Chris Shillington from Extrabet explains how "Take it Now" could be the Next New Thing in online betting.

When reflecting on major changes in the betting industry, you really don’t have to look back a long way.

Exchanges, in-running betting, multiples, online poker/casinos and spread betting have all flourished in the last ten years, giving punters an embarrassment of riches when it comes to ways to bet.

At extrabet.com, however, we have always tried to push the boundaries, and in this tradition we think our ‘Take It Now’ function could be the next ‘big thing’. In simple terms, what ‘Take It Now’ does is value a bet throughout the duration of an event.

Let me give you an example. Say you had backed a horse for £10 at 10/1 to win, and coming over the last it was neck-and-neck with another horse at the head of the field. Rather than wait until the end of the race and risk your horse losing, you could decide to ‘Take It Now’ and claim (let’s say) £50. This can of course be replicated in every market on extrabet.com, whether through our fixed-odds, spread or binary betting businesses.

So is this really the new age of betting? Of course you can do this already on the exchanges, but for the average punter the process can be a little daunting. Not only is it sometimes confusing as to how much you need to lay back, but a change in price might mean a bet can only be partially matched or indeed not matched at all. extrabet does all this for you at the touch of a single button, with a 100% guarantee that your bet is closed.

The key point is that in-running punting has become one of the biggest growth areas in sports betting in the last two years, and the betting world itself seems to be coming around to the ‘day-trading’ mentality of the financial industry. Is it reasonable, for example, for a bookmaker to hold the cash on a Premier League Season bet for more than eight months?

Clients using ‘Take It Now’ have told us they now look at a price ‘two ways’, whereas in the past they would just have let the bet run its course. Now punters can view a price as possibly shortening before the conclusion of an event thus giving them a chance to take a profit early. With this mindset, many of our clients are coming to see themselves not just as gamblers.

A good example of the benefits of ‘Take It Now’ can be seen if you had backed Chelsea at the start of the season to win the Premier League. They started faster than the rest, but in recent seasons they have begun to fade from January onwards. With that in mind, clients who backed them at 2/1 at the start of the season can take a tidy profit as they are now 4/5 to be champions.

In a world where you can sell a 20/20 cricket game four times over while a Test day struggles to sell half their allocated tickets, instant hits are becoming a necessity rather than a nicety. Inevitably some will ask if this is gilding the lily, particularly those who view betting as a distinct alternative investment industry. They say that with more markets, more ways to bet and many more places to do it, there will come a point where enough is enough.

However, the betting industry, whether it likes it or not, seems to be increasingly aligning itself to the financial industry. Finance is constantly updating, refining and innovating the way people trade the markets, and for them the ‘Take It Now’ option was available years ago.

Of course, ‘Take It Now’ is no sure-fire winner for our clients. I remember one case recently where we saw a client back Aston Villa to beat Man United at Old Trafford at 7/1. When Villa scored and moved to 2/1 to win the game he immediately pressed ‘Take It Now’. Had he let his bet run, however, he would have won the lot.

There are naturally thousands of stories either way on this front, but the overwhelming message from our punters is that they love to have the choice. It speaks for itself that over 10% of our bets are closed out early by punters looking to take a profit or limit a loss; that’s up from 5% a year ago, and we think the figure will double again in 2010. The power is with the people and they sometimes say ‘Take It Now’.