Betfair's silence on the matter is deafening.

silence untill betfair respond the case against has been made

Surely the press will have hold of this tomorrow?

I have profited from peoples mistakes in the cricket and rugby markets. I have also lost money by making errors myself but what comes around goes around. However now if I may an error betfair takes the**-up and I will not be able to get other peoples balls up ?

''All that is needed for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing''

you what new boy?

Another village has lost its idiot, and an uneducated one at that.

Cheers Basher that's what I thought.

Sorry for my belligerent remark. Yes I agree we should do something. Sometimes someone crashes the market to get a big bet on, now betfair takes the order and arbs the bet?

Thanks mate for your reply.

No more rick hunting then :-(

although most big price ricks will be taken by the queue on the alternative side of a market :(

not for the time being mate. Let's see how Betfair defend themselves! My view is that if they had nothing to hide then we would have been informed of this change to the bet matching procedure. Perhaps they thought we wouldn't notice :-)

imo, betfair will quietly remove this and be rather sheepish in response.. lol

I bet they haven't realised the implications....

Thanks for your replies lads. I'm not compos mentis after being on the source all day so cheers for explaining the implications to this layman.

I remember reading this article last year, how does this relate to the new matching system.



Betfair betting engine goes supersonic

Case study: Extreme transaction processing at nose-bleed speeds...

Tags: betting, betfair, transaction processing, volume


Betfair has developed a new core betting engine that can process staggering volumes of bets per second and significantly reduce the cost of each transaction.


The technology the company came up with is so impressive, it was the clear winner of the CNET Networks UK Business and Technology Retail & Leisure Technology Project of the Year Award for 2007.

Betfair is an online betting exchange - a peer-to-peer gambling site acting as a broker between parties for the placement of bets. The concept is similar to a stock exchange.

Matt Carter, Betfair director of architecture and advanced technology, explained to silicon.com customer trends are moving towards a high volume of small-value bets, which, in turn, produce small-value commissions. He said the only solution was to develop a system that could process exponentially more transactions for a lower cost than traditional betting engines.

Carter said: "It wasn't a case of whether we needed to do this, we have to do it. It's a question of survivability."

Betfair CEO David Yu set the company's R&D team the task of increasing throughput by 100 times for free. Project 100X took two years to develop and was run both internally and with three other partners, in what Carter calls a "bake out" - whichever team came up with the best prototype would get the investment for the rollout.

The budget for the entire project was less than 1m over two years.

In the end, the R&D team came up with a betting engine, called Flywheel, that could demonstrate a throughput of almost 100,000 transactions per second, while also reducing the cost per transaction by 200 times.

Even with a traditional betting engine, Betfair processes five million transactions per day - much more than the London Stock Exchange's transaction processing system is capable of.

The R&D team expects one million trades per second to be possible through Flywheel, which it estimates is the equivalent of the entire combined annual global equity trading volume being processed in a matter of hours.

However, for Carter, the key achievement is the cost levels. He explained the whole system runs on two servers with an approximate cost of 25,000. This, he said, is in comparison to a high street bank with a similar throughput load that will typically use a mainframe costing many millions of pounds.

The engine hasn't been installed into Betfair's core systems yet and Carter couldn't give any precise deadline for migration. In the interim, the company is about to implement Flywheel Lite, which will unleash some of the performance of the new system, while sweating the assets of the old betting engine. Carter doesn't see the need to make use of all that transaction processing power just yet. It is at his disposal when the company needs it.

The modular nature of the architecture, which Carter compares to a service-oriented architecture, and the transaction processing power, gives Betfair the freedom to innovate and come up with new products to offer punters.

Carter said: "If we hadn't found a way of increasing transaction volumes, while lowering the cost per transaction, Betfair would have been forced to change its business model."

Betfair has applied for a patent for Flywheel and is in discussions with other organisations, both in the private sector and education, about how they can share knowledge on extreme transaction processing.

Well it it doesn't say much for the "CNET Networks UK Business and Technology Retail & Leisure Technology Project of the Year Award for 2007" if they give it to a company that can't even devise a simple algorithm to give best execution for a betting exchange they have run for around 8 years. The idiots who run these awards should stick to judging vegetables at village fetes.

Two points.

1) We should be guaranteed best execution, and what I am matched at, the person I am matched against should get the same price. The software is in place to identify this, and to not use this to benefit the customer is unfair. If I wanted to buy some shares at 2.12 and my broker knew that someone was selling same at 2.00 then the two parties would be matched at the same price, (2.06?) and the broker would take his commission. A broker who bought the sellers shares off him for 2.00 and then sold them to me at 2.12 would be abusing his position as a broker. Are there no rules regulating this?

2) The 5 second delay should apply to everyone in the market. As I have pointed out elsewhere, that 5 seconds is vital in the case of a boo-boo to cancel any unmatched money. Right now you are screwed if there is a bet on the opposite side of the market.

cpfc4me 10 Mar 03:02
Two points.

I couldn't agree more.....

2) The 5 second delay should apply to everyone in the market. As I have pointed out elsewhere, that 5 seconds is vital in the case of a boo-boo to cancel any unmatched money. Right now you are screwed if there is a bet on the opposite side of the market.

Point 2 is complete rubbish, you have always been matched instantly after the 5 seconds if the money is in the market....that is still the same but using a wider market. (so it does apply to everyone)

People don't help their arguments by floating round this beating the delay cr@p