Help would be appreciated, please.

[jamie]

Hi there, im hoping someone with patience will read this and help me. I m a horse guy and my computer knowledge is embarrassing..
All i want to do is back a certain horse - i know which one beforehand, at a certain price in running. Its only 1 horse a race and i know which horse , and at what price before the race starts. BUT i only want to back it if it hits a certain price in running.
I know this probably seems really simple to you guys and girls, but im really bad on a computer and im hoping and praying that someone will take the time and trouble to explain to me how to do it. I have read various posts on the Forum here which mention Excel and various commands etc. - But that means very little to me - i dont know how to do it , or what to do..
So it really will need to be in an idiot proof step by step guide - I work in racing - hence the lack of computer skills , but im hoping some kind soul will give a little bit help back to someone who helps entertain you !
If you ve got the patience and can be bothered, then thank you very much

[jmorrell]

Hi jamie, I too am learning still but i think i've learnt enough to be able to fully explain how to do this...i'll put it in steps so that if you need further explanation you can say which bit of the step you are having difficulty with..

Step 1: Open Microsoft Excel followed by Opening Bet Assistant (BA) I assume you know how to login. but obviously if you just want to test first to make sure it's doing what you want before you login and start making successful bets.

Step 2: Add the horse race or all of the horse races to your pick list. Do this by clicking on the market Menu and selecting Select market. Then select the All UK win and press the Add button. Then close this add market window.

Step 3:Select your chosen Race in the quick pick List. When the runners all appear your ready to extract the data into excel.

Step 4:So we have our excel open with nothing in it. So we want to put all the current data for each horse into it, which will update in real-time (or near enough). So we click on the Excel menu and select Log Current Prices. A new window will pop up. Make sure the workbook name and worksheet name are filled in. By default these should read Book1 and sheet1. Because you actually want to able to place bets from excel make sure the "enable trigger betting" is checked. Then click OK.

Before step 5 i'm going to attempt to familiarise you with what's going on in excel. Now most of the columns are pretty self explanatory. you have the selection name, current back odds, current lay odds, and previous odds similar to that of betting assistant. so the areas you will want to change are your odds, your stake and of course the trigger for your bet. the trigger has been designed to reconised a few simple commands written in bold. these include BACK, LAY,CANCEL,CLEAR..there maybe more but i'm not familiar with them. if you were to type BACK in bold in the trigger on the same row as a selection, excel will tell BA to BACK that horse at the odds and with the amount written in the stake and odds cels.

Step 5: fill in the odds you want to Send to betfair when your selection reaches the odds you will later specify. Fill in your stake also for each selection. (quick tip: if you want use the same odds and stake for each horse simply fill in the odds and stake for the first horse and select it then click and drag the small square that appear at the bottom right of the cel down to the last selection, this will fill all of them in that you highlighted). so now you want customise your trigger to only bet if the horse falls below a certain price.

Step 6: Ok so you have your stake filled in for one or all the horses you want to back if it falls to a certain price. you're now going to create your own trigger that will write BACK in the trigger column for your horse based on certain rules. To do this we use something called an IF statement. and we are going to use one to say this:

IF This selection falls below 3.5 then BACK it. It will then type BACK in the trigger box which will then place the back bet.

now you say you only want to back one horse if it falls below a certain price so on the horse you think might win in the trigger column i want you to paste this....(i assume you know how to copy and paste )

=IF(F5<=1.3,"BACK","WAIT")

Now that is a simple IF statement that says IF the odds on F5 fall below 1.3 then type BACK...remember what happens when we type BACK, otherwise type WAIT which isn't a command BA recognises.

so you've pasted that in the same row as the horse you want to back. There are 2 things in this you will NEED to change. first is the 5...as this is monitoring for the selection on row 5 to fall below, if the horse your backing is the first in the list then this number will be 5. otherwise change it to whatever row your your selection is on. say the horse we want to win is third in the list. this number would be 7. The second thing you need to change is the stake in the statement above it will only back the selection if the current price falls below 1.3. So change this to whatever you want.

So if we want to back the 10th horse in the list if the odds fall below 5 we would type this in the trigger cel on the same row as this selection. As it's the 10th down in the list this would be N14. and we would type this in that trigger cel:

=IF(F14<=5,"BACK","WAIT").

