Hopeless v Clueless
I had to laugh when seeing this on the Betfair forum describing the England v South Africa rugby international. Certainly when watching the game for some strange reason I was reminded of the movie "Dumb and Dumber". Certainly the result was fantastic - not only for the fact SAF blew an 8-point lead no doubt allowing more people than myself to profit from the price movements during the game, but also England won, which means their coach Andy Robinson will keep his job and it's one less team the All Blacks will have to worry about come RWC 2007.
One team that should be worrying the boys in black is Ireland. They were ultra-impressive in dispatching Australia last night in horrible conditions, especially in the first half where their ball retention was astounding. No surprise to see on the back of that performance they have shortened from 3.55 to under 3's and equal favouritism for the Six Nations.
However the main story from the weekend comes from horse racing, where someone lost around a quarter of a million pounds on Betfair during one race. How and who is open to speculation, but some poor sod had the misfortune to lay a horse (who happened to be around a 3/1 favourite) for 237 quid at 1000.00 during the first few seconds of the race - and probably laid for a bit more at prices from 4.00 to 5.60 judging by the matched odds information.
Of course the horse duly won, otherwise there would be no story. There is speculation the horse got stuck in the stalls and someone was trying to vacuum up all the money wanting to back the horse, but the more plausible reason is someone made a keying error using one-click trading software, and as I use such a thing I know how easy it could be done, even if you do know what you are doing.
However what I find intriguing is someone had over 250,000 quid in their Betfair account (you can't have credit in these things) and have no limit on their liability on their account. There is a function on Betfiar that limits your liability on any one event to whatever figure you set - it's automatically set at 5,000 quid when you join and you have to e-mail them to get it changed.
Any gambler worth their salt would not have an open-ended liability on their account, precisely for this reason (assuming it was a keying error). A very painful lesson for someone who judging by the amount of money they have to throw around, should know a helluva lot better.
The best story to come out of this was someone who had laid the favourite for 10 quid at 3.00, and put a back up on the horse at 4.00 for 7.50 quid as the race got underway. Yes he got matched at 1000.00, and you can imagine the celebration for this small-stakes punter as the horse crossed the line first and close to 7,500 pounds was about to register in his account.
So while the English and South African rugby teams may have been hopeless and clueless in the weekend, they weren't the only ones.
One team that should be worrying the boys in black is Ireland. They were ultra-impressive in dispatching Australia last night in horrible conditions, especially in the first half where their ball retention was astounding. No surprise to see on the back of that performance they have shortened from 3.55 to under 3's and equal favouritism for the Six Nations.
However the main story from the weekend comes from horse racing, where someone lost around a quarter of a million pounds on Betfair during one race. How and who is open to speculation, but some poor sod had the misfortune to lay a horse (who happened to be around a 3/1 favourite) for 237 quid at 1000.00 during the first few seconds of the race - and probably laid for a bit more at prices from 4.00 to 5.60 judging by the matched odds information.
Of course the horse duly won, otherwise there would be no story. There is speculation the horse got stuck in the stalls and someone was trying to vacuum up all the money wanting to back the horse, but the more plausible reason is someone made a keying error using one-click trading software, and as I use such a thing I know how easy it could be done, even if you do know what you are doing.
However what I find intriguing is someone had over 250,000 quid in their Betfair account (you can't have credit in these things) and have no limit on their liability on their account. There is a function on Betfiar that limits your liability on any one event to whatever figure you set - it's automatically set at 5,000 quid when you join and you have to e-mail them to get it changed.
Any gambler worth their salt would not have an open-ended liability on their account, precisely for this reason (assuming it was a keying error). A very painful lesson for someone who judging by the amount of money they have to throw around, should know a helluva lot better.
The best story to come out of this was someone who had laid the favourite for 10 quid at 3.00, and put a back up on the horse at 4.00 for 7.50 quid as the race got underway. Yes he got matched at 1000.00, and you can imagine the celebration for this small-stakes punter as the horse crossed the line first and close to 7,500 pounds was about to register in his account.
So while the English and South African rugby teams may have been hopeless and clueless in the weekend, they weren't the only ones.
Labels: post mortems
posted by Rob Crawford at 2:34 PM
1 Comments:
Just stumbled across your blog. Interesting reading. I was at Twickenham for the NZ and SA games. As an England fan the SA game was a joke and even though it ended in a win with the boys showing some heart at the end I think Robbo is more likely to get the boot now than he was before the game.
A question I have been thinking about for a while is how good are NZ? They are way out front at the moment but is that because everyone else is playing so poorly? I suspect that it is partly that and partly that NZ are a decent side.
All my Kiwi mates are well and truly on the fence on this one. I think they have suffered too much during the last 4 world cups!
Post a Comment
<< Home