Smarkets site technical fault
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I placed a lay bet for £50 on golden poet in 1.50 listol.. but hadnt been matched… looked on betfair and got it matched there!!!
Anyway went back to smarkets to cancel bet and wouldnt cancel came up technical error… tried again same thing… looked at race didnt look like had been matched….Anyway poets world got placed double checked on smarkets and still saying 0% matched…. went to desktop version…. AND…. £1050 had been matched @ 1.71 costing me £745!!!!!!!!
What the hell can i do???
Phoned them and they said not really much they can do????
+0September 17, 2016 at 3:04 pm
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Pretty much the same thing happened to me but costs thousands…
I never got my money back.
+0I had a technical fault with Smarkets yesterday too. It wasn’t able to show me what my bets were in the right hand column. And I was waiting on some to match, but had no way of cancelling them if I so wished (as it happened, I didn’t so wish). It’s a shame that they have these issues, as I actually prefer the interface and am generally comfortable using them. Another issue is that the liquidity on 3rd odds markets often disappear – eg if you can back a horse at 8.0, and the second round of backing is at 7.8, then if I lay it for 7.6 then the 7.6 back odds in 3rd position don’t always show the liquidity I’ve just added.
Then there’s the issue with the mobile site, which is utterly hopeless. And they think they’ve improved it by only giving the 1st market odds. That’s no use at all to me. So I very very rarely use the mobile version.
I’m sure at some point I’m going to lose a tonne of money from a Smarkets technical issue – at which point I’ll also move to Betfair.
+0Small in comparison to that loss, but i lost £50 the other day. Every time i went to lay a bet on the mobile it would countdown until 1 and just stall. Tried over and over again and it kept repeating itself. In the end the horse lost on B365, i emailed them and said i have screenshots here (of every single time it happened). They said because i had not risked money with them. they would not be liable. They also pointed out a lay bet i cancelled a few minutes before (which wasn’t being matched) and hid behind it, saying it would have been matched if i had left it. Pretty disgraceful tbh, they provide a service for us to use and if we loose money because of a fault in this service, they should be paying out (providing we prove it).
I hope they can compensate you in some manner @supert.+0
Damn thats terrible but nothing you can do really.
Smarkets has been having problems again for the last two weeks. Midweek, the markets were frozen and wouldnt update so couldnt lay off two of my bets, luckily one of them won which cancelled out the loss on the other.
As above, there was a few hours when I couldnt see my bets in the right hand column, I immediately flagged this up with chat support and they said they would look in to it. However, the problem was still happening in the evening.
Its been the case for well over a year now that smarkets cannot handle its traffic and the activity happening on it. It has been so unreliable at times particularly on saturdays.
+0They definitely need to improve their servers especially at weekends. Maybe worth using Betfair at weekends and during the day when traffic is high. And using these guys in the evenings or late at nights.
I wonder how many of their customers are actually Match Bettors and people who do arbs. Because until i started doing this i had never heard of them.
Also what internet connection are people are using. Are you using standard or fibre optic super fast broadband.
+0Lucky to not have had any problems with Smarkets thus far, so I feel really sorry for you OP, losing that much hurts my stomach. My only concern with Smarkets, like already mentioned, is on the weekends the high traffic on the site sometimes leads to markets coming a temporary halt especially when I’m trying to do in play bets, but usually they fix up just in time, at least for me anyways. Also, sometimes I lay a bet and it says it hasn’t been matched when I’m sure it has, so now everytime I lay a bet, I always refresh my page 2 or 3 times to be absolute certain it has went through. I agree Betfair is much better and reliable, but being a student, the commission difference is small but every little helps as I am about to return to uni, until I run into a massive problem, I think I’ll stick with Smarkets.
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@ supert that’s a bad loss. Like others I’m sceptical that you will get the money back but, of course, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. And as someone else said, you should be able to make it up in coming weeks, though the hit is hard to take at the moment.
I’ve never used Smarkets. I hadn’t even heard of them when I started doing this so decided to give them a swerve for the time being and stuck with Betfair and, since they merged with Paddy Power, also Betdaq for when I need to avoid laying on Betfair. I had been intending to open an account, given that so many on this site and others seemed to be happy using them, but this post is making me think again.
@ dave_jones Betfair were a revolutionary outfit when they started up back in 2000, the first company to offer peer to peer betting markets, at least to any significant scale, and for many years seemed to operate on the basis of very punter-friendly principles and operating practices – for years their motto was ‘winners always welcome’. But this all changed after they floated on the stock exchange and became a public company. Their corporate mentality seemed to change at that point and the usual dreary impulse towards unmitigated capitalist greed and exploitation took over :). They still won’t ban you from the exchange if you are a winner (there’s no need) but, just like any other bookie now, they will employ any means possible to extract as much profit from you as possible.
