TradeSports shut down!
Nooooo! The world has just gotten a little bit stupider.
TradeSports was the best prediction market for sports. You could also think of it as peer-to-peer betting, finding someone who would take the opposite bet so you don't have to pay the house 10% overhead. I never placed a bet, but loved the site. You could watch in real time during sporting events as the market updated. You could read the market prices in effect as "Currently the Bengals have a 30% chance of winning." Nice to have open while watching sports - if you ever didn't understand what had happened, you could check how it impacted the odds. Other cool stuff too - you could get implied odds after the fact for success rates of things like going for it on 4th down.
Sadly, gambling is illegal. TradeSports was run out of Ireland but since their users were mostly American I guess that caught up to them.
What gets me is that the stupidest forms of gambling, like lottery tickets and slot machines, are growing. (90% of the profit in Vegas casinos is from slot machines.) But these prediction markets, which actually help their users become more intelligent, are hated on by The Man.
For now, BetFair is still operating, and Intrade still has the non-sports markets of the old TradeSports. Check it out.
TradeSports was the best prediction market for sports. You could also think of it as peer-to-peer betting, finding someone who would take the opposite bet so you don't have to pay the house 10% overhead. I never placed a bet, but loved the site. You could watch in real time during sporting events as the market updated. You could read the market prices in effect as "Currently the Bengals have a 30% chance of winning." Nice to have open while watching sports - if you ever didn't understand what had happened, you could check how it impacted the odds. Other cool stuff too - you could get implied odds after the fact for success rates of things like going for it on 4th down.
Sadly, gambling is illegal. TradeSports was run out of Ireland but since their users were mostly American I guess that caught up to them.
What gets me is that the stupidest forms of gambling, like lottery tickets and slot machines, are growing. (90% of the profit in Vegas casinos is from slot machines.) But these prediction markets, which actually help their users become more intelligent, are hated on by The Man.
For now, BetFair is still operating, and Intrade still has the non-sports markets of the old TradeSports. Check it out.
posted by Kevin at
4:48 PM
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