A. Change the fundamental rules of the exchange, of course.
Despite the presence of rounding errors since the days of Flutter, Betfair decided one regular Friday to implement a change to the allowable bets on the exchange. Result – chaos. (I wrote about my experience of this rounding error back in 2015 here)
And why this rush to get the change in before any announcement or consultation with third party vendors? Who knows?
Surely one option they had, and this may be a bit novel, would be to limit or ban those that are trying to make “consistent attempts to take advantage of bet rounding”? Instead, Betfair’s unique approach to customer service was to inflict a solution that effected everybody. Here’s the link to the announcement. Note also the edit in the announcement, a good two days later, when they bothered to include an example of the new rules.
Looking over the socials you can see that all the software providers were hit equally, with very poor communication from Betfair. Gruss worked late into the night to come up with a fix, releasing a new version in the small hours of Saturday morning. However, with the impacts still being realised, further updates followed over the next few days. It still appears that in some circumstances greening just won’t work, although I think a close to green trade could probably be made, slightly weighted to back or lay, thus avoiding being rejected.
Whether Betfair make further changes to improve/worsen the situation remains to be seen. You can be sure you’ll find out, after the event. But for those that provide the liquidity to enable an attractive exchange (yes that is the traders), it probably just feels a bit shit, to be fair.
TRADER247 