What's Really Behind the £600m Horse Racing Betting Scandal

[00:00] Every now and again, something unusual happens, something that defies logic and belief, a single race, a single horse within that race, and an It's 600 million to be precise, and around this time of year when I recorded

[00:16] seems almost impossible that could have possibly happened, and this is the story of the 600 million pound betting era.

[00:32] Uh, the horse has jumped the last hurdle. to cross the line as a winner.

[00:44] Because if you do any inplay betting, you will know. And when a horse has crossed the finish line, you always And that is because everybody has taken all of the back money

[00:58] In any particular race, there will be a little bit of uncertainty, And certainly when a horse has crossed the line, all of the money that's available Apart from that didn't happen in this particular race, but have a

[01:15] Cross the line. Take on three to four in front and at the last Levi, silver and clear of Mur in second, clear of power station and Shaker Mills.

[01:29] Put Levi and Andrew Lynch out in front racing up towards the finish and Bo Levi will win for Colin Murphy and Andrew Lynch. So let me show you what the Be Fair website looked like as this horse crossed

[01:45] And when you first look and glance at this, you sort of think, well, You can see something at very, very short odds because it is obviously one until the penny drops that this was actually the horse that finished second.

[01:58] And if we rewind the market slightly to the stage just before the race was complete, you can see exactly uh, why this race was so particularly weird because the horse that actually went on to win the race was available at odds of 29.

[02:14] You could bet millions on it. Uh, which obviously was a very unusual circumstance. So unusual that Bedford actually voided all of the Inplay bets

[02:26] And this was one of the very few times that bets Angel has actually Now when you place a bet on a horse to win and it does, you get your money,

[02:38] unless that is you backed Volla Vette in the big race at Leopardstown on Wednesday via the online gaming company, Betfair, the website has had to cancel a 23 million pound payout after a technical hitch, and the punters are furious.

[02:52] to find out just what happened. The fine performance from the mail, it wasn't even a photo finish, but many

[03:04] of the people who bet on Vette and thought they were in the money were actually left empty handed thanks to the growing complexity of online gambling. As the race started, person A offered incredibly crazy odds of 28 to one

[03:21] that the favorite would win the race and claim to have 600 million pounds. To back it up, BET Fair's users started to immediately take him up on the When the race ended, the favorite won as expected, and person A was in line

[03:37] Unfortunately he couldn't, but he only had a thousand pounds in his account and Beford software should have detected the mistake, but it says by fluke, their system went wrong at exactly the same time.

[03:53] Andrew Lynch on the near side, that's not gone down well with its customers who are venting out online. So somebody with a thousand pound in their account managed to create a

[04:05] Fortunately for them, only 20 odd 24 million pound or so was I think people were so shocked that they couldn't believe, plus their Unlike the person that laid the winner at odds of 29.

[04:23] Now the response to this was one of sort of like complete confusion because how was such a thing possible, especially when you learn that the person only And also, um, there should have been an exposure limit on that account.

[04:37] Um, so this was like a double failure in one sense or another. You write stuff, you try and error trap. that you couldn't possibly account for.

[04:52] But the interesting thing about this was that, yeah, you know, the response they avoided all of the in running bets. Betfair did apologize and did a bit of a press round to, uh, attempt to

[05:09] mention specifically what the error was. And there's a clear reason for this, and that is that if you highlight and exploit to somebody, then you're gonna have loads of people to send to try and replicate it.

[05:23] Um, so that is, uh, something that you obviously wouldn't want to do. was, but a big guessing game started to try and understand specifically And in fact, somebody on the forum, um, came up with a very plausible

[05:40] solution, which was suggesting that if you put an integer, uh, into the could actually end up with exactly the amount that was available, um, to back.

[05:53] Now it's a bit confusing to explain, um, how that is. But basically, if you put a negative back bet into the system, converted it

[06:05] through several different data types, and then converted it into an integer, if you dunno what an integer is, it's a, a zero, it's a positive or a negative or a zero. But if you basically put it through this convertible loop, you

[06:19] So it's very likely that this was potentially the issue. However, what happened a few years later was there was an anonymous, uh, posting that sort of outlined and claims to be, uh, sort of have some

[06:35] What I'll do is I'll give you a quick overview of what they said, but it sort of, you know, does fit in with this theory, um, that it was a, a data type era of some sort, but it also clarified, um, that in fact this was corrected

[06:50] and eventually the entire code base was rewritten to modern standards and But yeah, you know, the explanation is, um, worth having a look at so that you can understand exactly what was going on.

[07:04] So this was one in a generation sort of weirdness to occur on the exchange. I've never seen anything like it, uh, in my 25 years. And, you know, you do see oddities now and again, and they're the odd technical

[07:16] errors of this size never happen. Occurrence. Typically what you tend to see are people making mistakes or misjudgments

[07:29] some spectacular errors as well. I have a brilliant one on football if you want me to talk about that, but yeah, that was the story of the 600 million pound betting error.

[07:45] However, what happened a few years later was that there was an anon, however, However, what happened a few years later was that there was an, an

[07:57] anonymous, however, what happened a few years later was that there was an.