1000/1 odds being taken

[plake]

I had the experience last night of 4 of the 1000 back bets being taken - used when fractional stakes are being bet.


GB / Ling 21st Jul / 23:30 7f Mdn Stks Focail Maith Back 11567935986 21-Jul-10 23:31 C 1,000 5.00 1,000 (5.00)
GB / Ling 21st Jul / 23:30 7f Mdn Stks Jacks Revenge Back 11567935985 21-Jul-10 23:31 C 1,000 5.00 1,000 (5.00)
GB / Ling 21st Jul / 23:30 7f Mdn Stks Bearheart Back 11567935984 21-Jul-10 23:31 C 1,000 5.00 1,000 (5.00)
GB / Ling 21st Jul / 23:30 7f Mdn Stks Paco Belle Back 11567935983 21-Jul-10 23:31 C 1,000 5.00 1,000 (5.00)

Note that the bet time is after the start time. All of my bets are triggered from excel and are BACK before start time and not kept inplay.

Around the time of this race the app did seem to be having some trouble refreshing the prices.

Any idea why this occured as I assume the bet must have been placed inplay.

[GaryRussell]

To place a bet below minimum stake it has to first place a back bet at 1000 for the minimum stake then update the bet to minimum stake plus required stake which creates a 2nd bet for your required stake then cancel the bet at 1000 and update the odds to your required odds. If the available odds at the time are already 1000 then the first bet will get matched immediately preventing the process from working.

Are you sure your spreadsheet cannot allow a bet to be triggered after the off? What criteria does it use to prevent this?

[Ian]

Why is the stake £5 if you are trying to bet below the minimum ?

[GaryRussell]

Why is the stake £5 if you are trying to bet below the minimum ?

Australian Dollars. The scheduled start is 23:30 according to their statement, must be Australia.

[Ian]

Ahh Ok.

[plake]

I understand what is happening with the 1000/1

I use AUTO Select - 'wait until the scheduled off of the preceding race"

Bets are triggered at the 10 second mark before the scheduled start of the race.

I use "BACK" with no modifiers.

i looked back through the last 3 months results and these are the only bets with a timestamp that is after the scheduled start.

Also I thought Australians were blocked from betting inrunning on horse races xcept over the phone.

Would like to understand how the bet got taken - never happened before in several years. If it was place before the off then would not have been taken. 1000/1 being taken must mean the bet was placed in running or placed as a keep bet.

Is it possible for the application to hang between refreshes because of communication issues that caused the bet to be place inplay.

[GaryRussell]

Is it possible for the application to hang between refreshes because of communication issues that caused the bet to be place inplay.

Yes in theory. The prices could be requested 30 seconds before the off, but are not returned until say 10 seconds after the off. The in play indicator would still show "Not In Play".

It's impossible for me to say if you placed the bets in play or not or with "keep in play" set. You could ask the API team at bdp@betfair.com. They should be able to confirm if placed in play or with "keep in play" set.

[plake]

I got a response from bdp.betfair.

Bets were set to trigger "Back" at 14:29:50

Race went in-play at 14:30:40

Bets were placed at 14:31:41

Does this imply BA hung on my machine for 110 seconds then placed the 1000/1 bets about 20 seconds before race ended.

I did notice that there was a period of intermittant refreshing for about 5 minutes around this race. The rest of the days racing continued without incident. Is there anyway of stopping this happening.

I assume if BA does not refresh and get a new time value before the bets were placed there is no way of stopping this rare event.

[mak]

maybe you could add in your trigger an if statement like
=if(E2<>"In Play",your trigger here

[Captain Sensible]

I got a response from bdp.betfair.

Bets were set to trigger "Back" at 14:29:50

Race went in-play at 14:30:40

Bets were placed at 14:31:41

Does this imply BA hung on my machine for 110 seconds then placed the 1000/1 bets about 20 seconds before race ended.

I did notice that there was a period of intermittant refreshing for about 5 minutes around this race. The rest of the days racing continued without incident. Is there anyway of stopping this happening.

I assume if BA does not refresh and get a new time value before the bets were placed there is no way of stopping this rare event.

Seems a very long lag 110 seconds what refresh rate have you set? I've had problems with the Aus server being slow but not that slow. Although your program is set to back 10 secs before the off does it have set conditions that may not have arisen until 14:31:41? There are occasions where the API returns duff info and situations where the In Play flag may not have been correctly returned.

I'd go with mak's suggestion as you can't rely on Betfair to reject your inplay bets even though they're supposed to.

[GaryRussell]

The triggers aren't processed until after the prices have updated and this includes cell E2 which displays "In Play" or "Not In Play" and D2 which displays the seconds until scheduled off.

You can check both these cells before populating the trigger column so if there is a big lag and the next refresh didn't occur until 10 seconds before the end of the race then you have the opportunity to avoid triggering the bets. The only thing that cannot be accounted for, which is pretty unlikely, is if the bets are triggered before the off but take several seconds to reach Betfair's server by which time the market has turned in play.

How exactly are you making it place the bets 10 seconds before the off? Say for example you are calculating the seconds before off and then just checking that it is on or past that time then that could still trigger the bets if there is a big lag and the next refresh is after the off.

[plake]

I use Time to go in D2 and trigger when time to go is <15 with a 2 sec refresh period. The use Auto Select next race at the scheduled off.

Usually the bets are triggered and the next race loaded well before the race actually starts.

I had noticed the refresh was a bit erratic and looked in the excel error log and there were a couple of System Runtime InterOpServices COMexception errors on refresh events.

The bets would have been triggered some ten seconds before the scheduled start and held in BA but appear not to have hit the API queue for another 100 seconds and BA didnt do a refresh for all of that time. On the next refresh it loaded the next race.

So is it possible for BA after it has received a Trigger to be busy, then send the bet to the API when it becomes not busy - System Runtime InterOpServices COMexception and then do the next refresh and move on.

While the erratic refreshes were happening the clock in D2 was still counting down, just the market was not being updated.

First time its happened in tens of thousands of bets.

[GaryRussell]

It's not possible for BA to be busy after reading the trigger. It would have immediately sent the request to Betfair. If it happens again you can also check the transaction log under the account menu. It will show the time it actually tried to place the bet.

[plake]

Is it possible for BA to keep working - talking to the API but a problem in the InterOP communications between BA and Excel meaning Excel is not being updated properly.

I did notice that the Time in D2 continued to countdown on the refresh cycle but the race data was not being updated.

[GaryRussell]

No. Cell D2 is updated in the same write to Excel as the prices and the prices are only written when the prices have been received from Betfair. The fact that D2 was updating proves there was no problem with the interop between BA and Excel.

If it appeared the the prices were not updating then the API must have been returning the same data on each refresh giving the impression that nothing was updating. Unfortunately this is impossible for me to prove.