[Johnny 55]

Perhaps this is a dumb question but why doesnt Matchbook offer more alternate lines on games, it seems arbitrary which alternate lines are offered. How do they decide which alternate lines to put up.

[TomG]

Alternate lines on a sport like NBA are stale handicaps that were once the game spread but have since moved. Matchbook then moves that market to a secondary, alternate market and puts up a new handicap for the current line.

[Arilou]

Alternate lines would have little or no liquidity. Few would see them, and if you did make offers or even markets with them you would go unmatched most of the time even if you made a decent offer. As a result, they provide little but frustration and on top of that the lines being empty doesn't look good for Matchbook.

Matchbook will create a line for you upon request if you are large enough and provide the liquidity, and they have old lines for where the game used to be that sometimes will have reasonable liquidity, but that's not where Matchbook is strong. Exchanges are good at standard lines on big events with large interest, but usually very bad at niche offerings.

[skrtelfan]

Yes, the issue with Matchbook is liquidity. They don't offer action on some surprisingly large markets, like handicap betting on the English Premier League (they only offer 3 way and totals, and the totals have only been offered since somewhat recently), and when I've asked them why they don't, they said they don't have enough market makers to offer enough liquidity, so I suspect the same would be true for alternate lines. Even on Betfair, which is a much larger exchange that Matchbook, it's common to see little action on alternate lines compared to the regular lines.