blue4578

Why is Nadal inevitably going to win? Why should Murray start going for ridiculous winners when he is having plenty of success rallying with him? Some strange comments on this thread today.

A bit early to be writing Murray off is it not? Nadal is well below his usual level of play this year, although I must admit I have been away all week and haven't seen Nadal's matches against Ljubicic or Soderling, also missing Murray's match against Troicki and most of the match against Chela.

No tie break in the final set. Isner played the set pretty well, the difference was Nadal nailing three brilliant returns in succession. Other than that Isner pushed Nadal pretty hard. Good match, shame that Isner couldn't get to 4-4 or 5-5 in the final set to see if Nadal would really feel the pressure.

I'm not so sure, see my post in the Gambling Forum. I certainly hope not anyway! Wish me luck.

I disagree with a lot of that Loki. Federer might have a shot against Djokovic or Nadal at Wimbledon, that's for sure. However at the US Open he will struggle unless things change between now and then. I honestly don't believe Federer's level is that much lower than 2005/2006 right now. He has probably dropped off a fraction, but in 2011 he is up against two opponents way better than anything he faced during his dominant years. In all the hard court tournaments, he hasn't lost to anyone not named Nadal or Djokovic. Let's also not forget that Federer beat both Nadal and Djokovic on a fast, indoor hard court at the ATP World Tour Finals in London just six months ago. He also beat Djokovic in Basle and Shanghai just before that. Federer's physical conditioning is fine, his movement around the court is almost as good as it's ever been. From personal knowledge you naturally do slow down a little as you approach 30 though. Federer's forehand is more erratic and he is losing belief this year against the top two. That said, he could've even beaten Nadal in Madrid if he'd played the big points well, he had a lot of break point chances. He hasn't been crushed against Djokovic either. The only match he has been crushed was in the semis in Miami against Nadal, which was as one-sided as the 2008 French Open Final. Djokovic has made three major improvements. The Davis Cup win gave him a great deal of confidence and belief. The gluten free diet has by all accounts sorted out many of his physical problems. This much has been obvious as he has played so many matches and played superbly most of the time. Many people though that the three hour Murray semi final in Rome would've given him no chance against Nadal (he was 9/4 to win; thank you very much odds makers), yet he came back and won in straight sets; his third tournament win in three weeks, very tough to do on clay. Finally he has got his serve back to the level it was in 2007 or 2008. It had dropped off for some reason in the past couple of years. I suppose it may be a confidence thing since everything else is working so well. Agree that Federer has virtually no chance at Roland Garros. The likes of Ferrer, Soderling, Berdych and one or two others have a fair chance against him before he even gets to a semi final against Nadal or Djokovic. [Murray can't be in Federer's half of the draw.] Federer will be hoping for a kind draw. Let's not forget, Murray served for the match against Djokovic, and was 1/9 to win at one point and would've won for sure IMO but for a lucky net cord. No one else has come anywhere near as close to beating Djokovic this year, and this on Murray's worse surface. It would be the surface he'd least like to play Djokovic on for sure. Coming into this year Murray had also beaten Djokovic three straight times, all in Masters 1000 finals. [Djokovic has won all the other six meetings, two this year and four 2006-2008.] Yet the key thing here is that I think that Djokovic's fundamental tennis skills are better than Murray's. Djokovic at 100%, mentally and physically, would nearly always beat Murray at 100% for me. He lost his way for a couple of years but has found it again. This is the big, big problem that Nadal currently faces. On faster courts, he had problems early in his career with big hitters over powering him, such as Blake, Youzhny and Berdych. He has managed to improve his serve and hit flatter shots to overcome these players most of the time now on the faster courts. Yet suddenly Nadal is faced with someone who can hit big, powerful flat shots, serve well, move superbly and do it all consistently well on a clay court. It's just like with Federer in 2005-2008 on clay against Nadal. Federer's best would always beat Nadal's best, and he could win 6-1 and 6-2 sets against Nadal, even a 6-0 in Hamburg one year. Yet he could never usually keep it up for a match, so Nadal's consistency tended to win out. Djokovic at the moment has the beating of Nadal on every surface (grass yet to be proven) as he can maintain an excellent level of performance for the whole match at the moment. Federer even during his best years was always a bit inconsistent against the top players, but now is even more so and faces a much tougher level of competition. At the moment, Djokovic's best level is better than Nadal's on all surfaces. Can he keep it up? I think Djokovic should be favourite for Roland Garros, although he isn't. I think I feel a bet coming on.

