Betfair is not the only betting exchange, but it is certainly the one with the highest profile. Over recent months Betfair has been in the news on a regular basis. Unfortunately it has been linked more often than not with possible corruption in horse racing. The company themselves have gone to some lengths to counteract these claims and have even taken out full page advertisements in newspapers to put their side of the argument. So the big question is do betting exchanges help the man in the street or at the track or are they a tool for unscrupulous characters to cheat and take money from your pockets?

Speaking as someone who has held a Betfair account from the very early days of betting exchanges I think they are one of the best things to happen to the ordinary punter since betting on horse racing was made legal. The way some people are talking at the moment you would think that before the advent of betting exchanges there had never been a crooked horse race. You would think that every horse was always run on its merits. Maybe I just have a particularly sunny outlook on life, but my view is that racing is probably cleaner now than it has ever been. Some of this I even feel is down to Betfair and other betting exchanges.

There are many reasons why I just happen to think it is harder to cheat these days than it used to be. Some of these are listed below.

Television
If you think about it just about every horse race is filmed and recorded. Most are piped directly to the betting shops, shown on cable television and made available to watch over the Internet. The people who watch these races are the punters who have put their hard earned money down. It has never been easier for a jockey or a trainer to get a bad reputation for pulling horses. Experienced punters across the nation would soon be calling foul if the same jockey or trainer produced a series of bad races on favoured horses.

Statistics
On top of this more and more people are turning to statistics to give themselves the edge in their betting. With software becoming more and more sophisticated patterns are more discernable. Again if one trainer or jockey continually produced beaten favourites then it wouldn't take long for an obvious pattern to emerge.

The Internet
Perform an Internet search and it is easy to find message boards dedicated to horse racing. Most of the boards are frequented by people who are experienced gamblers and know a scam if they see one. Again any jockey or trainer obviously running horses and holding them back will soon find themselves subject to close scrutiny across the Internet. As we all know the Internet is a great medium for spreading information very quickly indeed. In terms of reputation, if anything the opposite tends to happen. A jockey soon gets talked about as being one to watch out for as the punters friend, one you can put your money down on Betfair and the other exchanges confident that you are going to get a good run for your money.

Doping
Science also moves on. The balanced article here would acknowledge that it is a lot easier to dope a horse than it ever has been. That is undoubtedly true, but it is also true that it is much easier and quickly to detect any form of malpractice too.

Betfair and the Betting Exchanges
Dubious betting patterns are soon noticed on Betfair and the other betting exchanges. A trail can soon be picked up and Betfair makes available to the Jockey Club any information relating to betting patterns where they can smell a rat.

As you can see as technology moves on everything becomes that much more transparent. On the whole I think it is much harder to cheat than it was before. That doesn't mean that every race is straight and every horse gives 100% every time it goes to the track. But then that has never happened and probably never will. In my own view I would image that betting or laying on Betfair and the other betting exchanges accounts for only a small amount of the dishonest betting that goes on in the U.K. I would imagine in practice of backing a horse when it has been laid out specially for a race is by far and a way the biggest form of dishonest betting that goes on. If a horse has been held back in previous runnings to get a good handicap mark then the best place to get on a sizable bet is on course. Even if the prices on Betfair are bigger there are still only modest amounts of money available to back on outsiders.

It would be a tragedy for the average punter if Betfair and the other betting exchanges were ever made to close down. Not only would that be a blow in terms of all of us being able to offer to lay a £10 bet, but I also believe that it would help to make it easier for the cheat to quietly ply his or her trade behind the scenes undetected.

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