Bet Results Showing as Cancelled When Not

[Sensei27]

Over the last week or so I seem to be getting a lot of bets that show a result of CANCELLED in Excel, but they weren't.

Usually sending a '-6' refresh fixes it and it will show the actual results, but loading another race doesn't. It does kind of mess up automated systems that rely on previous results!

Everything was fine up until the beginning of last week. Is this an API change, or is there a setting I can change that gives more reliable results information?

I did update to the latest version a couple of days back in case that would help but still get the same problem.

[MollyMoo]

All bets show as CANCELLED following the result of a race being declared at Betfair. Is that what you're experiencing?

[GaryRussell]

I think this is an API issue. For a short time (not exactly sure how long yet) after the market has closed the request to get results is incorrectly returning as cancelled. Once it has populated the result it does not check again for efficiency.

Are you loading the next market close to after the current market has closed? You could probably workaround this issue by making sure you don't load the next market (and therefore trigger a results update) until 30 seconds after the market has closed.

In the meantime I shall see if a can create a workaround in my code.

[GaryRussell]

Unfortunately my suggested workaround won't be reliable as the results are requested as soon as the market is closed if the market is closed while still the active market. I am working on a solution which I hope to release shortly.

[Sensei27]

Thanks for the quick response.

I use a mixture of timings split between Horse Racing UK and AUS, and Greyhounds UK and AUS.

Generally, Horse Racing is fine as I monitor the In-Play to get a guide to the winner before moving on, and manually overwrite the 'RESULT_NOT_AVAILABLE' result. Then '-6' every minute until the result is official. There was one day where I came home in the evening to find every result showing as 'CANCELLED' - which is when I really noticed that something's up(!) - and updated the software - and since then the horses seem to be fine.

Greyhounds, though - that's where the pain hit as, on one particular day, every win showed as Cancelled but none of the losses. That one actually hit quite hard. And it's more difficult without In-Play to manually adjust. Even though there is a '-6' every 60 secs in there too, on certain days and times the result of the previous race comes in literally as the next one is starting, so I'm guessing the previous winner was showing as CANCELLED when the bet was calculated.

In an ideal world this feels like a Betfair API issue - I can't imagine they are deliberately intending to send misinformation. But, I guess, the only workaround is to ignore a first check that gives 'CANCELLED' and re-check it once the market has been closed longer than x seconds. (For me, x would be 60 secs, but an actual figure would depend on testing how long it generally takes to sort itself out.)

i.e. return 'RESULT_NOT_AVAILABLE' until x seconds after the market closed.

That could be programmed into Betting Assistant, but it's a horrible workaround. Hopefully, Betfair will just fix it - but my initial hope is that maybe there's a setting in BA that rechecks results to make sure they are accurate. Don't know how, but just hoping!

[TBMsupport]

I first noticed this in July. Largely the API has been OK since then. Some days it intermittently returns the bet as Cancelled in the moments after a Market is settled.

In our own software which uses Gruss COM interface to place bets, we added an additional check 30 seconds later for every returned Cancelled Bet. Whilst testing this solution in July, even 10-20 seconds later the data was still stale on occasions. Over 30 seconds seems to solve 99.9% of the issues. (No reports from users of issues yesterday yet.)

There is maintenance planned on the API on the 24th October so maybe Betfair have recognised there is an issue and are dealing with it ?
https://forum.developer.betfair.com/for ... ouncements