1.28 was too short when it just about to go one set all. Djokovic has been suffering from an allergy, hay fever I assume, and also looked very tired at times against Wawrinka. He looked pretty weary at the end of the second set. Djokovic is far superior to Murray of course, and particularly at the moment and on clay, but Murray looked to have a fair shot to me. My problem is that I don't particularly like "trading" on tennis, by which I mean betting every point or every few points and constantly changing my position. Requires too much concentration and I've not been particularly good at it in the past. So these days if I am getting involved in-running, I tend to make the bet and stick to that position. If the original bet is value, which it was on this occasion it's pretty safe to say, you should end up in front overall. Murray's weak serve meant I should've taken the money and ran when he was about to serve for it. It's never as easy as that though as you have about 30 seconds to make your mind up. Anyway enough about betting. Looking forward to the final tomorrow and the French Open draw in a few days. For once, it's not clear cut whether Murray would want to be in the Nadal half of the draw or not with how Djokovic is playing. I think all of the top players are glad that del Potro (if he is fit) has got himself into the top 32 to avoid the possibility of a blockbuster first round match.

Indeed it was. Djokovic from 1.2 starting price went to 1.04/1.05 when he got ahead in the second set. About 1.33 at the start of final set. Murray was 1.11 serving for it 30-15 up. Murray went to about 1.4 when Djokovic was 0-30 at 5-5. I wasn't looking right at the end but the matched total was certainly over £30m near the end of the final set. I am foolish as I'd layed Djokovic at 1.28 and if I had any sense I'd have layed the 1.25 on Murray as he was about to serve for it and been celebrating a very pleasing profit at the end no matter who won. Net cord changed everything though, I'm 99% sure Murray would've won but for that, and it was the luckiest net cord I've ever seen. It's always better to be lucky than good, and unfortunately for Murray Djokovic is very good as well as being very lucky. That match just reinforced my belief that Murray will always keep falling short when it matters. He can talk positively and talk a good game, but when it comes down to it, he just hasn't got it in him to get over the line when it matters against the top players. He can beat the players outside the top 10 with his eyes closed, but he's never going to win a grand slam unless it gets handed to him by all the top players getting knocked out.

You can bet to tighter margins. However the smaller margins you use, the better you have to be. I'll tell you a little story to prove my point. I know some guys through Betfair who have found a way to make money. They use bots to take prices from bookmakers and lay them on Betfair in slightly more obscure markets where they have a good chance of getting them taken. Stuff like baseball, winter sports, rugby league and so on. I was speaking to one of them and he said that they got absolutely murdered during the 2008 Olmypics. Centrebet were pricing up every gold medal, so they took Centrebet's odds and layed them on Betfair. People who knew the Olympic sports inside out just picked them off and took the good prices and they lost a fortune. Centrebet probably did too, although maybe they were only letting people bet £5 a go. This is why most bookmakers don't bet to low margins, particularly on more obscure sports. If they can get plenty of business, and a little action on both sides, they don't need to offer really competitive odds. They don't need to offer odds at all on things like Olympic sports either. As I said, you could easily back to smaller margins. If there is still perceived value in each price you're putting up there, you should still end up in front over time. My own personal preference is to look for more lays than backs to get matched. You could in fact easily do it the other way around, ie back to 94% and lay to 111%. If you adjusted the stakes accordingly, that is just a different way of doing exactly the same thing. In a three outcome event, laying one outcome is just backing the other two and vice versa. It's all down to personal preference and playing about with it till you find something that works. I've been playing about with it for 10 years so I've reached a point where I'm pretty happy with what I'm doing. As for which matches to get involved with, I think that's very simple. I would make the effort to get involved in as many as possible, if you've got the time to research properly. So if you were going to do £20/£40 stakes on 10 matches, if you can do £5/£10 stakes on 40 matches. You want your eggs in as many baskets as possible as there is then lower variance in your results on a weekly basis. If you bet on less matches, your results will be a lot more up and down week to week. Again though, that's just my preference. The long term result should be roughly the same, but I prefer to win a steady amount week to week with maybe one losing week in twenty, rather than having two weeks where I win big, and then one where I lose most of it again. Closer matches are more conductive to backing and laying in this way as prices tend to move more. As for the website I'm going to have for next season, I'll post a link in my signature when it's ready to go (will be July at the earliest).

