Triggered Betting, What do you all use it for?

[jmorrell]

Hi, As we all know..the excel ability of this software gives it an amazing edge! I would like to knowwhat types of spreadsheets people have to do certain tasks I am just curious on how successful the excel feature has made peoples trading,dutching,laying,backing or whatever be?

would be interested to see.


joe

[Kinyo]

This is very sad.

Its clear people are using triggered betting, but dont want to share.

Thats ok, maybe its to be expected, but I wonder how long the SW will be free.

Common people, open up.

I cant program, - if I could, I would post code/ideas .. and maybe think of a way of
charging, with giving Gary a cut.

[boycee]

Well let me break the mould.

I have used trigger betting both simple and advanced and I have not come up with a strategy which has consistent long term profitability. I have played the horse and dog markets 24/7 and come close to making it pay, but ultimately I have have come a cropper and lost any gains which I have made.

So if somebody on here thinks that they have a strategy that is profitable in the long term, then I would be more than happy to help them set up an automated trigger betting spreadsheet.

There you go kinyo, just my tuppence worth, but as you say if we don't share then we might as well chuck it in as far as this forum goes.

[GeorgeUK]

I have a few ideas for triggered betting, but:

don't have the time to set anything up
have a VERY dodgy internet connection
don't have the funds available to test anything (loan to brother)

The ideas i have been able to run and monitor realtime have ended up being pretty half assed

So i can help with coding and formulas - but strategy would cost you - heavily

What i am doing right now is trying to find trends for either
courses - which stalls may have an advantage - and if weather/conditions affect this
Form - does the previous results of horses have an effect on their results (performance monitoring)
(But as a general view - not individual horses...yet)

I have put together a spreadsheet that will place bets 5 min before the off for races the user selects.
This is still being tested (it has had problems in the past) - and not userfriendly unless you know a bit of VBA
My other spreadsheets are half finished and can't remember what i was going to do with half of them.

The only thing i have not tried is staking plans - these can get out of control very quickly if they are progressive.
If you can't win money on a set stake - a progressive staking will lose you money quicker. (About the only thing i have learned)

So who else uses the spreadsheet function - and what for (apart from to make money )

[Mitch]

This is very sad.

Its clear people are using triggered betting, but dont want to share.

Thats ok, maybe its to be expected, but I wonder how long the SW will be free.

Common people, open up.

I cant program, - if I could, I would post code/ideas .. and maybe think of a way of
charging, with giving Gary a cut.

So you want people to share, but if you could do it you would charge?

Also, a member since January and 2 posts?


Apart from anything else, I dont think jmorrell was asking for people to give their strategies away, just curiosity about how the software was being used.

So.........



The best thing about it for me is that I have learnt (to a degree) how to write vba code.
I've used vba to back a horse in running when it reaches a certain price, and when I couldn't make that pay I did a sheet that recorded the shortest price for each horse during a race to see if it would be profitable to lay all runners at a certain price. I'm not the most patient person in the world and the short period that I recorded that I didn't find a way to make that pay either.

I made a sheet whereby you could pick horses to lay later in the day at a certain price and stake, then the program would place the bets when the races appeared using the quick pick list. This wasn't for me and I don't know how well it works. If it is profitable is down to the skill of the person choosing horses and prices to lay.

I did another one to drip-feed bets into a market at various prices, hoping for fluctuations in the market to provide a profit whichever team wins. Again, that wasn't for me.

Motivated by Thunderfoots excellent ladder trading spreadsheet I had a go at making one of those too, and got the ladders importing prices and scrolling, plus other information to aid decisions, then I realised that I wasn't going to be able to make it (efficiently) do what I wanted from it and that's on the shelf now.

My main one, which I am still working on, tries to predict when a price (on horse races in my case) is going to move then place a bet, and when the bet is matched place a bet in the opposite direction to secure a profit. The code still has a couple of bugs in but works well enough for me because I sit watching it anyway. I couldn't trust it to run on it's own at the moment.
My main problem is defining the rules to predict the market movement. I have it choosing fairly well at the moment, but using my £2 test stakes I might win 30p for 5 races in a row then lose £2 in 1 race when a price moves badly against me because when it works I'm taking 1 tick, but it's so easy to lose 5 ticks in one foul swoop.
I'm convinced that other people do the same but with MUCH larger stakes thus moving the market in the direction they want it to go. For no apparent reason (on US racing because I work during the day) £500 might appear on the LAY side of a horse at 2.5 which panics people into backing it, then 10 seconds later it is gone and miraculously appears at say 2.2 which then forces the price back up again. I'm sure the owner of the £500 has made a nice profit from the price movement. All that in case you're not familiar with the US racing markets could be on a horse which before had a total of £50 available on the 6 prices on the screen.

Anyway, I'm done now.

Good with computers, good with numbers, crap at gambling.