There is one Important thing you need to take into consideration. As the race goes In play the odds fall to 1.04 or whatever for a split second. You dont want to back your horse then obviously so using this simple method must be done just after the off. I have been working on a spreadsheet which you can prepare before the off, and when it is finished would be glad to send it to you with instructions. At the level you are at the moment i would use the method above until you are familier with how this excel trigger malarky works

i hope this helps rather than confuses further


-joe-

[Castillo]

Hi jmorrell

Thanks for that explanation, I also use BA, and find it very useful (Many thanks Gruss), however the Excel side to betting is something I've been trying to get to grips with.
There are some extremely good programmers lurking in these forums, and some of there IF statements are mind boggling. Going back to your explanation, if you wanted to BACK a horse at a certain price and then LAY the same selection immediately could this be done in one statement. This is where I'm getting confused on how to perform several commands on 1 selection. If anyone has some simple excel trading spreadsheets they wouldn't mind sharing with me to help me understand it better I would be extremely grateful, please PM me if you have some to share. Thankyou, Castillo.

[jmorrell]

Yes im sure this is possible, just off the top of my head perhaps something that says if trigger cell has BACK in it and REf cell says something then LAY
and if it says ERROR then do nothing...yes i do believe this is quite possible. I'll work on a statement for it tomorrow and test it with whatever racing is on....

joe

[jamie]

Hi Joe, thank you for your reply . Really kind of you, especially on a Saturday night
Now am im being thick, or what am i doing wrong ?
I have XLviewer - which i believe is similar or the same as Excel. I open it and it , and when i try to open Betfair Trader, it says Betfair Trader .msi file format is not valid.
I ve been sat here trying this for about 2 hours and have only just got this far !! Lol. I dont know if that means my laptop doesnt like it or what ?
Maybe i should give up before i drive you crazy with it too..
Sorry..
Jamie.

[jamie]

PS Your reply to my initial question looked like it contained everything i needed.. It was really well explained i actually understood it - i think !!
Thanks so much for your help, sorry, but it looks like i ve got a glitch or something..

[GeorgeUK]

Jamie - did you download .NET
(just thought i'd check)
Not sure if the viewer will work - if not i'm sure there are some torrents you can find

Castillo - It might be possible to do what you want in a formula, but easier with code
You could have the formula back the horse at certain odds
then x seconds after the "bet time" column value
you would need to clear the bet data for that selection (not sure if CLEAR is all you need)
then change the selection to LAY (but you may need to reference what the back price was in another cell as you are deleting this data)

Will try to look at it more tomorrow (today really) - but it may be possible if you don't want to mess around with code. Hopefully someone else has already done this and will answer your query

[jamie]

Joe, and George, i have taken it all off my laptop and re downloaded and it says on the screen something like "Microsoft excel cannot open these files". I think this is probably because i havent got the proper Excel thing for spreadsheets , i ve got an old program called Xl viewer.
So im going to go and buy this "Excel" thing and put it on my laptop. I should then hopefully be able to follow your instructions Joe Once i ve got "Excel" , if i get stuck i ll give you a shout again, if you dont mind ?
Dear oh dear, Lol, all i can say is riding horses is easy compared to this !!
Thanks a lot guys, you ve been great

[jmorrell]

ok, as george said, Betting Assistant won't run unless you have .net framework 1.1. This is required by Betting Assistant to run. all you have to do is install it and forget about it.

this can got at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/deta ... laylang=en

Once you've got this you should have no problems running Betting Assistant at all. Or installing it.


joe

*edit* - Excel is just Microsoft Excel that comes with Microsoft office. Sorry i don't mean to patronise.

[Mitch]

Jamie - you are right in thinking that xl viewer will not do the job for you. As the title says, it is just a viewer - if it could do what Excel does then no-one would buy Excel

I'm not the best with formulae, but I can't see how it would be possible to do what you want it to (Castillo). You'd have to include a reference to the cell the formula is in I would think to place a LAY straight after, which would create a circular reference which whether or not you know what that means is bad.

I'd love to be proved wrong but I think vba code is the way to go with that.

[Mitch]

I think I might be able to prove myself wrong.......

Just wanted to get that in before someone else did

I've not thought about the details yet, but I think you could do it with a multi-nested IF statement with the odds details you want for the BACK, checking if the reference column contains a number for the CLEAR, then checking the profit/loss column for the LAY.

