Baseball Botters and Bonders

It's been a while since I wrote about baseball, yes OK, it's been a while since I wrote about most things, but there was a very interesting occurence in the last game of the evening yesterday which has reportedly resulted in some bettors losing millions.

The San Francisco Giants were at home to the Los Angeles Angels and in the bottom of the 10th inning with the score tied 6-6 and the bases loaded:

[Rafael] Devers hits what is normally a ground rule double. The initial final score shown is an 8-6 Giants win (due to an official MLB scorer error). - Over 13.5 runs, Giants -1.5, and Giants team total o7.5 runs bond to 99c thanks to bots

However:

MLB rules state that a walk off ground rule double cannot score multiple runs and in this scenario counts as a single instead of a double - People start to realize this and insane action comes in to unbond the above markets. Prices go absolutely haywire, touching 1c and 99c multiple times

For readers not familiar with the term 'bond' it's equivalent to betting on Betfair at 1.01. In prediction markets, a market “bonded to 99c” means that bots or bettors pushed the price all the way up to 99 cents (to win $1) — treating the outcome as basically guaranteed.

How various companies settled these markets is unclear but presumably Betfair (if they did initially settle the o13.5 runs, Giants -1.5 and Giants team total o7.5 as winners) re-settled based on the actual final score of 7:6.