Unexpected behavior when playing Balanced/Odd games

I've been playing Balanced/Odds games with a friend of mine recently and there's no option like in the other modes to say :" I Play as white" so every other game my friend ends up with the side that's missing pieces because the game alternates automatically between black & white every game and the handicap is always going to the white player so it's kinda frustrating because we have to abort half our games to account for that

It should give the odds to the lower rated player every time.

Well it's not working, I'm always playing against the same player ( TaguarJordu) and he's about 800+ points lower than me 

I've mentioned it to a staff member to see if that can be recreated and fixed.

Can you play balanced odds games against random opponents or only friends? I can't find the option to play a balanced odds games against a randomly selected opponent. I also don't see any odds games in the open games section?

It's only against friends and only in Play (BETA).

this is still a bug and hasn't been fixed.

yup buggy for me too!

Glad I'm not the only one

Still not working as of today

 yup, tried and still not working.  It's a bug they refuse to fix lol

Still happening.

Same here. My friend is just starting out, so I'd like to encourage him but I'm always white, it's always just a knight I'm handicapped and I can still win - be great to be able to select the piece(s) to forfeit. Can't see how to play balanced AND rated so it knows adjust down further.

Great feature and a good start though.

Frustrating... Here'se my upvote to fix this bug!

yep. this should probably be fixed. i can't set it up so that i have the disadvantage, only the person i challenge gets the disadvantage.

Yes.  My upvote too.  Trying to get my sister into the game.  First balanced game she was white with no kings pawn.  I am +700 on her.

+1 👍

Still a bug.

Still not working. Trying to use balanced odds to teach my nephew.

Regardless of what should happen automatically, it would be nice to be able to pick which side gets the advantage.

I have a friend who's significantly better than me, but my rating is significantly higher than his because we randomly picked different levels when joining (I picked the "1200" rating and he picked the "800" rating). We probably play 1 rated game per month, so it could be months or years before our ratings reflect reality and the auto-pick-side feature would actually pick correctly for us.