As a long term product the integrity and confidence behind the BSP is surely more important than one race where Betfair could easily have paid an enhanced BSP much the same as other bookmakers do with their guaranteed odds. With any luck this will just pass as a blip in the BSP’s history and hopefully grow into a much more robust addition to the site.

all fair comments. I’m away from the action now - I’ve been in the mix on this one though.

I think (hope) that this is a one-off. The BSP was, bizarrely, a victim of its own success - having moved along quietly doing relatively little turnover for a few months it suddenly burst into flame. The win market for the National yesterday was nine times bigger than any BSP market we have ever had before, and almost all the new business was business to back. It was always going to be big but the BF planner didn’t envisage or plan for this sort of scale (it would have been easy to have alerted more layers). The demand for Comply or Die bust a hole in the tissue and the price died.

This was a mistake - no question - but I have some sympathy as the numbers were way higher than my expectations too. Hopefully the guys can paper it over - BF will surely be the financial loser here and not the customer. I see it as a one-off mistake - BF must learn from it and make sure it doesn’t happen again.

I can quite understand the need for Betfair to return a higher BSP on such a high profile race although there were many ways they could have paid an enhanced BSP on the winner without amending every other price.

I’d previously seen the BSP as a useful addition to Betfairs product base and hoped the turnover would increase making the prices more robust. Trouble is it’s now been shown up as some PR scam in order to advertise ‘better prices’. If the BSP reconcilation process is going to be disregarded everytime inappropriate prices have been returned (inappropriate to who ?) then surely it needs a complete rethink as the same thing will happen with every high profile race due to the fact they’ll be large numbers of BSP backers rather than BSP layers.

Thanks