Betdaq don’t seem to get mentioned much on here. They also offered a competitive advantage over Betfair for a long time, charging only 3% commission, however, they seem to have decided they are on a par (they’re not) and now charge the same as Betfair. That said, in my experience they have always provided a reliable service and offer decent liquidity in most of the markets I am likely to be betting in.
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More problems today, they have a notice up apologising for problems with the Watford game and the Spurs market keeps crashing too.
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Had an email saying still looking into it but they have confirmed there were technical difficulties at the time in question… My main concern was there was a 3 minute window where the bet hadnt been matched and on numerous occasions i tried to cancel it… even it the £1050 had been matcged i could have easily backed out of the trade either on smarkets or betfair however at no point could i see the trade had been matched or for what amount!! Like i say even after the race it was showing 0% matched???
Still completly gutted…. Matt was very kind and has contacted them on my behalf and i forwarded Matt screenshots of the bets and the time i transferred and struck my bet on betfair because it looked as though smarkets site had crashed and the trade hadnt been filled!!+0
Damn sorry to read this thread Supert and hope you get compensated. From my own experience though in a 3 day period last week i paid smarkets just over £100 commission. Had i been on betfair it would have cost me £250. Works out a lot of extra money to be paying out if i was to do that regularly.
+0As someone who was one of the earlier members of betfair, (think I joined around 2002), I’ve seen them squeeze and squeeze the profitabilty of laying horses over the years. Commision rose and rose to todays 5%. I saw the introduction volume scales for deciding if you got a discount on your commission. And then just when I had enough volume to bring it back down to profitable levels, they brought in the dreaded premium charge, which really gave me the hump.
Believe me, Betfair had it’s share of cock ups in the early days and I got shafted numerous times for serious money because of the site going down just at the wrong moment. Occasionally they’d reimburse you, but not always
‘
Adrian Massey, stopped doing his ratings, (my major source of making money), and Betfair was taking the piss, so I gave up the exchange betting, and moved into other hobby revenue streams. It’s only recently, I’ve returned back on the scene, and doing a bit of matched betting to keep the grey matter ticking over.Whilst betfair has gone from strength to strength, I do resent giving them anymore of my cash, (they had thousands and thousands of pounds off me over the years), I’m more than happy with smarkets, been a couple of small issues but nothing major, and not lost anything because of it. They are like Betfair were at the beginning, and how betfair should be now, (instead of the monstrosity betfair have become, by turning from poacher to gamekeeper). I’ve found liquidity on smarkets absolutely fine, much better than Betdaq was at the start.
Long may it continue….
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Hi just an update to the situation…. had email after a few days of investigating basically saying although they accept there was a fault at the time my bet was struck and that the bet was larger than my usual stakes unfortunatly because the whole of my bet had been matched with other users in good faith they cant be liable because they cant promise access to the site at all times… gutted but i understand that if the horse had been out of the frame i would have had over £1k extra in my smarkets account!!
Mark from this site was really kind to contact them on my behalf, however as i thought after the event … even though on numerous occassions i tried to cancel the bet there was nothing they could do!!
Managed to claw about £300 back since Sat however still a big hit to take!!!+0Sorry to hear that supert but I had a feeling that’s what the result would be. On the bright side if you have managed to make back £300 already (that’s a normal month for me), then it should not take you too long to get your money back.
+0@BillHill did you ever consider trading on Betfair back in the early days. From what I have read things were a lot easier back then to make money. I’ve heard guys who were making a killing back in the day have found todays Betfair market place very difficult to crack and have more or less given up.
+0@Dave_Jones I didn’t need to trade in the early days, punters were throwing out daft odds left right and centre at the start. Anyone with any knowledge of stats as I was, was making a tidy sum. I was only doing it at weekends with small stakes but I could easily make several hundred quid a day without breaking sweat.
When you realise that 33/1 shots place about 1 in 12 times, and on the place market, (remember in those days most average punter wouldn’t have a clue about laying place markets), you could easily place back for 16/1 or more (I once got 36/1 on a 33/1 horse to place, I think someone tried to lay on the place market thinking it was the win market. came in 2nd, happy days), it all added up.
I usually played the place markets as there were so many people who didn’t know what they were doing. After a while they got used to it, the odds tightened up to what they should be, and the profits got tighter. Betfair got greedier, and priced me out sadly.
But I got a nice wedge of cash out of them though
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