Fill or Kill

The Fill-or-kill feature is used to cancel unmatched bets at a specified number of seconds after the bet was first created.

The setting must be chosen before the bet is sent, because it cannot be added retrospectively to bets that have already been submitted.

Fill or kill does not work on bets that are closing positions via the offset or greening features. So it won't be active on a bet that was sent using the green up buttons or GreenTo column. It also won't be active on the closing offset bet (but it is active on the initial bet before it is matched). The fill or kill feature is also not applied to robot bets (those sent by the automated robot within the ladder).

Note that fill or kill does apply to some bets that could be considered closing trades. For example, if you close your trade by manually sending a separate bet (not via the greening or offset options), then fill or kill will apply to it because it looks like just any other normal bet to the software.

The fill or kill logic is triggered immediately after each refresh of market prices and bets. So it can't work faster than the refresh interval that you have chosen in the main program's settings (File Menu | Settings | API Refresh tab | Price refresh interval).

Fill or Kill and in-play delay

Please note that the fill or kill duration is calculated from the moment when the order was created and sent by your computer, not the moment that it arrived in the market or emerged from the in-play delay. So for example, if you are trading football after the game has started and there is a 5 second in-play delay enforced by Betfair, then choosing a 5 second fill or kill will cause your bet to be cancelled almost at the instant it emerges from the in-play delay. So in that example, if you want the order to work in the market for 5 seconds after it emerges from the 5 second in-play delay, then you would need to choose a fill or kill setting of 10 seconds.

Similarly, if your chosen market has an 8 second in-play delay, then you'd need a 13 second fill or kill setting to enable your bet to work in the market for 5 seconds after emerging from the in-play delay enforced by the exchange.

In-play delay is applied by the exchange for certain types of events, for example football, tennis and horse racing all usually have an in-play delay. The duration of the in-play delay that is applied by the exchange to a particular market is displayed in yellow at the top of ladder and grid windows (in seconds) - but it is only displayed when the event is actually in-play.