few years, and I had enough data to predict very accurately how much money I would make over, say, a period of 100,000 hands.

Equally, if you play slots, are you really gambling when you know the payout is 94% (or whatever). Is it gambling when in the long-run you will lose all your money (if you were to gamble into infinity).

Once you introduce certainty into a game (which you do the more you play it) does it cease to become gambling?

During the online poker boom of the mid-2000s, I played full-time for a few years.

I'd be hesitant to describe myself as a "pro"; I was young and not playing particularly high stakes. But I was churning out hands (playing 24 tables at once) and making an hourly well ahead of what anyone would pay me at the time.

Anyway, I haven't played poker (online) for many years now, but a lot of the lessons I learned during those years have served me well when sports betting. Here are three of them:

Don't be results orientated

Poker is very much a game of ups and downs. It is common for good moves to backfire and bad moves to pay off. Accordingly, it was extremely important to separate your actions from results. For instance, if I managed to get an opponent to bet all their chips against me with a worse hand, only for them to hit one of the only two cards in the deck they needed to beat me, I needed to keep my head up and acknowledge I'd done the right thing, despite losing.

But equally, if the roles were reversed, I couldn't celebrate knowing I'd made a bad play.

When it comes to sports betting, it is much the same. If I call a tight game between strong defences, bet on a 0-0 draw, and then watch a tight game finish 1-0 due to a freak goal out of nowhere, I know to tell myself that if I keep doing what I'm doing, I'll come out top in the long-run.

Information is power... but only if your opponent doesn't have it too

People who play poker a lot tend to run programs which provide thousands of statistics on their opponents. This is fine, and the information is great for informing decisions. But it becomes worthless if the other players has the same information, and knows I have this information. If the stats show a crazily aggressive opponent, but that opponent knows I have this information, they can easily adapt their game to fool me.

With sports betting, it is easy to get carried away with information. "Messi is injured so it makes sense to bet against Barcelona". Well, no, because obviously the bookmaker knows this too, and has already adapted their odds accordingly.


There's no system, only constant improvement

I eventually fell out of love with poker and stopped studying the game. My results quickly went downhill. It is the same with sports betting. Finding an edge is hard, but possible. The thing is even if you find one, don't bank on keeping it very long. For a couple of years, I had a lot of success betting on football from very obscure leagues. I had an algorithm which was great at spotting games where bookmakers had not priced up correctly. But very quickly this edge vanished, as the bookmakers improved their own pricing strategies.

Would love to hear from anyone else who played poker seriously online and now bets on sports...

Very true - still staggers me how bad the UX of some of the normal exchanges are given hundreds of millions of $$$ is traded through them each day!

This is really interesting - always thought I needed to be betting large amounts to go through a broker.

Amazed after last night's matches that Chelsea and Arsenal are favourties and third favourites respectively to win the whole thing.

Would expect both to lose to the first decent team they face (in Arsenal's case, the first half-decent team as we saw last night...)

Couple of questions:

(1) My understanding was betting agents are only really for high rollers. Is that not the case anymore?

(2) Do Orbit / 9Wickets allow BTC deposits?

Betfair user for as long as I can remember (since early 2000s).

I haven't used the two Bitcoin sports betting exchanges mentioned here, but neither really look anywhere close to the experience.

It took awhile for Bitcoin sportsbooks to get close to the likes of bet365 (IMO they are still a little behind, but closing the gap fast). I fear it may still be awhile until we see a Bitcoin sports betting exchange that can compete.

Would be happy to be proved wrong...

Another point relevant here: don't play games where the odds are statistically weighted against you.

However much you think you have a winning strategy at roulette, you haven't.

Stick to games where it is possible to gain an edge. Poker is a good one. Sports betting too - although generally you'll have a better chance trading on exchanges than betting against a bookie with high margins.

Tell that to the many multi-millionaire ex-professional sportsmen who have lost their fortunes gambling...

A good gambler has no interest in gambling. They either see a spot where they have a edge and exploit it, or they pass on the opportunity.

Of course this doesn't mean they will always win, but then anyone who is overly results-orientated is not going to succeed in the long run anyway...

Broadly agree with this. Ultimately there has to be a compelling reason for someone to choose to gamble with a dedicated altcoin, and so far no-one has provided it.

IMO this is a reflection of the immaturity of the market and the lack of genuine use cases that are being adopted by a sizeable audience.

When/if that changes, alts that have high demand and circulation because they are linked directly to a world-class product or service should be able to stand alone.

Not sure I agree there. Of course bitcoin has more uses, but at gambling coins have a use, which is more than can be said for a big chunk of crypto projects.