Leopardstown - 14:00 - Christmas Hurdle - Voler la vedette

[Lagos]

I still cant believe Betfair got away with this.
Every time I see Tony Calvin on the box I grimace(He was the frontman at the time.
One of the other guys on here who had also made a substantial sum took quite a bit of leagal advice which I was party to and they basically said if we took them on we would lose.
I complained to IBAS but they strangely judged Betfair had done notheing wrong.
It was a rogue bot on someones account!
.....pull the other one, I wonder if that person will ever surface??!!
VLV was a great mare who gave Big Bucks a scare at the festival a few months later.
The name means 'steal the show' ....she certianly did!

[shakespeare]

I complained to IBAS but they strangely judged Betfair had done notheing wrong.

The IBAS website says that they "adjudicate mainly by reference to the operator's own terms and conditions".

I think the law and the regulators haven't fully caught up with bookies yet. It's only as recently as 2005 that gambling debts became fully enforceable in court. There's some way to go before punters, including BF users, are properly protected.

[Dallas]

Thought this was worth a bump for those who weren't around for that infamous day in 2011

Also, read about it here
https://www.betangel.com/blog/betfair-e ... as-hurdle/

[Euler]

Somebody has added a detailed response on the blog post detailing exactly what the error was: -

https://www.betangel.com/blog/betfair-e ... as-hurdle/

[Euler]

It's that day again!

[spreadbetting]

Dear Betfair customer,

At the 2.00pm at Leopardstown today, customers betting in-play on this race will have seen that Voler La Vedette was available to back at 29 when the in-running market was suspended, and that a considerable sum was matched on the clear winner at that price.

An investigation has revealed that this was due to an obvious technical failure which allowed a customer to exceed their exposure limit and in accordance with our terms and conditions, all in running bets on this race, both win and place, will be made void.

As you will have been impacted by this decision, we fully appreciate the dissatisfaction that this will cause you, and we apologise for a very poor customer and betting experience.
The relevant clause in our terms and conditions can be found here (please see clause 6) http://www.betfair.com/aboutUs/Terms.an ... /#section6
Regards
The Betfair Racing team

[Euler]

The trigger was a guy running a ridiculous bot on the API on one of his unfunded sub accounts.

It was doing a martingale over and over again, going from tiny to huge stakes in a cycle. The max stake on the exchange was some very large number, I don’t remember what, but bigger than 2e31.

Two things happened at the exact same moment: this martingale bot tried to place some huge bet way over the numeric max (and crucially, over that subaccount’s exposure limit) this caused a numeric error inside the trading engine exposure checking code.

This bet was rejected and you never saw it: all good. Unfortunately, the long dormant bug activated and allowed another bet which was not over the numeric max stake but was over the exposure limit for the account (it had nothing like the 20m to bet in it) to skip the exposure check.

Because it was a valid stake and the exposure check was missed, it went into the market and became good value pretty quickly. The nature of the bug meant that both bets had to be placed effectively at the same time, otherwise the tiny window of time that the numeric error opened up for the second bet to skip the exposure check would be closed again.

All involved in all aspects of handling this bug at the time were given the usual spiel of secrecy, which was fair because the bug was exploitable for a little while until fixed.

However, it was fixed long ago (although similar bugs probably existed because the codebase was very difficult to reason over) and now that whole trading system has been rewritten in a more modern language with a safer architecture (and it’s much much faster). I imagine there are all sorts of bugs in it, but they won’t be this type.

[Derek27]

Somebody was asking the other day if the exchange has a maximum stake. I guess it's now 2^63.

[Euler]

Ten years ago today!

The amazing thing is that today the market didn't even reach £1m traded, just £920k. Ten years ago £2.5m, though probably distorted by the circumstances.

[Seth]

I remember looking at the amounts in disbelief and didn't go in as heavy as I normally would simply because I thought Betfair would be voiding some of the bets, especially my winning ones. Plus there weren't that many full timers around back then, was a lot easier to make a living back in those days.