Dumb things you've done on Betfair

Didn't you try yo trade out of the position, maybe for a small loss ?
  It looks to me as if the 1.7 was very close to the correct market price.

That's what I should have done but I figured I'd let it ride, thought it might be one of those stupid things that actually work out. 3-1 down heading into the 6th, not looking good, a costly lesson

I've made similar mistakes on Horse Racing. I find alcohol is normally the culprit :-(

100% correct MrE, however in this instance there is a happy ending

Back     Your
Odds     Your
Stake     Your
Profit
Colorado (U Jimenez)     1.06     €2.40     €0.14
    1.07     €6.52     €0.46
    1.7     €114.62     €80.23
    1.71     €174.01     €123.55
    1.72     €4.45     €3.20
Lay     Backer's
Odds     Backer's
Stake     Payout Liability
Colorado (U Jimenez)     1.6     €302.00     €181.20

In other words I managed to green up @ 1.6 to the tune of a cheeky £26 profit if Rockies win. Rockies squared up in the 8th 3-3 heading into final inning. A lucky escape for sure for me[:p]

Rockies take the LEAD

Alcohol sure plays a part, dude imo.  How very silly of you, let that be a lesson!

Actually, I'm the worst, done all stupid bets.  Man Utd v Celtic one example a few years ago.  Layed 2.5 goals & lost 500.  Gotta laff

Half my reply missing, not too worry, hey-ho.  Can't be bothered to rewrite it, but in a nutshell I got the bet ass about face & would have won if
I had bet as I'd intended to do.... Took me until the following day to realise, derrr....

Indeed noadis, 2 lessons to take here

1 If a price looks too good to be true it's because it probably is

2 Never EVER bet after a feed of pints*



*Admittedly this is not the first time I've learned this lesson

My "top ten" losses all came from mistakes which, of course, is always frustrating.

Mine mainly come from when I have a long-list of plays for a day and the races are back to back. 

Yesterday, the latest....

I won't lay a horse over 5/1.  At that point, I'll consider the place-lay. I'll also place an in-running lay at 4/1 or so that if it moves in and the elements are right, I'll lay in-running.

Had a horse marked as "strong" and "value" that I had noted on Saturday for Monday. 

Race rolled in, laid it at 3/1 place market and put up an in-running at 5's since it was 15/1.

The horse was Cavite at Wolverhampton.  Odds moved in constantly through the race and it held on to win. 

Shaking my head on the mis-read and the loss, I looked closer at my notes; 

Scribbled beside the "Strong" was the word "back" which I had unfortunately been overlooked.  friggin' 15/1 ew targeted two days before and laid.

Dumb things I've done on betfair

#1  Join betfair

#2 lumping on big on Argentina to beat Costa Rica or some other well know footballing power after an day/ evening down the pub . Falling asleep and missing the game totally . Ended 0-0 anyway so was on a lose from the off but probably could have traded out if sober for a small lose !!!Convinced theres something in lager that makes you an instant gambling expert

I posted before...A breathalyzer attached to the modem would save thousands!

And, in the case of a friend of mine, his dignity.  He came home ripping drunk, logged onto some free porn site, passed out with his head on the keyboard.  Unfortunately, he had left his front door wide open so at 10AM, his parents, his 70 year old aunt and sister walked in unannounced to pick him up for brunch, their jaws hanging open as some fake asian lesbians were on his 22 inch screen.

"What saved the situation", he said, "was my ability to splurt vomit ten feet in the air causing them to vacate the premises."

Ive done one dumb thing on betfair that i got lucky with and a dumb thing im still not sure about with an online bookie . First with betfair , a couple of yeras ago i did a bookings match bet on a late nite argentina v peru game ,, i ha d backed the peru to get the most points , i smashed 800£ on it , i watched the game and thougt i had lost went to bed well pissed of :( , two months later i logged into my betfair acount to see 1500 ,  after 5mins i realised by checking my bet history what had happend . so got lucky . but came unstuck when i opend a sporting bet acount a few weeks ago ,, i did my first rugby bet won ,, then i put the winnings on the total match points in another game ,  over 44.5 ,,5 mins later i though id wack another 100 on , this time the odds were over 43.5 same price 5/6 ,,,, game played final tally was 44 points , so i knew i lost my first bet over 44.5 but had one the second ,, so loged back in , no money ?? turns out i had selected under 43.5 points ,, i could have smashed the laptop ,, still think they changed it as i checked them both in running but got no proof ,, oh well never using them again .

