Cashout - How is it meant to work

Forum Q & A

CASH OUT NOW

The CashOut button does not give the correct amount based on odds available. Why? (Stuart, London)

The Cash Out button calculates its offer using the second best back prices and second best lay prices. This is to protect customers against unmatched bets in fast moving markets. If the better prices are still available once bets are submitted then these will be given to the customer through best execution. In other words the customer will always get the best prices available when using Cash Out.
Mike – Sports Product Team

The explanation sounds good in principle, but how does anyone know that they actually give what they say is the better price. Most people might accept what was offered, and not query it if the better price was not given.

Notice that Betfair have their own message stating that a problem with the Sportbook cash out exists....they are working on it.

Any vaguely competent customer would be able to identify if best execution wasn't provided by the Cashout feature with any regularity.

Quite right JT, however......

many / most on here would take things at face value, and TRUST the value Betfair has given. Which means that people are effectively being mislead / connned / cheated whichever.

Whenever iv looked at the cash out amount on my bets the offered amount has been ludicrous,if you want to cash out use the exchange market instead of paying a 30% premium for the pleasure

This thread refers to the use of the Cashout feature on the exchange. No fee is charged for using it.

As pointed out early in the thread, the cash out feature calculkates/places bets a tick or two away from the best price to increase the chance of getting on, so the offer won't look as good as doing it yourself at the best price.  But if the prices are unchanged when your cashout goes in, you'll get best price execution to the price you were looking at anyway.

It's not as if BF ahave anywhere to hide on this - you can see the bets that were placed to execute the cashout in 'My Bets'.

nothing you can not do yourself,
a waste of time,
betfair would be better off spending more time making their site
work properly which has cost me well over $10,000 already.

nothing you can not do yourself


i'm afraid that probably doesnt apply to the majority of casual punters Betfair are wanting to attract, FATMan

are we sure that cash out offers best execution if the prices change while the bet is being submitted?

as any trader knows there are numerous occasions when you balance a book based on the available odds and get a lopsided book because better odds were available when your bet was matched.

does this happen with cash-out, or is bet volume dynamically adjusted milliseconds before submission, or heaven forbid, is there some skimming going on here.

Perhaps you can experiment with this and report back if you continue to have concerns?