I put a few pounds on Murray at about 4/1 when he was about to win the second set. Decided to let it ride, and what a poor decision that was. Djokovic seems to have mastered the art of the net cord at crucial times. The whole match rested on the net cord when Murray were serving for the match at *5-4 15-0 in the final set IMO. It wasn't your usual net cord either, it bounced up a bit before going over. Djokovic looked like he'd given up as he saw it hit the net (he also landed two net cords in one game to break Nadal to win the first set in Madrid last week, perhaps he means it ). That gave him a new lease of life and from then on, Murray bottled it under pressure yet again. Two double faults, on second serves which were out by miles, in that tenth game of the set. Djokovic played well from 5-5, but Murray just doesn't believe he can win the big matches against the best players and it showed once again. Feel sorry for all those people who backed Murray at 1.11 when he was serving for it! I'm a bit annoyed Murray didn't win, but I should've known what would happen. Good to see Murray back playing at a playing at a pretty good level though. A win tonight would've made the world of difference to his self belief, but should still enjoy a decent summer.

That's pretty much how I do it, although your three percentages add up to 99% and you'd have to round your odds if you're using Betfair as you can't back or lay 2.35, 3.47, 2.93 or 3.96. There isn't really such a thing as "doing it wrong", unless you're laying a 95% book or backing a 105% book or something along those lines. The method I described in previous posts is just what works for me. I've tweaked it slightly over time, but it's just what feels right for me and someone else wouldn't necessarily agree. I deliberately set the back percentage to around 89% as I don't want to get two backs fully matched very often, as only one of them can ever win. It does happen occasionally, which basically means you're laying the other outcome for double the amount or more as your lay on that outcome will inevitably get matched. I'm a lot more flexible with my lay percentage as when I tried rigidly setting it to 106%, I ended up laying bets at prices that I didn't really want to be laying. Over a month I pretty much broke even doing this, when before and since I was making a lot. So sometimes I lay 105% and sometimes I lay 115%. The more uncertain factors there are, the higher this percentage tends to be. I can also decrease the back percentage on occasion if I'm wanting more margin for error. If I'm out on a Tuesday evening at a game for example, I can't really analyse all the team line ups before the games and adjust my prices accordingly, although an iPhone 4 does help with this. I have to trust the team news and take my chances, therefore I need a bit of margin for error as if some team leave out a couple of key players, the odds will move and I'll probably end up backing them and/or laying their opponents. If you want to get more backs matched, back to 94% if you're laying to 106% and it should be about the same both sides. I'm not wanting that to happen so I adjust my percentages accordingly. Obviously over the course of the week, the ultimate thing is to see action on both sides, either two or more lays get matched, or a back and a lay on the same outcome get matched at very favourable odds to you. It's just about playing about a bit and seeing what works. What works for me might not work for someone else and they might have completely different ideas about how to go about it. I've got a website set up, which I will be using to post several updates per week on my betting activity as well as some general betting articles. I'll have everything available on an RSS feed and will provide Twitter updates. I'll post a link up in a few weeks if anyone is interested. I probably won't be posting here very much at all when it's up and running.

Yes, that's something I've said here many times, including on this thread. Although to be fair, there is very little action early in the week outside the Premier League and other high profile games. Not at all. If you know who is going to be good you can really cash in. This is particularly true if a slightly unfancied team turn out to be among the best in the league. Sometimes it's obvious that a team is going to struggle when they are quite fancied. Research done over the summer is important and can be extremely valuble. Ante-post betting is completely different, but you can really hit the jackpot with that too if you have a good feel for the teams before the season starts.

You'd struggle at the start of the season then.

You ignore (to a large degree) the current prices. You certainly don't let the current price influence how you're pricing things. However if you're wanting to be laying something at Evens for example, and you find that the market has people wanting to back that outcome at 1.3 for decent sums, you'll have to seriously reconsider your position. Or perhaps you're so right that you can ignore this and lay the 1.3 for a lot more than you were originally planning to lay at Evens. As to how you work out those percentage probabilities of outcomes occurring, there is no one way to do it. It's not like tossing coins or rolling dice, where you have a definite probability for each outcome. You'll struggle to find two people who do things in an identical way. I'd be quite happy disclosing most of my methods, safe in the knowledge that as it's far from being purely statistics based, no one would be able to replicate it in the same way and therefore undercut me by one tick on betting exchanges. The other percentage, the book percentage you're backing and laying, when it comes to laying if you want to be safer lay to higher percentages, and back to lower percentages when backing. The closer you lay to 100%, the more bets you'll get matched but the easier it is for people with better knowledge to pick you off. That is if there are people with better knowledge. High street bookmakers can lay awful odds as the idiots in the shops will take them anyway. It's more competitive using betting exchanges so if you're laying awful prices you usually won't get matched.

