Betfair Exchange October Newsletter: US Election race tightens and launch football bet delay trial launched

• US election drama on Betfair Exchange

• Football bet delays trial launched

• Betfair Exchange stability and live tennis scores latest

US Election markets on the Betfair Exchange are in full flow after September saw a dramatic debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump and both candidates continued to campaign in the seven swing states that will decide who wins the White House.

The televised debate on 10 September led to odds flipping in Harris' favour in real-time during the debate.

Since then, Harris' odds have drifted to close to evens. Betfair Exchange data published on 26th September showed that more was bet on a Trump victory than a Harris victory in 24 hours for the first time since their debate.

Seven swing states will likely decide the upcoming US Election - Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Pennsylvania is considered to be the most important of these, current Betfair Exchange odds show this is also the tightest of all the swing states. Odds for State Races - Pennsylvania are Democrats 1.9210/11 and Republicans 2.0811/10 at time of writing.

Matched volume for all markets in the US Election at time of writing is £122 million, with swing state markets £935k in matched volume. Betfair Predicts, our Betting.Betfair insight and social feed page shows the latest US Election betting data based on odds taken from Betfair Exchange markets.

New trial launched on optimising football bet delays

On Monday 23 September, we started a trial on 13 low grade competitions whereby a four seconds bet delay is offered instead of five seconds.

We know that customers get frustrated by long bet delays, we also know that matched volumes are considerably better when the delay is five seconds vs 12 seconds, but we'd like to test more subtle tweaks while continuing to provide protection to our market makers.

We believe we can still offer sufficient protection under a slightly shorter bet delay, and we hope that it will have a positive impact on the Exchange for all involved.

We intend to run the first phase until January on the competitions below (median volume ~£8k) which will impact around 1,300 matches. Performance and protection via feedback will dictate how fast the trial progresses but we hope to see benefits and rationale for extending the trial to wider competitions.

Here's a list of the initial set of leagues included in the trial:

Czech 1 Liga

Ecuadorian Serie B

French National

Turkish 1 Lig

Venezuelan Primera

Division

Norwegian 1st Division

Hungarian NB I

Norwegian 3rd Division

Brazilian Serie C

Algerian Ligue 1

Uruguayan Primera

Division

Greek Super League 2

Uruguayan Segunda Division

Exchange Stability

Following on from last year, one of the key goals for us in 2024 was to improve stability, availability and performance of the Exchange. Bet load has continued to increase in recent years so we've had to work even harder to improve latency and availability. This year, we've spent about 50% of our efforts on improving service reliability for Exchange.

Here are some key stats from the first 8 months of 2024:

• 6.7 seconds - Average settlement time
• 22 thousand - Peak bets placed / second
• 1.7 million - Number of markets offered
• 4 million - Number of active bets in the system at any time
• 60 million - Average number of orders settled per day

The time and resource invested in stability over the past few years has been reflected in the uptime. As of August 2024 we had Exchange availability over 99.99% for more than 12 months for the first time ever. Stability improvement works are constantly ongoing and there's more to be done in 2025.

Tennis scores feed

As mentioned in last month's Newsletter, the scores API feed for ATP and Challenger events has been live since the end of July 2024. Since then, we have been made aware of several bugs and issues that required attention.

We are currently up to date with the most recent release being made last week, however if any future issues or problems arise please don't hesitate to raise this with BDP@Betfair.com.

Now read Betting.Betfair for tips and previews from experts in major sports