What's been your most costly mistake for which BF were responsible?

[eightbo]

Just had £340 worth of bets void which were apparently placed inside of a 20-second window between when a race actually started, and when it was late being turned in-play by BF.

IncidentReport.JPG

Bets are retrospectively void so my 'what-if' figures were normal in the moment and there was no way for me to know my liability was so huge.
These bets were to hedge an existing position so turns out I was actually gambling on the market all along without knowing!

Of course this means I also had the chance of winning, but you know, sod's law and all that

I can recall being significantly stung by an outage before on a Saturday afternoon but in theory I could have managed my position on a different exchange/bookmakers. There was also a time a market settled whilst I was mid-trade and my account balance turned to -£0.01, which meant I couldn't close my position. I actually found that so funny that by the time I realised what was going, and the race was already In Play, the odds would have changed dramatically anyway by the time I deposited so I just sat and watched the race. That one did win fortunately! Definitely one of my highlights from trading.

We have to expect + be prepared for mistakes but sometimes it's really not our fault!

Anyway it got me thinking...
What's been your most costly mistake for which BF were responsible?

[Euler]

Betfair crashed during the Cambridgeshire at Newmarket a few years ago and it was too late to mitigate anything. Of course, the wrong horse won and I lost £7.5k

[eightbo]

Betfair crashed during the Cambridgeshire at Newmarket a few years ago and it was too late to mitigate anything. Of course, the wrong horse won and I lost £7.5k

Some outlier that must be on the P&L

edit: Can you recall your emotions during that time?

[Euler]

Large losses on my account are generally rare and usually caused by something out of my control.

[xitian]

And actually “only” cost you £4.5k because of Premium Charge.

I stopped checking what I’ve won and lost through void bets, crashed servers, etc... Over the long term it’ll be up and down, and will be pretty negligible compared to my yearly p&l. If it is a loss overall then it’s just a cost of operating. And if it does turn out to impact you that much then you need to reconsider your stakes and size of edge you have.

[LeTiss]

There was an outage a few years back which cost me £650

To make matters worse, I was stomping around my flat in such an uncontrollable rage, I stubbed my big toe on a door when kicking the air in frustation. A week or so late the nail went black and fell off

Bastards

[Euler]

And actually “only” cost you £4.5k because of Premium Charge.

I stopped checking what I’ve won and lost through void bets, crashed servers, etc... Over the long term it’ll be up and down, and will be pretty negligible compared to my yearly p&l. If it is a loss overall then it’s just a cost of operating. And if it does turn out to impact you that much then you need to reconsider your stakes and size of edge you have.

That more or less sums up my approach to it. I've had some big exceptional wins, but never really celebrated them as I don't mourn the unexpected losses.

[Euler]

Though that one did piss me off a bit for sure!

[Derek27]

Lost just over £100 on a football match that didn't go inplay, about 10 years ago.

Eightbo, where did you download that information that gives a description of the error, action and number of users affected?

[eightbo]

Over the long term it’ll be up and down
If it is a loss overall then it’s just a cost of operating

Really great way of looking at things, I'll be sure to adopt this mindset.

Eightbo, where did you download that information that gives a description of the error, action and number of users affected?

It's not an online resource, just some internal documentation for their own reference.
Doubt any company would want a list of cock-ups hosted publicly!

[spreadbetting]

Eightbo, where did you download that information that gives a description of the error, action and number of users affected?

It's not an online resource, just some internal documentation for their own reference.
Doubt any company would want a list of cock-ups hosted publicly!

If it's internal how do you get access to it?

[Derek27]

I presume it was emailed.