Give iBetMate a try Adam, it's a definite upgrade on what Betfair offer. Better odds refresh, much easier to manage current bets, price graphs are available, app doesn't crash or fail to work like Betfair's does quite often. Only slight downside is that you have to be logged in to view markets.

Futbol24 will play a noise when there is a goal or sending off in a match. That's probably the best you're going to get, and that is quite quick. The Betfair iPhone app is rubbish, always has been when I've tried to use it. iBetMate is a much better version of the same thing.

It's amazing what a serious dose of confidence can do for someone. I don't know if Murray has worked with the Adidas player development team, Darren Cahill and Sven Groeneveld, properly yet but it would seem a few words of wisdom from David Haye has helped turn things around. It's a shame that the elbow injury seemed to bother him at the start of the third set today as he absolutely dominated the second set (Nadal only hit 3 winners all set). Murray admitted that the injury affected him more than it should have done: Murray interview Nadal still won so you can't exactly go overboard, but that's only the second set he has lost at Monte Carlo in the past five tournaments including this one. The ranking points for Murray will come in very handy as well for making sure he stays ahead of Soderling, therefore avoiding the top three until the semi finals rather than possibly facing one of them in the quarters in the upcoming tournaments.

No one watching the sporting event of the day?

Yes. Yes.

And another decent win. Although Simon got injured at the start of the second set, Murray is starting to resemble a top tennis player again. Will be a strong favourite against Gil to set up a likely semi final against Nadal.

Baseball is the sport with the tightest margins. The best bookmakers are happy laying the moneyline to 102.5% or even slightly lower. It's hard to find an edge, so you have to be very strict with the prices you're backing and laying. With other sports, sometimes you just get a very strong feeling that a team or player will or won't win. With baseball this is much harder as any team can beat any other, with the old cliche being that every team will win 60 games and every team will lose 60 games (they play 162). It's almost always true. You can get good value bets, but typically over a season I'll only make 2%-3% profit on my total stakes. I'll make a far higher percentage on football or tennis, but I can stake much more on baseball as there are games every day (2430 in all) and plenty of places to bet decent stakes. I don't think I'm going to bet seriously on baseball this season anyway as it's just too much hard work and antisocial hours, and I don't really need the money any more. In MLB teams will field their strongest lineups throughout the season. Starting pitchers only pitch once every five or six days, everyone else can handle playing every day except relief pitchers who may get rested if they've pitched three or four days in a row. The only slight exception to this is September, the last month of the regular season. Teams are allowed to expand their rosters from 25 to 40 players, so some younger players will get a chance to play, particularly on teams out of playoff contention. The NBA is a strange sport. Year upon year, teams lose that have been matched at 1.01 in-running on Betfair far more often than they should (there was one last night). Teams can play the score far better than other sports, and you'll often find teams getting well ahead being pegged back. The difference with MLB is that 16 teams make the playoffs in the NBA as opposed to 8 in MLB. Therefore there isn't quite the same intensity with most regular season games. For example this year, the 16 playoff spots were wrapped up a few days ago, so for the last week of the season teams are only playing for seedings. The worst teams also prefer to lose to improve their draft lottery chances. You have to take all this into account, but it can take a bit of getting used to. For me personally, I bet mainly on the total number of points in the game, it's far easier to win than betting totals on football for example as the scoring is continuous. It isn't that important if you have a week where you don't get much matched. Every bet that you do get matched should be very good value and the odds should be in your favour. If you know how to price games up, then you can think of it like tossing a coin several times. If you've got an edge in the prices you're laying, it's like getting odds of 11/10 for predicting heads or tails. If you toss a coin 25 times on a Saturday afternoon and are getting paid out at 11/10 each time you call it right, sometimes due to the relatively small sample size you'll make a loss. If you toss the coin 25 times per week over 40 weeks, 1000 times in all, the chances of making a loss are almost zero. If you're really good at pricing games up, the odds for tossing the coin could be 6/5 or bigger, and your chances of making a loss would be much smaller still. Betting always comes down to simple probability. It's not an exact science pricing up sporting events, like it is working out probability for tossing coins or rolling dice, but the principle is exactly the same.

