BetFair’s new bet-matching logic

Chris F. Masse March 17th, 2008

Michael Robb’s e-mail to me:

Hi Chris,

Firstly I’d like to clarify that Betfair is a privately-owned, limited company and is not listed on the Stock Exchange. Therefore, there is no trading in its shares and so when Ed Murray says, “I just pray that the people tempted to buy Betfair shares…”, he is mistaken because people simply cannot buy shares in Betfair at this time.

As you say, however, Betfair is trialling an improved bet matching process. This work is ongoing and will affect a limited but growing number of markets.

Previously we would only attempt to match customer bet requests against unmatched bets of the opposing bet type (backs vs. lays) on the same runner in the same market. That part of the bet matching process remains unchanged. Where there is no opposing bet to match on the same selection, rather than just leaving a customer’s bet request unmatched, we will now attempt to match the bet request against unmatched bets on other runners.

For example in addition to matching back bets against lay bets we can from time to time match customer back bet requests across all selections, or customer lay bet requests across all selections. The effect of this change is that customer bet requests will stand a greater chance of being matched.

There will be circumstances where a customer bet request could be matched by either process. In this case priority will always be given to matching in the traditional way, back vs. lay, and the process for matching those bets is identical to the way this was done previously. Where a market is turned in-play and bets are subject to an in-play delay this also remains unaltered. Bets will only become available to be matched once the in-play delay has expired: backs vs. lays first followed by matching across selections where no other match was possible.

If you have any questions on how this change will affect you or your readers the Q&A session, as you mentioned, will take place on the Betfair forum this Wednesday evening (19th March) between 6pm and 7pm (UK Time).

I hope this helps. Please let me know if you have any further questions.

Kind regards,

Michael