Here's a few..

Laying the 9/4 fave for American Idol at 1000 in 2006
Backing a 7/1 shot at 1.3 when I meant to lay the 1.3 shot in 2003 or 2004
Seeing a FREE MONEY thread on Betfair, reading it and then realising that it was my bet that I'd forgot about and hadn't cancelled before the event went in running.
Spotting a £500 even money bet in running on an otherwise empty rugby hcap market (dont really bet on rugby, just happened to be casually perusing the markets) that should have been 1.1 or lower, thinking it was too good to be true and taking too long to convince myself my initial reaction was right so that someone else gobbled it up

The rugby one was probably 2007 ish.  Thankfully nothing since then that springs to mind.  Always have the "what if" option checked these days which helps you from making typo errors

Some brilliant(scary) stories here, albeit for all the wrong reasons
I guess making dumb mistakes is all part of the Betfair experience. Not neccerily a bad thing either provided you learn from it and NEVER make the same mistake again

used to be a mr mischief on an arb forum...is this the same one?

Had a grand on some obscure football match when pissed when 1.2 and 1-0 up....Was gonna lay at 1.18 but fell asleep....You guessed it , woke up and 1-1 (they scored 94th minute...)

^
that's not really dumb, just unlucky

I read a book about online poker it seemed to be suggesting their could be money to be made late on Friday and Saturday nights from drunks going online to play the game.

no moves...a mate of mine lives in California; eight hour difference to here.  More for eastern Europe.

Most nights around 8 his time, he plays on-line poker taking on people from Europe.  He says it is ridiculous on how easy it is.

Dancing on Ice, first week elimination market, I backed all 8?, 10? men to be first eliminated. Turns out that only the women were dancing in the first week, the men in week 2. I too discovered my mistake reading a ´free money´ thread.

A friend of mine (not me, honestly) deposited 100 quid. Over the next eighteen months he traded it up, in 10 and 20 quid bets on reality tv stuff, to a balance of 1012 quid. Quite impressive really, until he is bored one saturday afternoon, and decides to have a tenner on the even money fav. in the next race, a 5-furlong sprint. He keyed in 10 as his stake, but it didn´t appear in the box so he wrote 10 in again. He vaguely saw something appear in the stake box and pressed ´submit´, just before the race is off. To his horror, he sees 1010 green next to the fav, and 1010 red next to everything else. If he had just 3 quid less as his initial balance, the bet would have been rejected...
Obviously, the nag lost, and he hasn´t played on here since.

^^^^ Didn't he instantly try and lay it back in running?

Backed 1.5+ goals at half-time, when I meant to do it full time. It lost!

turtleshead   That was the first thing I asked him as well. His bet was placed a second or two before the off, and he didn´t see what had happened until about 2 furlongs into the 5 furlong race. His non-comprehension turned into horror, by which time 3 furlongs had passed and the horse´s price had drifted beyond the point of any meaningful act of retrieval.

trying to lay it back in running would be pretty dumb imho

in so far as following one bad bet with an even worse one isnt a good strategy

timbucktooth- nightmare scenario.

a mistake i make all too frequently in running is putting the wrong bet in the wrong box.... no losses on a busy game ,but on quiet games it can be a costly mistake.
- Or reading the score wrong after a goal (getting the teams round round the wrong way ),  many times i have been first up to the plate offering 7.8 when the real score odds should be 3.25 .... done that a couple of times at a cost

Had the 1 remaining unit on Fav at Roscommon so laid it to quarantee a win. There was 1 unit on another horse who got withdrawn so there ended up being 2 units on Fav. It won and instead of winning £2,000 I lost £300.

