It’s not exactly unheard of for a punter to place a bet that is a mistake. How easy is it to stake £100 when you meant to bet £10, for example? Equally you might have placed a bet on a horse that you didn’t intend to bet on, simply clicking the wrong option when you were looking at the list of odds. These sorts of things happen all of the time, with the obvious question being what can you do when you’ve made a mistake?
The short answer is that it is at the bookmaker’s discretion whether or not to allow you cancel a bet. If you get in touch with the straight away and explain the error, many of them will cancel the bet as a good will gesture. It’s not something that they have to do, however, so whether they will or not will depend on numerous different factors. Here we’ll look at what your options are and what you can do when you’ve make an error.
Cashing Out
The most obvious option to explore is that of the Cash Out. Though typically an option that is intended to be used by punters who have placed a bet but seen the chances of it coming in alter in one way or another, most of the companies that allow you to Cash Out will give you the option to do as soon as you’ve placed your bet. As long as the odds haven’t changed, you should be able to do so without losing any money.
If you’ve placed a wager in error, therefore, you should head straight to your account and see if the option to Cash Out is there. If it is then you can take it, get your stake money back and be no worse off than you were before you placed it. You might have to take a slight hit if the odds have changed, but it’s probably still worth doing so depending on why you’ve decided that you want to cancel the bet.
Contacting The Bookie
If Cashing Out isn’t an option, the next thing you can do is to get in touch with your bookmaker of choice and explaining the situation to them. The vast majority of bookies have excellent customer service options nowadays, especially the bigger and better known ones. Whether it be by phone, text or email, you can drop them a line and explain the situation that you find yourself in and ask them to help.
Sadly, they are not obliged to do so. The placing of a bet is essentially the creation of a contract between you and the company that you use, with the submission of that bet the equivalent of you saying that you’ve looked at it and you’re happy with it. If you ask them to cancel it and they say no, there’s not an awful lot that you can do about. There are also a number of reasons why they might refuse your request.
The most obvious one is if you do it on a regular basis. A punter that has requested the cancellation of ten bets over the past two months, say, will be flagged up on the bookmaker’s system. Whilst you might have an entirely innocent explanation for cancelling the bets, they will soon start to refuse your request if you’re making it all of the time. A bettor who has never asked before, however, will stand a good chance of getting it cancelled.
How much you bet is something else that your bookie will look at, especially if this is the reason for you getting in touch with them. If you have spent your entire time as a member of a bookmaker placing £10 bets and have never bet more than £20 with them, for example, then it’s much more likely that they’ll believe you when you get in touch with them and explain that you meant to bet £10 and not £100.
If, on the other hand, you regularly bet £100 on a selection then there’s no reason they’d believe you when you say that this time you only meant to bet £10. That might well be the truth, of course, but bookmakers can only go off what you’ve chosen to do with your wagers in the past when trying to decide if you should be allowed to cancel a bet this time around. That’s the sort of thing that you’ll need to bear in mind.
It’s Not Illegal
Some bookmakers claim that the law forbids them from cancelling bets. This is absolutely not true and there is nothing in a legal sense to stop them from cancelling your bet if they want to. What is written in their terms and conditions is something entirely different, but at least you know that if a bookie tells you that it’s against the law for them to cancel your bets you’ll be able to tell them that they’re chatting nonsense.
That doesn’t mean that they can’t still refuse to cancel it, though. Regardless of the reason you want to cancel your wager, the responsibility for getting it right in the first place lies with you and you’ll be lucky to find a bookmaker willing to make your bet void irrespective of the reason you give. Unless the bet was placed because of a technical error on the website, which is virtually unheard of, you’ll be stuck with your bet in place.
That being said, the other example of an occasion when a bookie would not only be willing to cancel your bet but could also get in trouble for placing it in the first place is if you had previous self-excluded. In this instance, you never should have been allowed to bet and there are all sorts of regulatory issues that would arise for a company that was willing to take your bet. Get in touch with them, let them know the situation and if it’s on their system that you wanted to self-exclude they’ll cancel your bet immediately.