General Betting
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It's interesting reading on here about the many hideous mistakes that people have made with bets on Betfair. Fat fingers, accidentally adding an extra zero, clicking 'lay' instead of 'back', and so on. But unless you make a million-pound mistake, Betfair are all too willing to let the bets stand.
Perhaps now it is time for Betfair to give us some better options to help stop us making mistakes using their website? At the moment, all they offer is a 'confirm bet' option (good, but still who reads their bet back every time?) and a stupid pop-up if you are backing at odds of 100 or more.
Things that Betfair could easily add (all optional, in case they get in the way):
1) Per-event (or per-bet) liability limits, so you could choose to disallow making any bet with a liability above £100 (or some chosen amount)
2) Warnings if your bet would be matched instantly and far above current prices (so entering 29 when the horse is currently 2.9 would be flagged up)
3) Warnings if you are backing/laying the whole field in an incomplete market (or one where runners may be removed) - the 'money saving experts' protector
These would be simple to add and would prevent many of the palpable errors that occur but are not voided on a daily basis. Why does it take £millions for Betfair to start caring about errors?
Perhaps now it is time for Betfair to give us some better options to help stop us making mistakes using their website? At the moment, all they offer is a 'confirm bet' option (good, but still who reads their bet back every time?) and a stupid pop-up if you are backing at odds of 100 or more.
Things that Betfair could easily add (all optional, in case they get in the way):
1) Per-event (or per-bet) liability limits, so you could choose to disallow making any bet with a liability above £100 (or some chosen amount)
2) Warnings if your bet would be matched instantly and far above current prices (so entering 29 when the horse is currently 2.9 would be flagged up)
3) Warnings if you are backing/laying the whole field in an incomplete market (or one where runners may be removed) - the 'money saving experts' protector
These would be simple to add and would prevent many of the palpable errors that occur but are not voided on a daily basis. Why does it take £millions for Betfair to start caring about errors?
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Can't I just decide whether it was a mistake or not after the race?
In seriousness though, everyone that trades HR in running either has variations of these things or would switch off all of the things you are suggesting. |
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People could be free to turn them off if they don't like them. They then only have themselves to blame.
But you could also design it so that the checks wouldn't even need an extra confirmation - the website 'place bet' box could change colour and a huge 'WARNING' could appear below the bet form as you typed in the bet so there would be no extra delay or an extra step of clicking a 'confirm' message if you didn't want it to. Just a simple "This bet is far larger than your normal stakes" warning message that appeared the second you accidentally type that extra zero into the page would save some people from disaster. |
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Yeah - fair points - but I would still prefer to have one of these accounts where I can decide after the race.
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That's only for the millionaire Betfair customers, it seems.
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the option to be presented with a message when you submit a bet at a price which is more than, say 10% in implied chance away from the last matched price on the selection would be a simple and welcome addition for many. it would also impede trap betters as well, although cross matching has done that to a certain degree already.
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Agreed DStyle. They could even allow your bet not be placed unless there was an offer on the other side within a certain percentage. On quiet markets is the cross matcher not the number one trapper nowadays?
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ffs...isn't everyone an adult here?
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An excellent idea, Mr Magoo.
As some forumites might remember, I lost £3k here in October by laying a horse in-running at 21 instead of 2.1. These simple measures would guard against this ever happening again. And for those players who'd find such limits restricting, a simple opt-out system could easily be implemented. |
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If this is something people really want surely there is an opportunity for a developer to make an app.
What could it be called? |
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Would you buy the app Dr J?
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cat, the ones who would need it most would be the ones least likely to use an app.
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The ad could read "if you think you don't need this, you probably do!"
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with background music supplied by Queen
"We will we will trap you". |
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I was thinking of Hot Chocolate's
"everywon's a winner" |
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I think the reason why BF shy away from adding this sort of functionality to the web site is that they want to keep things as simple as possible for the average punter. They don't want new customers coming to the site to see a vast array of menus/options/buttons which they have to get to grips with before they can place a bet.
For more sophisticated punters, they'd argue, there is always the API, which allows one to implement whatever functions you choose. |
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. . . of course using the API can itself lead to serious mistakes. One of my bots went a bit crazy earlier this month and lost me about £3k.
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Mine did once too. A lot of my code is belt and braces against a similar recurrence,
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"Act in haste, repent at leisure" is an apt motto for any player.
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I would love
a) To be able to set a liability per market. If there are price bands I can set within that then great, but the liability thing would do. b) For different price bands to be different colours so I don't have to repeatedly check that the 1.01 im laying isn't 101 or 10.1 I also remember them saying that a) was coming soon, about a year ago when I last mentioned this on some forum or other. |
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Oh, and I wouldn't buy an ap to do this. I still find it hard to trust the auto-refresher no matter how many people tell me it won't expose me to extra charges, so a more complex ap would be even harder to trust.
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I've also asked Betfair for a) before, several times. At the last Q&A, they said it was the first time they'd heard of it
 These features should be on the website for everyone, including new and infrequent Betfair users, not via some 3rd-party API. If designed properly, they wouldn't get in the way, nor would they add any complexity to using the site. You'd only notice them if they spotted you were about to do anything dumb. Or maybe Betfair should just give up on developing their website and make everyone use their product through 3rd party tools. Or has this already begun? |
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I rely on 'maximum liability per click' several times per week. I place a lot of manual bets, and anyone that does that will know that sometimes you will lay when you meant to back. Setting a modest 'liability per click' means my lay of say 30 quid at 25.0 (meant to be a back) exceeds permitted liability.
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I still find it hard to trust the auto-refresher no matter how many people tell me it won't expose me to extra charges,
Lori it's a shame you won't try the API, you'd have a field day, it's really easy to set up and use, and any questions you can just ask here. On Gruss I set the refresh to 1 second and throttling limit to 10 requests per second which avoids any charges. |
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In fairness Trev I've been thinking about it a lot more the last few months and will almost certainly try it in the next 3 months at some point. I genuinely appreciate the kick up the rear too as I'm sure it would help me no end - if only to save me from RSI with clicking something like twice a second for hours on end every day.
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Perhaps ''You are backing a result that cannot happen''
Example being backing, say 0-0, usually at 1000, when a goal has already been scored. |
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Betfair's willingness to accept bets on things that have already happened is another big murky kettle of fish...
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