Betfair live chat 10th August

A place to discuss anything.
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Point2Point
Posts: 81
Joined: Fri Apr 24, 2009 6:59 am

We’ll be hosting a Q&A session on the forum on Monday 10th August between 6pm and 7pm (UK Time). We’d welcome questions on any topic of interest to Betfair customers.

To help us get through as many questions as possible, any questions that you do have can be emailed in advance to [email protected]. Unfortunately it is not possible for us to respond to each email individually but we will attempt to answer all questions raised via the live Q&A session.
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jimrobo
Posts: 1289
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2009 12:49 pm

any particular reason for the live chat??? Or is it just a general one?
Bet Angel
Bet Angel
Bet Angel
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Joined: Tue Apr 14, 2009 3:47 pm

Here is the question we have sent to Betfair.

Can you clarify what the current issues are surrounding the process of turning a market in-play. A lot of markets have suffered recently from not being turned in-play and there seems to be a lack of explanation from Betfair on what is causing this other than 'technical issues'. It would be useful to understand exactly what these issues are?
andyfuller
Posts: 4619
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2009 12:23 pm

Does anyone know if the Live Chat will be open to banned Betfair Forum members?

Also I hope they aren't planning on using it to discuss an increase in the Premium Charge or another similar charge.

Would be interesting to ask if they regretted introducing the Premium Charge? And, what they have used the extra income for to help grow the markets as my experience of the last year is that the racing markets have done the opposite of growing. But as the BF bouncers are unlikely to let me in it won't be worth asking, unless someone else would on my behalf....
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LeTiss
Posts: 5386
Joined: Fri May 08, 2009 6:04 pm

I'd be interested to listen in. Agree with BA & Andy, they seem to invent ever increasing charges, yet their service appears to be in decline. I find Betfair's actions over the past 12-18 months very distasteful. They championed themselves as the punter's hero, and would never close winning accounts, but then decide to hit them with whopping charges instead. I never did hear a acceptable or reasonable explanation for PC
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jimrobo
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Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2009 12:49 pm

profits up 29% the only thing they regret is not introducing it sooner!
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TheRiddler
Posts: 102
Joined: Sat Apr 25, 2009 5:02 pm

jimrobo wrote:profits up 29% the only thing they regret is not introducing it sooner!

They probably also regret not charging enough. If they realised at the time that betfair users would do little to nothing when slapped with a big fat one then they may as well doubled up with a slap from both sides. Yeah there would have been a few moans and groans but they'd all be back trading the next day. And they wonder where all the mug punters have gone to at the race track? They're all at home sat behind their computers learning how to become mug traders.
Bet Angel
Bet Angel
Bet Angel
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Joined: Tue Apr 14, 2009 3:47 pm

Can you clarify what the current issues are surrounding the process of turning a market in-play. A lot of markets have suffered recently from not being turned in-play and there seems to be a lack of explanation from Betfair on what is causing this other than 'technical issues'. It would be useful to understand exactly what these issues are?

Peter Webb (Bet Angel)

Dear Sirs,

Why are there so many cases where a horse racing market is not suspended and put in-play at the off.
What are these 'technical difficulties' that is the common justification.

Vics


There has been a considerable increase in the number of horse races failing to suspend and go in-play over the past few weeks. I think most users will excuse the odd 1 or 2 ever now and then, but theres been about a dozen over the past month. Are you's concerned by this problem and is something been done about to prevent it happening again.

Regards

John


We unfortunately had several instances during July when it was not possible for us to turn horse racing markets in play. We’re acutely aware of the inconvenience and annoyance this causes customers on the, thankfully rare, occasions where this happens.

The application our operations team use to manage markets was, for reasons not readily apparent, intermittently not communicating correctly with the betting exchange. We asked several key individuals in our engineering team to drop everything to attempt to get to the bottom of the problem. We had not made any recent changes to the parts of our system involved, so there was no obvious element to focus on, nor an obvious point to roll back to. Frustratingly we were unable to replicate the problem by recreating identical conditions on our test systems, or to determine why only certain markets were affected.

As I’m sure you’re aware, the hardest problems to resolve are those where you are unable to replicate the problem, so while continuing to investigate we’ve added a number of additional diagnostic tests to give us an even more precise picture of what’s going on. Since we began logging the output from these tests we’ve not had a recurrence of the problem. Obviously it would be far more satisfactory if we’d identified a specific issue that we’d been able to fix, but we can say that we’re monitoring the situation every day to try to get to the bottom of the issue and to ensure that it doesn’t recur. Once again we’d like to apologise to customers for the inconvenience caused.
Bet Angel
Bet Angel
Bet Angel
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Joined: Tue Apr 14, 2009 3:47 pm

1.Have you any plans to make changes to the Premium charge?

Yes. It’s been nearly a year since we announced the charge, and we’ve recently completed a review to confirm that the outcomes matched our predictions, and to see if there are changes that we believe would be an improvement. Overall we’re happy with the way the charge has worked. It’s affected slightly fewer customers than we originally projected, considerably fewer than 2,000 of our 650,000 active accounts, but principally it’s affected the customers we expected to incur it.

Based on feedback we are planning to make some changes:

1. The current charge considers only customers who’ve demonstrated consistent profitability over the long-term, currently defined as 60 weeks. In conversations our customers have told us that they’re concerned this isn’t long enough, and that they’re worried about the possibility of incurring the charge during an extended successful streak. We’ve therefore decided to reduce the number of customers affected by the charge, and the amount we collect, by increasing the time period over which a customer would have to exhibit highly consistent profitability from the current 60 weeks to the entire lifetime of each customer’s account.
2. We chose to assign the commission we collect at the settlement of each market equally between those who win and those who lose, to focus the charge more on those who are incredibly consistent winners and to reduce the charge for big risk-taking winners. We chose to use the actual rate that we collect commission at the settlement of each market, rather than a fixed approximation, because we concluded it would be preferable to be accurate. Feedback from customers has been consistent that they consider transparency and certainty to be more important, so we’ll therefore simplify the charge by valuing the contribution of all markets in which customers lose at 3%, regardless of the actual average commission rate.
3. We included transaction and data request charges in the calculation of what customers have paid, reducing the charge collected. Customers have told us that they believe this is incorrect, that those charges exist to discourage excessive use of the site, and that there is the perception that those customers who run robotic strategies that use our facilities intensively are being treated unreasonably favourably. We’ve agreed and we’ll be removing transaction and data request charges from the calculation. The number of customers affected by this is negligible.

We expect those changes to be implemented in October this year, and we’ll communicate the precise details to affected customers nearer the time.
andyfuller
Posts: 4619
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2009 12:23 pm

Would have been nice of them to actually allow everyone to see the Q&A. I might be banned but clearly what was being discussed is of key importance to everyone.

Wonder what next years price hikes will be as I am sure we will all be back tomorrow for more of the same.
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TheRiddler
Posts: 102
Joined: Sat Apr 25, 2009 5:02 pm

andyfuller wrote:Would have been nice of them to actually allow everyone to see the Q&A. I might be banned but clearly what was being discussed is of key importance to everyone.

Wonder what next years price hikes will be as I am sure we will all be back tomorrow for more of the same.

Oh dear. You didn't go upsetting those nice people at betunfair did you? You must learn self control. You know they're only in early stages of fleecing its customers. I've thought about some fresh and wonderful ways of them placing their hands in users pockets. I must remember to email them my ideas. Who knows I might even secure a small commission for myself. Now that would be tasty!
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