Something like.....

Code: Select all

IF(ISNUMBER(Q5),"CLEAR",IF(bet criteria here,"BACK",IF(U5>0,"LAY","WAIT)))

....maybe.

But don't quote me, I just made it up and haven't tested it in Excel.

[jamie]

Mitch , bloody hell !!!!! Lol ! Im at nursery school standard !!

Im waiting for a friend to come around on Friday to put "Excel" on my laptop, and i will show him this thread, so he should be able guide me through it with the help of everyone s posts.
I ll be honest, i cant wait to get it sorted now.
Many, many thanks, to all of you for helping me out ,
Jamie.

[thunderfoot]

Something like.....

Code: Select all

IF(ISNUMBER(Q5),"CLEAR",IF(bet criteria here,"BACK",IF(U5>0,"LAY","WAIT)))

....maybe.

Yup ..... that looks like the way to go .... or it's flipping close!!!

[jamie]

Okay Mitch and Thunderfoot, so this formula Mitch has posted is what i write into the Excel Spreadsheet to tell it to back my selection at the price i want in running. Is that right ? I told you i was bad.. Thank you for that.
Roll on Friday and my friend shows me how to do it. Cheers guys.

[Mitch]

I've just had a little mess around with this, and I was roughly right.

The LAY and BACK need to be the other way round so...

IF(ISNUMBER(Q5),"CLEAR",IF(U5>0,"LAY",IF(bet criteria here,"BACK","WAIT)))

and the bet criteria needs to include something that says profit/loss column must be zero otherwise you'll get another BACK placed after the LAY has been placed, etc, etc.

The formula above would go in cell N5. If your selection is on a different row then change all the 5's to whatever row your selection is in, and put the formula in column N of the same row.

Some suggestions for criteria to BACK the selection (if it were me) and how you would tell it to Excel....

Back odds lower than or equal to 1.5
F5<=1.5

Lay odds for same selection lower than or equal to 1.7 (I wouldn't want to back anything at 1.5 if no-one wanted to back it at 1.7)
H5<=1.7

No other horse is trading at below 4 (don't want to back short odds-on if anything's close to it!)
COUNTIF(F5:F50,"<4")<2

Just a quick note on the IF statement to show how it works. In plain English (or as close to it as you're gonna get from me!) it's saying...
If this is true, then do this, or else do this.

Or closer to what it looks like on the screen...
IF(this is true , do this , or else do this)

Our formula looks a little more complicated because there are IF's buried in IF's, but you'll soon get the hang of it.

The COUNTIF that I've used above means...
Look at the numbers in the cells from F5 to F50 (I've used 50 because there won't ever be any more than this, and blank cells don't matter) and tell me how many are below 4. In our case we want there to be less than 2 at under 4, in other words, just our selection.

ISNUMBER means just that. Does the cell in the brackets contain a number. That is there because the only time that column Q contains a number is when a bet has been placed, which is exactly what we want to know.

The only other function this will use is AND, and that will be part of your bet criteria because you have multiple things you want to be true before you place the bet.
For example....
AND(condition1, condition2, condition3, condition4) will only be TRUE if ALL of the criteria are TRUE. If only one of them is FALSE then the whole thing will give a value of FALSE.

I hope that makes some kind of sense, and helps you to understand this....

=IF(AND(ISNUMBER(Q5),U5=0),"CLEAR",IF(U5>0,"LAY",IF(AND(F5<=1.5,H5<=1.7,COUNTIF(F5:F50,"<4")<2,U5=0),"BACK","WAIT")))

Just had another play with this longer version and it DOESN'T WORK - PLEASE DON'T USE IT!!

I'm still going to post it though because it might help people make their own formulae up, or at least to understand a little what is going on when other people post.

The problem with mine appears to be one of timing.

Anyone who does their own formula and wants to play around with it just put it in N5 on a blank sheet without BA entering data and make some odds up in column F, then fill in what would happen if BA were interacting with it and you'll see what I mean.

Because of the in-play delay the p/l column will still be 0 when the reference is cleared, so another BACK will get placed.

Please post if anyone finds a way around it.

Alternatively, learn VBA Anyone who did any sort of BASIC language at school or wherever will pick it up very quickly (am I showing my age now?)