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Suspension

Introduction​

Bookmakers want to carefully manage markets to ensure minimal risk exposure. This involves suspending markets under specific circumstances, such as when an outcome seems certain or during critical moments like a decisive team fight in a match. In addition to providing odds, we include a suspension reference value for relevant markets in order to facilitate this decision.

This value answers the question "How likely is something deciding to happen in the next few minutes?" and ranges from 0 to 1.

A value close to 0 indicates stability and that the market is far away from being closed.

A value close to 1 indicates an immediate suspension, i.e. we expect the market to close soon or we rate the market as highly volatile, being able to go either way very quickly.

However, for future-based markets like those predicting the next map, suspension isn't applicable, and it's denoted as 'Nan'.

Suspension availability​

Suspension reference is part of the Bayes Live Match Prediction message and is contained once for each market (see data format example). It does not exist in any other stream.

Presently, our suspension feature is active only for Dota and Counter-Strike markets, as we're not actively developing suspension for League of Legends.

Suggested usage​

With the suspension reference being just a guideline in the form of a risk indicator, it's up to you to decide when to suspend a market. We recommend starting by setting a global threshold value of 0.8. Any market with a suspension reference above this value should be suspended.

We are ourselves using the suspension reference in our own odds generation in this way.

To manage your risk, you can set the threshold higher or lower, where a lower threshold would lower your risk of upsets. However, this would also mean you'd be suspending markets more often.

Suspension rules​

While the specific suspension rules of a market are subject to change and listing them for all the markets we offer would be prohibitive here, we can provide a general idea of the suspension rules for the most common markets:

  • Probability-based suspension rules, e.g. for match winner, map winner or CS2 round winner: If a market's probability reaches certain thresholds, it is likely to close soon and offering bets becomes increasingly risky, so the suspension reference will increase. Thresholds are chosen more restrictive for fast-moving markets and for slow movers like the match winner the thresholds are a bit more lenient.

  • Time-based suspension rules, e.g. for the Dota2 first tower market: Some markets show a strong time-driven behaviour and we use that signal to provide an additional closing signal, together with other suspension rules.

  • Event-based suspension rules, e.g. for the reaching overtime market: Some markets' suspension reference is driven by certain game state, e.g. when the game reaches a state where the market might be closed within the next few rounds. In the case of the CS2 market of reaching overtime or not, this is when either team is within two rounds of winning the map. Similar triggers apply to various other markets, e.g. specific kill counts being reached or specific Dota2 buildings being damaged or specific items being in play.