A quick point about yesterday's bets involving froyotech: if you split the bets to encourage more people to bet on the underdogs, and make it so that they win the bet if the underdogs win a map, or the first bo3, you're actually making it soooo much easier for froyotech (or any team in their position) to abuse the system. They can just throw a map and still win the game, thereby winning doubly.

I suppose you can counter that by saying that any match fixing is bad and possible for any game but the biggest deterrent to match fixing in TF2 is that people want to win more than they want to get a few refined metal. If you give them an opportunity to do both, I think you'll have trouble.

I don't think it's a good idea not to use spread which is somewhat of a standard in betting and guarantess much fairer payouts just because some team isn't discouraged to throw otherwise.
It is still possible to catch them if they do so and the potential punishment is harsh enough to make it not worth it for them (1 year ban for a player and/or organization involved in ESEA)..
If I give you right I'm basically saying that all matches without money on them (regular ESEA season, all UGC games, regular ETF2L season for some teams) are likely to be rigged which isn't really a case.

I'm not saying the money is the motivating factor though, it's the desire to win. Imagine you're deciding how to run bets on an upcoming MGE cup and you decide to cover the final - Mike vs Stark. Now stark is gonna get fucked, everyone knows that, so in order to sort the betting out a bit you make it so that stark wins if he gets 10 points. Mike (being a dodgy bastard and so far above the competition) can afford to throw a bit to win fat refined as well as the tournament prize. This situation only happens when the winner can afford to throw a bit and will still win - but that's exactly the situation in which you want to split bets.

I think for regular games the appeal of winning and the risk of being caught outweighs getting a moderate amount of refined. But in this case they win anyway, and get money for winning, and get a tonne of refined for fixing the result toward a huge underdog.

I have a problem I can't access the bets page on saloon.tf it just loads forever and says undefined on the tab. I have tried on different browsers (Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome) but it never seems to load for me. My default browser is Google Chrome.

This happens when you don't have any bet, I'll make a fix for it soon.
Payouts today weren't ended as early as they should be as I wanted to use them to see how a new patch will impact performance. It should vastly reduce the general load on bots and how they behave with many consecutive users making bets/payouts.
Also for this match (since the last 100 or 200 bets) I've been trying to smartly balance between keeping number of bots accepting bets for a single relatively low and not getting throttled by Steam (2 calls/second per API key).
The issue where offer was being marked as accepted and bet wasn't being added has also been fixed as well as the startup time of bots.
There is still a couple of things to do that can improve performance, but I think ESEA final wasn't that bad already given that it was 4 times bigger than i52 in terms of page views (250,000 across 2 days which meant 955770 hits for the website).

We also passed 10,000 dollars bet today :O

A big thanks cherry for keeping this site constantly updated and fixing bugs. Valve should learn from you and do the same thing with tf2 itself

If you run a model for any business, you need to base it on a model of profit and not on a model of worst case scenarios.

You can regulate and take precautions against match-fixing, ultimately it isn't Saloon's responsibility to come up with solutions to stop match fixing on league games as much as it is the leagues who allow saloon to use their logo and promote their matches.

Saloon runs a disclaimer and strictly prohibits involvement in betting on the outcome, the ToS's will be updated in due course to reflect this, users who do it will be banned from using the site.

End of the day - there is risk involved of corruption but you cannot go around fearing the worst of people and allow 1% to dictate how betting is operated - the only way to fully prevent match fixing in full is to not bother with a betting site. Allow the risk and you can make a profit, don't take a risk and you'll end up nowhere.

Thank you for replying to my question. By the way I think saloon.tf right now is really awesome.

Fixed offers queue which got blocked (most likely)

Today's my birthday so everyone is free to bet up to 6 items ;)

It's automatic as soon as you stray from any bet that doesn't reflect the broad result, spread, exact score, etc. The other problem is that TF2 prize pools are generally so low that corruption could potentially outweigh the actual prize in many tournaments. You're right that it provides an incentive to potentially act outside of normal competitive behaviour though, and in such a way that it puts the average punter at a severe disadvantage.

A possible alternative would be to enhance the complexity of the bets, for example exact score in an MGE match would be much harder to guarantee, even if Mike sat on 19 points, throwing points until he could get an exact match he'll never know for sure that he can finish off his opponent at will. Similarly Froyo could bet easily they would win, but not by exactly how much on each map.

4 games added for this weekend! We're also expanding into the new market with our first game casted in foreign language!!

AsiaFortress's Unagi Park vs MVP

ozfortress's Cash Money vs Not Bad

ETF2L's Bol’shoĭ Derby and Fair Enough vs Tourettes

I've decided to get ZenDesk to manage tickets better and easily build knowledge base.
It's only a beginning, but I hope to have answers for all the questions that may be raised there in the near future: https://saloontf.zendesk.com/hc/en-us

http://i.imgur.com/MAmbUVi.png

Shoutout to 555, Deity, Spammy and his friends!

5th translation (including Potuguese, not yet finished)

http://i.imgur.com/Gfe4l0d.png

we are not commenting becouse we are betting :^)

the little grey token isnt appearing on the main menu to show Fair Enough gets default bet spread points?

Where are the bets for the first game of the new ESEA season?
https://saloon.tf/match/357/

Hi for some reason I cannot bet craft hats, only keys and metal. Any reason for this?
PS saloon is some good stuff Cherry

All your craftable, tradable hatsare worth under one ref :(

http://i.imgur.com/PfP4azw.png

You need to win some first with keys/metal :D

I don't understand the bet spread with 20b vs. Five Dollar Club, I think it needs to be much easier to understand.

You're British how can you not understand spread? :O

The Five Dollar Club are given 2.5 points.
So it's like the game starts with 0-2.5 for them
Then you add the actual score on top of that.

I was confused too. Maybe Sideshow and I are in the minority, but I think if you used the word "rounds" instead of "points" it would be easier to understand. The 2.5 is really odd to me too, couldn't you just give them 2 points and say they win a tiebreaker?

There shouldn't have been a spread on this game, period. 20b's roster took a hit (grape -> showstopper) over the offseason while $5 traded one good scout for another (freestate -> arcticjoe). Both teams are primarily composed of LAN players, and although 20b would have to be favored, it definitely isn't out of the question that $5 will win. I suspect the odds would have been around 75-25.

I didn't invent spread myself, it's how it's done in all other sports for 3 times my age now :P
It's why I don't really feel like it's a good idea to make my own solution for this like giving them whole numbers and stating what happens in case of a draw since it's quite of an established standard and everyone who knows betting expects it to work like this, though I do realize that my users have no clue about gambling which is why I've added this description in which I'm stating points needed for a draw. Anything more is a win, anything less is a lose.

I'm stating points instead of rounds because those are not always equal.
In any other format than BO1 each map won is 3 points, no matter the amount of round played, except for GCs which give winning team 2 points and losing one.

And there's always (pretty poor) knowledge base :P
https://saloontf.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/202946962-How-does-scoring-work-on-Saloon-tf-

I don't care about the power of the teams, but the amount of items they will most likely attract, the closer it is to 50-50 the more successful I was :)
Though in this case I still think that 20b have a big chance of winning with this advantage.
There are many factors, power is one of them, but sympathy and fanbase is also taken into consideration.

BEFORE:

AFTER:

Ok...so basically they have to get 3 rounds to win. That would be much easier to understand!

Any thoughts on this: https://saloontf.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203099681