- Abandoned match bets: what rain does to each market
- Match odds: void or settled
- Session and fancy markets in a shortened game
- Bookmaker markets and the revised target
- Where your money sits while a market is suspended
- Reading the settlement in your statement
- If a settlement looks wrong, and what to do next
Abandoned match bets: what rain does to each market
An exchange does not settle a match as one thing. It settles each market on its own, and a rain-affected game can leave the markets in three different states at once. One market may have a clear result, another may be impossible to decide, and a third may be waiting on an official decision that has not yet been announced. The confusion people feel after a washout comes from expecting a single answer when there are several.
The rule that sits above all the others is this. A market settles when its outcome is known, and it is voided when the outcome can never be known. A void bet returns the stake to both sides as though it had not been placed. Nothing is won and nothing is lost. Everything else in this guide is a special case of that one sentence, applied to match odds, to sessions and to bookmaker markets in turn.
Two words matter before we go on. Abandoned means the match ended with no result. Shortened means the overs were cut but a result was reached, usually through a revised target. The two feel similar from the stands and are treated very differently on the settlement screen. If any term here is unfamiliar, the cricket ID glossary has it.
Match odds: void or settled
Match odds is the simplest case. The market asks which side wins the match. If the officials declare the match abandoned with no result, nobody won, so the market is voided and every back and lay stake returns to the balance it came from. This holds whether you backed the favourite, laid the outsider or had both open at once. The exchange does not pick a winner the match did not produce.
If the match is shortened but reaches a result, match odds settle on that result exactly as they would after a full game. The side that met the revised target, or defended it, is the winner for settlement. How many overs were lost, and whether the target felt fair, does not enter into it. The official result is the only input.
One wrinkle catches people. Some competitions have a tie-break for a no-result, such as a bowl-out or a super over on a reserve day, and some have a reserve day where the match resumes. Until the officials have said which applies, the market stays suspended rather than void. A market that is suspended overnight is not stuck; it is waiting for a decision the exchange has no power to make.
Session and fancy markets in a shortened game
Session markets, often called fancy, are where most rain disputes start. A session asks how many runs will come in a defined stretch of play. Our guide to back, lay and session markets explains the mechanics; here we only need the settlement rule. A session settles if its stretch of play was completed, or if the outcome became certain before the interruption. It is voided if the overs it covers were never bowled and the outcome was still open.
Take a market on runs in the first ten overs. If rain falls after the tenth over, the session is complete and it settles normally, whatever happens to the rest of the match. If rain falls in the seventh over with the runs already past the line, most exchanges settle it as decided, because no amount of further play could change the answer. If rain falls in the seventh over with the runs short of the line and the innings is cut to eight overs, the ten-over question can no longer be answered and the market is usually voided.
Markets on a full innings total behave in the same way, with one difference worth knowing. When an innings is shortened before it starts, some exchanges void the pre-match innings line entirely and open a fresh one for the reduced overs. A bet on the first line is returned; the second line is a new market. Reading the market name and the overs it covers before you place a bet is the best protection against surprises here.
Bookmaker markets and the revised target
The bookmaker market on these exchanges is a fixed-price match market offered by the exchange itself rather than matched between users. For rain it follows the match odds rule. No result means void and the stake returns. A result under a revised target means it settles on that result. If your bookmaker bet and your match odds bet seem to have settled differently after a washout, that is worth a question to the desk, because they should move together.
The revised target itself, calculated under the DLS method, is a tool for the officials, not for the exchange. It produces a number of runs the chasing side needs in the overs left. The exchange takes the final result and nothing else. What the target does change is the price while the market is open. Between suspension and restart the odds can move a long way, because a side that was cruising at the break may be well behind the new target. That is why the market closes during the calculation and reopens afterwards.
Toss, top batter and other side markets have their own rules on each exchange, and we will not try to summarise all of them here. The compare page sets out where to find each exchange's rules, and the compare cricket exchanges table is the quickest route to them.
Where your money sits while a market is suspended
A suspended market is one the exchange has closed to new bets while something is decided. Your existing bets stay exactly as they were. The back stakes and lay liabilities tied to them stay held, which is why the free balance looks smaller than you expected during a long rain break. The money has not gone anywhere. It is sitting against open positions, and it stays there until the exchange marks each market as settled or void.
This is also why a withdrawal placed during a rain break can only draw on the free part of the balance. If you ask for the full figure while three sessions are still suspended, the desk will tell you the held amount is not available yet and ask whether you want the free part now or the whole amount after settlement. Our guide on why a withdrawal is late covers this in more detail, and Deposits and Withdrawals sets out the normal flow.
Settlement after an abandonment is not instant across every market. The exchange back office works through them, and it is common for match odds to show as void while a session still shows as open an hour later. Give it time before you assume something has been missed.
Reading the settlement in your statement
Every exchange has an account statement or bet history screen, and that is where you check what happened rather than guessing from the balance. Each bet has its own line with the market name, your side, the stake and the result. The wording differs a little by exchange, but the states you will see come down to a short list.
| What the statement shows | What it means | What happened to the stake |
|---|---|---|
| Open, suspended or unsettled | The market has not been decided yet | Still held against the bet |
| Void or cancelled | The outcome could not be decided, so the bet is treated as never placed | Returned in full, no profit or loss |
| Won or lost | A result was reached, under a revised target or otherwise | Paid out or deducted as usual |
| Settled at zero | Some exchanges show a void this way | Returned in full |
Match the line in your statement to the market you remember placing. The market name tells you the overs it covered, and the settled time tells you when the exchange applied the result. If the market name says overs one to ten and the match was cut to eight, you now know why it shows void. If it says the match odds market and shows a loss after a game you believed was abandoned, the officials recorded a result, and the exchange followed it.
If a settlement looks wrong, and what to do next
Sometimes the statement does not match the rule as you understand it. Before you message, collect four things: your ID and the exchange, the full market name as the statement shows it, the bet ID or the time the bet was placed, and a screenshot of the statement line. Then send them in one message in the chat you opened from this site, with one sentence on what you expected and why. The help page has the same checklist, and the WhatsApp page has a template you can adapt.
The desk cannot change a result itself. Settlement is applied by the exchange under its published rules, and those rules outrank anything we might say in the chat. What the desk does is read the statement with you, point to the rule that produced it, and raise a query with the exchange when the entry does not fit that rule. Most queries end with the rule being explained. Some end with a correction, and those are exactly the cases where a clear message with a bet ID made the difference.
Rain will keep interrupting matches, so the practical step is to make a habit of checking the statement after every washed-out evening, before the next deposit or withdrawal, and to read the overs on a market name before you place a session bet. Abandoned match bets are the simplest case of all once you know the rule: no result, no winner, stake returned. The sessions are where the care is needed, and now you know what to look for.