Yes. Some people I know make hundreds of thousands of pounds per year trading in-running on tennis and doing nothing else. In fact, along with football and horse racing it is the most popular in-running sport. The growth in the amounts gambled in-running on tennis far exceeds other sports over the past few years. The key thing, obviously, is to make the right trade/bet at the right time, which is easier said than done. One warning I would give you is that some people have very up-to-date television feeds and some people even have people present courtside to give them instant updates. Therefore if you're betting point to point rather than inbetween games, be very careful about getting picked off by people with more up to date information.

You don't need hundreds of thousands to get started. In fact, that would be crazy if you've never done it before. Although even just backing and laying for £20 liabilities on every outcome across 46 matches would require about £2,000. As I said, I think laying across many markets is the way to go, much better than putting all of your eggs into one basket, or a very small number of baskets. I wish I'd started doing what I was doing years before I did, as I remember the days when at 2:55pm on a Saturday you could sometimes lay 4/1 shots at 6/4 on Betfair for decent sums as there was no money in the markets. It's much more competitive these days, which is one reason I'm trying to do the same thing on Betdaq now since the liquidity there is like it was at Betfair 7 or 8 years ago. In fact, if you're going to start laying football for fairly modest stakes, use Betdaq not Betfair. The Betdaq commission is 2.5% till the end of June and for fairly small stakes, you can get people to take silly prices far more easily, particularly if you get your money up early. Your question is an interesting one, and again the answer I'm going to give is very specific to me. I tend to find that using the method I described for football laying, most of the time I'm either backing the favourite or alternatively laying the favourite and backing the draw (there is almost always value in the draw if the favourite is too short). My method doesn't lead me to back outsiders particularly often. The worst thing you can do it try to get all, or most, of your bets matched. You have a price that is as low as you'll go when backing and as high as you'll go when laying. You have to draw the line somewhere. I ran into problems a couple of years ago when I was doing really well, and started thinking that I'd do even better if I got more bets matched. As I said above, I'm quite rigid with my book back percentage, which is nearly always within a percent of 89%. This margin is high enough not to have to worry too much about being too generous. However I've always been flexible with my lay percentage as every game is different. However at one point I decided that I was going to lay everything to 106% or so. This meant tweaking the prices that I was comfortable laying, and pushing them a bit higher most of the time to get the book percentage down to 106%. This resulted in me laying bets that I didn't really want to be laying at the prices I was laying. Over a period of a month I went from making a very decent sum nearly every Saturday to breaking even or being slightly down. I readily accept that I'm going to get no more than 30% at the very most of the bets I put up matched. Those that do get matched, I have a very decent edge. There's no point reducing that edge too much trying to chase bigger profits by having more bets matched. If you want to make more profit, keep the margins the same but increase the stakes. Football is a unique case though. The sport that I stake the most on over the course of a year is baseball, which makes up about 40% of my betting approximately (and is why, along with the NBA, I was still up in the middle of the night last night ). I can quite happily lay to 102.5% or so and make a consistent profit on baseball, as the margins are always small and it's generally much more of an exact science calculating the probabilities of teams winning as there are statistics for everything you can possibly imagine. As an example, if you're laying to 102.5% and the game is a real 50/50 call, you'd be laying 1.95 each side. When it comes to football, if I thought that a team was 50% likely to win, I wouldn't lay higher than 1.9, except on very rare occasions like a very high-profile match between two top teams.

