Trading Exchange Games: All Green before River

Except for the popular sports, there are other games in Betfair that we can do trading at, such as Poker, Blackjack and Baccarat, the so called Betfair Exchange Games. Regarding X-Holdem, today I’ll discuss a situation showing how to profit by trading from flop to turn before the river card is known. By profit I mean an all green screen where we make money regardless which hand wins in the end.

In the image above we see the turn and how the betting odds were at that moment. Unfortunately I wasn’t quick enough to capture the flop’s betting odds, which were 1.40 for hand1. During the flop (before the 3rd King appeared) hand1 was in front and in order to become an outsider, the turn card should either be a 3 or a Q. I have to note that if an eight came up on turn, then the favorite would still be hand1 along with hand4. In any other turn card, hand1 would remain the favorite for this game.

There were 2 treys and 3 Queens remaining in the deck. That were 5 cards total we didn’t want to see on turn. An easy calculation to have in mind so that we find out the probability any of those cards appear on the next street, is to double that specific number. In the example here, 5 multiplied by 2 means 10% a 3 or a Q shows up on turn. Therefore, hand1 would remain the favorite by 90% probability.

Let’s say we had backed hand1 at 1.40 betting odds. When the turn cards is the 3rd King, we can lay hand1 at 1.20 and secure a profit before the river card. How?

If we had backed $100 on hand1 at 1.40 and now we lay $100 at 1.20, we would have secured $20 profit on hand1 and zero losses on the other hands. Laying now $16 more on hand1 we would secure $16 profit on all possible outcomes.

In other words, we risked $100 in order to win $16 with 90% probability. Out of 10 times we follow the above scenario, we would stand to win $16 9 times (=$144) and we would lose $100 once. Additionally, in the worst case a Queen or a trey appeared on turn, we could still decrease our loss (just a bit though) since the hand1’s betting odds would be around 15.

Finally, in case the turn card was a heart, hand1’s betting odds would be even lower since it would draw to the nut flush, given it has the higher heart card among the other hands.

Let’s take a look what happened at the river.

Hand2 would also win if a 4th King was the river card, while all hands would be winners if the river was another seven (everyone would have KKK77 in that case).

The article was published in the official Greek Betting@Betfair Blog.