penny bets

Probably done by Bots trying out a new system.
Thus you risk little.

Thx for the answer... sounds about right.

No it's not bots trying systems to small stakes, it's people systematically trying to nick pennies.

I had one the other day where they matched nearly 1,000 bets like this, equivalent to stealing about £4.

I'm sure a lot of the time this happens I won't even notice. I notified Betfair, and they say they have taken action, but if someone created a bot that did this once one each market, they'd probably make a few quid a day. The transaction charge stops it getting out of hand I think.

Try going to an empty market like o/u 0.5 goals in football early on, and offer early odds. I do this and get lots of instance where my pnl = 0 and all I've had matched is one of those 3p penny stealing bets.

Have you seen Office Space?

Mar 22, 2012 -- 1:53AM, TheInvestor2 wrote:

No it's not bots trying systems to small stakes, it's people systematically trying to nick pennies.I had one the other day where they matched nearly 1,000 bets like this, equivalent to stealing about £4.I'm sure a lot of the time this happens I won't even notice. I notified Betfair, and they say they have taken action, but if someone created a bot that did this once one each market, they'd probably make a few quid a day. The transaction charge stops it getting out of hand I think.Try going to an empty market like o/u 0.5 goals in football early on, and offer early odds. I do this and get lots of instance where my pnl = 0 and all I've had matched is one of those 3p penny stealing bets.

Agreed.  Somebody in Ireland was advertising the bot for sale a few years back. I thought that betfair acted fairly quickly to step on the 1p bot users.

Haven't seen it Jesse, but seems similar, except that these guys aren't breaking the law, just the Betfair rules.

Betfair should try to stop this completely somehow, not very difficult to do conceptually, but probablye expensive to implement.

One way would be to calculate balances and transfers for won/lost bets to fractions of a penny in the background, whilst displaying the rounded balances to the user.

Shirley, the guy in Ireland, probably had his account closed, which is why he was trying to flog it!

Perhaps if this money was coming out of Betfair's own pocket rather than that of their users, this problem would have been dealt with in short order...

No risk penny bets, front running with £1.99 bets, trapping ....

Betfair say they take a dim view of such things and come down hard on the perpetrators yet such bets are always still there. Maybe they don't like people encroaching on their territory.