@HH

"which is poppyc0ck coz i (and others) have seen it..."

How can you tell?  I can think of a couple of things - like seeing prices move in relation to a faller or slow start and those prices changing less than a second after the event - but you'd need to (1) have a complete view of the market so you could tell if the change in prices was unmatched bets being cancelled or new bets put up and (2) be trackside or otherwise have a feed with an exactly known latency.

How are you doing it?

On the substantive question of "why have a 1s delay at all?" I *think* I remember rightly that on the old Public API ("API 6") which BF offered when I was first on here (and thought I might be bright enough to write a winning 'bot - spoiler, I am not) there was no specific "in-play" flag on markets, so the only way to tell a market was in-play was a non-zero bet delay (and bet delay was an integer, so 1s was the smallest value).

That was all a long while ago and the API has moved on since - but that might be the historical context?

"market makers are the best customers for the exchange eco-system

In any peer to peer betting system the most important customers are the losers. Ideally for betfair everyone would lose slowly and hang around providing liquidity and givimg them commission.

A system that protects winning market makers at the expense of losers losing far more quickly is going to collapse.

In the case of horse racing in running, the casual players want to be able to click on a horse and get a price near to what they see. They are going to get extremely annoyed when they click and don't get matched and see the horse win unbacked, after a dozen times getting matched on a loser. They are not to continue betting in play.

https://www.betangel.com/betfair-inplay-delay/

Paste and Go

did the Bet Angel bloke just say...

'it was rumoured that an outside broadcast engineer was in fact the 1st in play millionaire' ?

well i never.