Two monitors for effective arbing

Dear Arbers!

Today we’ll explore the advantages associated with using a double display configuration. Let me bring to your attention a fact every arber intuitively understands.

Arber makes money by correctly and quickly placing surebets. Arber loses money by slowly or wrongly placing surebets

There are arbers who break even or even lose in the long run due to their mistakes, and there are those whose profits exceed losses by an order of magnitude. While there are no people who make no mistakes, you want to be in the latter category.

Within normal circumstances, there are two basic ways to fail at betting.

The first one is to be late. It can be due to network delays or extremely fast bettors getting the surebet before you (a thing that can be sometimes seen on sharp bookie pairs, such as SBO/Pinny surebets).

The above reasons, however, are out of your control. There is however a great contributor to betting delay which happens to those of us with less than perfect memory. Generally, there are a few pieces of information one needs to remember once an arb pops up:

• Event name (eg. Real Madrid – Barcelona)
• League navigation at the bookies
• Which bets and odds one should find

Later when betting, one has to remain aware of stakes. An experienced arber is well capable of remembering all the data at once and makes very few mistakes. However, almost everyone has a slower day once a while, and the information can slip in his mind. Results vary from two bets on the same side, to a bad AH value chosen, to mixed up stakes. The two last errors have been commited by arbers with a few years of experience, so are not really newbie mistakes. If you place many arbs, the probability of eventually making a mistake grows, there’s no way around it.

However, there’s a great method to reduce matching errors. Attach a second, identical monitor to your workstation. The idea might be a new one for you, but you’ll get used to it extremely quickly.

If you have your SBMon open on left monitor and the bookie site on the right, you can check all the surebet data with a glance, without having to switch to its window. Also, you have immediate access to the surebet calculator in case of an odds change. Empirical data shows that an arber can gain as much as 15s per surebet due to a multiple monitor setup, while reducing the error rate.

Fifteen seconds is ages in the surebet industry, and if your volumes are even semi-serious, the cost of an extra display will come back in a few months in the money you’d have lost in the mistakes. I’m serious, try it out.

We’ve described a VM setup some time ago. Put the VM on your right monitor. This makes it almost impossible to confuse with your real PC. With the VM, one can decide to put sharp bookies on his left monitor with SBMon for actual physical separation of virtualized betting from direct one.

As a sidenote, forex and stock market traders routinely use 6 (SIX) multiple displays at once. They’re our older siblings, and we should take as much knowledge from them as possible.

With two displays, live arbing becomes much easier. Put one bookie on left screen, the other on right, and watch the odds change.

While I won’t attempt to persuade everybody to get a 3×2 six monitor array like actual traders, having two monitors on your desk will reduce your error rate, speed up your arbing and generally make your experience of using a PC much more enjoyable.

Get a second monitor and taste effective arbing.