Bookmakers continue to be excluded from the newest wave of interactive betting sites coming out of the U.K. The latest two to announce the launching of new person-to-person wagering services are Betfair.com and Betmart.com. Both will go live with their sites this month. Plus, a new site from bookmaker Firststake plc will offer punters the ability to propose a bet, but not the odds.
BetMart's new site will host message boards and provide links to sports-related sites and historical data and research as well as facilitate betting between customers. The punters, and not BetMart, define the events, control the odds, and can even reserve a bet for someone else by typing in that person's email address.
"BetMart customers will be able to place and view bets over the net and via WAP phones in much the same way as a trader views buy and sell orders on a trading screen," CEO Barry Murphy explained.
Customers will have plenty ways to bet with BetMart, since its service will be accessible via the Internet, WAP (wireless application protocol) and SMS (simple message service). Already, the company's WAP site won Nokia's Best of WAP 2000 services contest. The company aims to offer players a variety of alternative points of contact, such as Sega Dreamcast, to enable them to take advantage of cutting-edge technologies that speed access to information and improve their chances of winning.
BetMart will charge a 2 percent commission on the tax-free wagers. The site will initially concentrate on football and major sports events, with horse racing, politics and financial bets on indices and individual stocks to follow.
The operators of BetFair.com, a person-to-person site that went live yesterday, call their approach "open market betting." Punters can make their own odds, and trade at better prices. The site's patent-pending software is based upon the order driven software used by the Nasdaq or London Stock Exchange.
The site, available via both Internet and WAP applications, enables customers to propose a bet along with the odds and watch as others accept the bet. A proposed bet's odds can fluctuate just as the price of a stock does, explained Mark Davis, a company spokesman. A punter can even sell off his bet before an event happens, and still come out ahead because bettors later bought the bet and thus changed its value. Winning punters pay a 5 percent commission on their bets.
Finally, independent betting shop operator Firststake is launching a website this month that offers fixed odds betting as well as a feature that enables punters to propose wagers that aren't already on the site. However, the bookmaker, not the player, will set the odds on such bets.
Firststake is operating from the U.K. for now and is swallowing the hefty 9 percent betting charged on bets, explained company spokesperson Fiona Boddy. The company also has a license to operate from Malta and will operate from the island jurisdiction if it launches an international operation and/or in the event the U.K. government fails to reform the betting duty policy. (Company representatives were among those bookmakers who pled, in vain, with the U.K. Treasury to lower the betting duty earlier this year. Bookmakers are hoping that when the government reviews the betting duty again, a lower tax will result.)
As the legal maneuvering continues in both Australia and the United States, one could argue that the real action is in the U.K., where new interactive betting service are launching seemingly every week. Strengthening that argument is the fact that many of these new operators are taking interactive betting to new levels by offering alternative forms of wagering.