Problems with Bots on Betfair

[DeepBlueDevilFish]

Not sure if this is quite the correct place for this thread but I thought I'd put it in here. Seems that there was a race at the weekend where all the bots on Betfair got stung for a serious amount of money. £100,000 is reported. The race in question was the 3:40 at Newton Abbott yesterday. There's a long thread on the Betfair forum about it. Apparently one guy who was running a bot ended up with a £40K liability from a starting balance of £200 ! It seems what happened was that the horse Catch The Bug was a non-runner but this wasn't picked up by Betfair and it had a declared 0% reduction factor. The normal human bettors knew about this and kept the price low on Catch The Bug so that the Bots kept laying on a book that they calculated as being over 100%. All the figures on the screen were green so the Bots just kept going and Betfair let them because they didn't know about the liabilities that were being built up. But hey presto when the non-runner was removed - Red everywhere ! :eek Question is should Betfair foot the bill or should they go after the money from the Bot operators who weren't paying enough attention about what was going on ? Suspect the former as Betfair would not want the adverse publicity of ruining some of their best customers (ie. the bot operators). Interesting stuff I thought. What a mess for Betfair to sort out !

[GaF]

Re: Problems with Bots on Betfair

It seems what happened was that the horse Catch The Bug was a non-runner but this wasn't picked up by Betfair and it had a declared 0% reduction factor.

Not a big Horse Racing man - so bear with me - does a "0% reduction factor" mean that there is no rule 4? So all of the bets on the NR were voided, leaving the bots with losses on the rest of the field and no rule 4 to compensate? Why would there be no rule 4? Was this the official BDP bots or unofficial ones? Regardless, do the bots not have a stop loss? (i.e. a maximum stake on any individual race - user defined) That's madness!!! Not betfairs fault, but the negligence of the bot developers/operators, surely. Does Betfair have a duty to pick up on NR within a certain amount of time? Don't your highstreet bookies sometimes delay putting NR in, to make their odds look more attractive, then hit with a rule 4 after the market is reformed? If bookies can delay, then surely betfair isn't responsible for an accidental delay..... Anyway, as you say, interesting - I'm off to betfair to find the thread......