Thanks to Niall O’Connor for the pointer.

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BetFair Games, BetFair Poker, BetFair Casino, BetFair Multiples, and all non-UK BetFair customers (including those trading on BetFair’s prediction exchange), are under the radar of Malta’s Lotteries and Gaming Authority. (As you all know, Malta is a state that is a member of the European Union.) I told you I would have a short post on the API delay for BetFair’s non-UK traders. Here’s what I gathered.

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BetFair have indeed imposed a small amount (I heard a figure of 120 micro-seconds) of additional latency in the delivery of their API feeds served to non-UK customers. The move from London to Malta was motivated by regulatory concerns (it has to do with checking IDs).

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I asked whether that API delay (which could accumulate, I feared) was hurting their international customers…

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Tony Clare (of BetFair):

We’ve seen no evidence to suggest that the changes we have made in the processing of bets placed by non-UK customers have had any detrimental affect on their experience when using Betfair, nor have we seen any shift at all in the profitability of UK customers vs. non-UK customers as a result. There are many factors that will determine the time taken from submission of a bet request to confirmation of the bet’s status being received, and the majority of those will be dependent on the customer’s own set-up and the precise routing of traffic across the Internet.

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Thanks to Deep Throat for the link.

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