^^^^^ that sounds unfortunate rather than dumb tbh.

Clydebank, if he had managed to put the bet on within a couple of seconds of the market going in play, how would that have been a bad thing? Even if he had to take a small loss (e.g offerring 2.1 or 2.2), gotta be better than sticking with your entire 4 figure bank resting on a coin flip, no?

My own contribution is losing just over a grand on the debacle that was the pompey manager market. Kept telling myself it couldn't happen, but it did. Lost numerous chances to red up and get most of my stake back. I blame myself for ever getting involved, but feel justified in being sore not only to the manager and chairman who blatantly lied in order to rig the market, but also to betfair for not voiding it when they did the same to the equally corrupt Davydenko market which was no more blatant! A painfull lesson learned...

turtleshead a quite likely scenario is the bet would only be matched if it was going to win.  Sticking blind bets of that size in a very fast moving in running market with a significant time delay is crazy.

Mordin on the dumb scale that isn't that dumb.

My most stupidest bet was on England to win a handicap bet on cricket.  Pieterson was on 98 and I needed one more run to win my bet.  I had just lost a fiver on something and staked 411 (my bank) at 1.01 for the bet to come off. Pieterson swung his bat back ready to smash it for six, and hit the f***ing stumps with it.

I disagree totally Clydebank, in a situation like that if you've accidentally backed at evens and want to secure most of your bank back offerring 2.1-2.2 the second it goes in play makes perfect sense and in no way would only get matched if it looks like winning.

Don't forget many pre race layers stick up in running backs blindly to secure a profit - giving a 10-20% profit on a red hot favourite would almost certainly be taken unless it literally falls out of the stalls. Also note that there is only a 1 second delay in running.

And even if it did fall out of the stalls, if you are the first to offer the price and someone has ticked the box to take the same one or lower as soon as it goes in play, you would be matched.

making the first deposit

bet £500 on womens football

czech republic v england

bet england 6/4

weather--blowed a gale--england has 75% possesion---did everything but score---draw

next time they met england won 4 or 5 nil

Spotted an easy arb on a race backed with a bookie layed here, horse won, nice quick risk free £50 I thought....until I checked my balance.....Two horses running in the same race one called Medicean man the other Time Medicean...Yep backed one and layed the other and of course the one I layed won.  Cost me about £300 and there never was any arb in the first place...Wadda fcukin idiot.

bet 1K on an unders market in NBA less than 2 minutes from the end at 1.01. THEN thought, what happens if it's a draw?

that was a relaxing few minutes.

btw, someone had a 1K bet on the mavs for game 6 at 1.8 last night, so the OP is not alone.

Laid all the favourites for the Brits.

A few years ago, I wrote a simple bot to automatically back horses pre-race. To start off cautiously, I made it use just £2 stakes and it would bet at odds that were way way higher than my tissue prices. So it would often be backing outsiders at odds of 1000.

Unfortunately, due to a massively dumb coding error and shoddy checking, when it came to placing the bets the program used the odds as the stakes and ended up backing most of the horses for a grand at 1.01

-Put 4k on an a 2/1 shot just trying to centre my ladder, could only get 1.5k out before the price hit 100s
-Laying 10s about an evens shot in a volleyball match, then trying to hoover the 10s without realising it was mine (and I missed out)
-Laying £6666 instead of £666, cost me 1k
-Put £800 on a selection around 3.5 when the true price was 100s, all because I switched the coloumn layouts of the selections

christ magoo, what did that end up costing you?

Betting on WTA , backed S.Williams to win 2-0 today, really stupid and regretful - Got busy, and forgot about the bet before it was too late - I still ask myself why I did it. I will never bet on WTA again.

Hadn't used Betfair that much but I once lost £1000 by simply clicking the blue box instead of the pink box, I went to lay the draw between TNS and Liverpool with Liverpool leading 3-0 and doh I went and backed the draw instead ... total waste of money !!