From 18th July 2011 Betfair will be making some changes to the Premium Charge. The current Premium Charge mechanism will remain in place but higher rates may now apply to a small number of customers (less than 0.1% of annual active customers).

Full details of the changes can now be found on the Betfair Charges page under the About Us section of the website. However, the changes can be summarised as follows:

• Customers will only be subject to Premium Charges at higher rates if they satisfy all of the following conditions:

o Lifetime net profits* exceed £250,000
o Lifetime commission generated less than 40% of lifetime gross profits
o Bet in more than 1,000 markets

• Customers that satisfy all of the above conditions will be asked to pay Premium Charges at rates between 40% and 60% on all future exchange activity.

All customers that will be affected by these changes have already been contacted.

For more information, please visit our FAQ section here promotions.betfair.com/pcharge/

We hope the information provided will outline why we are making these changes and how they will be implemented in practice.

If you have any further questions, please send them to premiumcharge@betfair.com.

*by net profits we mean the amounts won less the amounts lost, on all exchange markets, less all commission paid and Premium Charges debited.

Congratulations on your success Shaun.
I wish I qualified for those charges

hahaha, not me mate, not yet anyway, the stupid thing is it is taken over your betfair lifetime so if you were making 50k a year for the last 5 years you are toast.

I posted this on another forum.

I was reading some interesting threads on the BF forum and one opinion of this charge increase is that they want to drive away traders and those that generate little commission without actually banning them by forcing them to leave on there own.

After doing this they will then start to be involved in all the markets themselves to create the liquidity needed to keep them going, you may say that this sound stupid but they stand to gain far more than they will lose, the traders that stay will pay a huge price for using the service and the ones that go they will lose little as they were not paying a lot in commission in the first place compared to what they made.

I don't understand it.
Betfair makes their profit by taxing winning Punters.
How are these big bettors not profitable for Betfair?
The TAB would swap the 50 cent Punter for one of these big Punters anytime , anywhere.

How do these Punters cause Betfair to lose money?

Yet another bright spark with a bright idea ruins a company.
See this every week somewhere.

The premise is that volume traders place strain on the IT infrastructure calling for constant upgrades, and they don't pay their way. They don't generate enough commission because their winning bets are marginal compared with turnover.

However, some moron with a masters in accounting has no nouse, education is not equal to wisdom.
Betfair is successful because of the liquidity provided by the traders.
Without liquidity, Betfair is dead.

Backers and Layers are encouraged to use Betfair because of the money available at various prices.
The backers and layers generate the bulk of the commission.

So they drive away the "costly" traders, and then layers and backers will follow in droves.

Many of these corporations are simply driven by idiots.

The other situation that has not been thought through, is this constant changing of the goal posts, it has a very detrimental effect on serious punters, there's no confidence left anymore, because every month, something else changes with the cost structure.

The cost of punting on Betfair is too high, but when the rules are constantly changing and being backdated to suit the "board", then it is truely BetUnfair.

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I can understand that Betfair wish to increase profits as the traders don't provide enough but what they are doing is penalising every winner with this life time amounts,as we know traders are low profits high volume so why not set the markets and profits on a yearly basis.

There is no way that any one wants to pay 40-60 percentage of there profits based on life time on betfair, the way i understand it they will remove the winners and just replace them with there own traders, this way they are not accused of banning anyone.

And we are to trust that their lifetime figures are accurate?

Well, here's one for you...

They "lost" a whole chunk of my betting history, they said one of their servers had corrupted data. Thousands of punters were affected.

So either lifetime data, is guessed, wrong, or estimated.

Any way you slice it, it's wrong.

__________________
RaceCensus - powerful system testing software.
Now with over 399,000 Metropolitan, Provincial and Country races!
http://www.propun.com.au/horse_raci...ng_systems.html
*RaceCensus now updated to 31/03/2024
Video overview of RaceCensus here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W821YP_b0Pg

Could this be the reason for turnover on US races going down the toilet?

Other exchanges like Betaq would give their left one for the turnover that they ignorantly snear at.

Without traders , most markets would be 125%

Have a look at the NZ market percentage.

Its very high .

Thats what it look like when there is no trading.

All exchanges rely on liquidity to make the market happen.

Their min bet of $5 is 67% higher in Aust than it is in the UK .

Why?

Why do they bother with dicounting the commission for that matter, I thought it was all about the money, half a percent discount is not worth the infrastructure set up to account for it.
If it was a flat 5% , they could afford to keep the traders on board.

I thought computers did all the work anyway , so it costs the same whether they are going or turned off.

If it worries them that much , why not slow their processors down if they want to drive traders away,
The standard punter does not need 200 updates a second.
I personally use 1 update per 2 seconds.

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Cheers.