If you're wanting to test out things, you're best off looking at these two sites: Football Data and Betfair Data There is also the option of time-stamped data from Fracsoft but this doesn't come cheap if you're wanting information across a lot of markets. I do some football laying, but football these days makes up only about 15% of my total betting. I also don't limit myself to Betfair, I use Betdaq and Matchbook (almost exclusively American sports at Matchbook) quite extensively too. It's difficult to get decent sums matched on correct scores, except for the highest profile matches, so I don't even try. I can make a profit very easily on the match odds markets, while total goals markets in football are just too random generally. Any edge you can find is relatively small, and certainly for me much smaller than with match odds. I do all sorts of other laying, including running automated bots on Betfair to employ various strategies. Look up this book if you're interested in getting into that, as it is a good starting point. It's probably a bit beyond what you want to do at the moment though. Laying across many markets is the best idea when it comes to betting as far as I am concerned. If you're doing this, the variance in your results should be much lower as you've got a high number of bets on and therefore if you've got an edge you should make a consistent profit. Since you were asking about football laying, what I do is very simple. I stick to English football only, as there is little money on the exchanges for Scottish football. So you've got 46 matches every weekend. I put a back up for every outcome (laying isn't just laying, but backing one outcome is effectively laying the other two I suppose) and lay every outcome. My back percentage is nearly always 88%-89%, but my lay book percentage tends to vary between 105% and 113%, although is mostly under 110%. That might all sound too hard to understand, so in simple terms, let's say I think that all three outcomes in a football match are equally likely, ie 33.33%, to 2 decimal places. The fair price for this would be 2/1, or 3.00 in decimals. Therefore if I want to make a profit, you need a profit margin both sides. In this case of me calculating that all three outcomes are 33.33% likely, then when it comes to football, I would look to back all three outcomes at 3.35 and lay all three outcomes at 2.8. This isn't set in stone, if there are some uncertain factors in play, or if I just don't particularly want to lay or back a certain outcome for whatever reason, I can increase the margins. I also tend to start the week with higher margins, and decrease the margins as match day gets closer. I might be backing and laying 3.8 and 2.5 respectively on Monday, but be backing and laying 3.35 and 2.8 by Saturday morning for the same outcomes. The only downside to laying is that it requires you to have lots of available funds. For example, normally I lay every outcome upto Evens (or 2.00) for £2,000 and lay every outcome above this price for a £2,000 liability. Then I back every outcome under Evens for a £2,000 stake, and back every outcome upto 2/1 for a £2,000 profit. Everything above 2/1 I back for a £1,000 level stake regardless of price, although I occasionally reduce this is you're looking at something 20/1+. Therefore the minimum liability per game is going to be £4,000 and the maximum is going to be £5,000 usually (unless two outcomes are below 2/1, which is unlikely). Multiply that by 46 and you have a figure between £184,000 and £230,000. Typically I'll only have 20%-30% of my total lay amounts matched over the course of a week, but every bet that is matched is at a very good price (according to my calculations anyway). It's far better than just turning up on a Saturday and taking whatever prices are available. There are an infinite number of betting strategies that can work. I've found things that work for me, but of course other people might find what I do doesn't work but that totally different methods work for them. You just have to find something that works and refine it over time.

Looking at the graph, there has been £99 matched @ 2.02. There is also £40 more waiting to be backed at that price, plus another £50 @ 1.7, £2 @ 1.2 and £33 @ 1.18. So if you want to back you could back all of those prices for those stakes. These amounts are rounded, so might not be precise. Also, sums less than £2 don't show up on the price graph, so there might be £1.99 sitting at every other price. Click the little graph symbol to the left of the players' names to see what has previously been matched and what is available to back and lay at every price. You're looking at the amounts and prices available to back, not what has already been matched. You've got things the wrong way around. If you want to lay Vargas right now and have it matched immediately, you'd not be able to as the lay side is blank. That is there is no one wanting to back him to make the cut at the moment (except for possibly any £1.99 idiots). It doesn't matter what has been matched in the past, if you want a bet that is going to be matched instantly, there has to be money sitting there waiting to be matched. You don't have to just take the prices on the screen like a traditional bookmaker though. You can make speculative backs and lays, like the person who has put up £40 to lay at 2.02. If there were no layers, Betfair wouldn't work as no one would be able to come along and just take a price, as the majority of people probably do. If you put up a lay at 50, it probably wouldn't last long and you'd get matched. If you put up a lay at 2.04 you may well get matched, although probably not straight away. Illiquid markets like this one, particularly in-running, are great as you can get people to take a silly price sometimes, although only usually for small stakes. Betfair has no palpable error so people can't change their minds later if they lay a price they didn't mean to or would rather not have.

Are you downloading the free ones or are you paying for them? In my experience, you have to get one of the paid ones if you want something decent. Betfair never send me any emails at all, ever, unless I send one to them requiring a response. So if I don't read the service section of the forum, I get no information about their latest gimmicks, excuses for site downtime or anything like that. I didn't even know there was an in-play tab till you just mentioned it.