It's been said before by myself and others, but I'll say it again..... There are people on here who can make ideas happen in Excel who are more than happy to help so if you have an idea and can't implement it just ask and you shall receive.

[funky]

ha. I just can't help but make my little contribution to this one.

OK. What I'm using BA for is to lay horses. I'm quite probably going to rewrite some of my Excel spreadsheet VBA to back horses as well.
My spreadsheet has a few different pages:
1. current race (self explanatory)
2. Lay list (holds a list of horses to lay)
3. Work (Every time the "current race" page is updates, my VBA takes a copy of the horse names and odds from that page, sorts it into order by odds (so favourite 1 is at the top, etc etc). I use this to figure out who the favourites are as I'm experimenting with a dutching strategy as well
4) Config page. This page is "read" by my VBA routines, it holds variables such as stake, maximum liability to have on a lay bet, and various other things.
5) A logging page. This logs any bets BA does - basically if a bet is matches my VBA copies the relevant line from page "current race")
Thats what i'm doing, maybe it'll give you some ideas.

Where do I get my list of horses I want to lay, I hear you ask...
From an MS Access system which I have developed over the last year. I taught myself VBA for Access using this book:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/078973 ... e&n=283155
and if you have a prior knowledge of programming (eg you understand what a do...while loop is, or for...next loop) you won't have any problems learning froma book like that . There's plenty of VBA/Excel books out there if you're keen to learn VBA. As programming languages go, its very easy to learn. You just have to learn to think logically.

Anyway. My access system. A year on, its still a work in progress but it allocates points to each horse in a race, based on things like last start, number of recent wins and places at this distance, and recent speed ratings . These speed ratings are based on Andrew Beyers work, read this for more:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/039573 ... e&n=283155
Speed ratings aren't the whole answer, but a lot of the time they do provide some clues as to who the best runners are and can also be a good way of identifying false favourites.

Recently, I was very close to giving up on my Access system because, well, its been a year and I still don't have an automated system

Two things have, in the last few weeks, changed my mind. One is BA- it means that if I come up with something that works, I don't have to sit around in front of my computer while I bet because BA can do it for me. The 2nd thing is finding that on data.betfair.com I can get files that have all the odds on all the races. This really is the missing part of the puzzle for me. In my access database I have around 12000 races, from March 2005 to the present, but until now I had all the data I needed except for the betfair odds on each runner. This made it fairly difficult to test scenaros like "bet on the fastest runner in each race if that horse has odds <3" etc etc.
I've now downloaded the data from betfair, done some more coding, stressed my computer out no end because a years worth of data became an access db >1Gb but in the end I've imported what I want into my database and I think I've finally hit on something that'll work. i just need a couple more hours to find the best profitable scenarios, and then code a way to dump this info into the relevant sheet in Excel automatically.

So thats it. No trading - yet. I've played around with this manually but like Mitch said, you can make a tiny bit in 3 or 4 races only to lose it again in the next one (hang on - that sounds a bit like what can happen with laying doesn't it!!). Also I haven't got the mental energy - at the moment - to do all the coding required.

Mitch - you mentioned making small amounts 3 times ina row only to lose it - and more - in the 4th race. if you find that thats a regular occurence, wouldn't the opposite be true if you place opposite bets from what you're doing now? (does that make sense?) Kind of like if someone comes up with a laying system that consistently loses money, then wouldn't they be better off backing those selections instead?


cheers

R.

[Ian]

I've designed a spreadsheet which does the same as the software Value Horse Finder

http://www.bettingprofitsoftware.com/VHF/vhfhome.htm

Basically it uses a web query to bestbetting to obtain the morning prices and compares them to the BF prices to see if I can lay the win and place combined for a free bet. I had the outline before BA came along using web queries to betfair lite but using BA allows me to fire off the bets to the calculated stakes to the win and place markets.

[Mitch]

That sounds good Ian. Do you have to have many accounts with online bookies to make it work?

Do you use Excel for the web query, or a script, or something else? It's something I'd like to learn how to do and I was just wondering what the best way of doing it was. Also, I presume you have to know the url of where all the races and prices are on Betfair?

[Ian]

Mitch - yes, you do need as many online accounts as possible because you must get the best price available with the fixed odds firms. Taking the second best price is usually no good. Eventually though, bookies close you down because in the long run you will win off them using this method. When I run the web query to bestbetting I also run a bit of VB script to exclude the bookies where I can't bet. This is a drawback with the VHF software because it will indicate many bets with Sporting Odds but you won't last long with them backing each way.

Funnily enough, it's the first time I've looked at the VHF website for a few months and I see that they have added a quick pick like Gary's. I must admit that setting up the web query for each race is a bit tedious - although I do know now which races are likely to be the most fruitful so I don't do every race - so I would say that the software is probably well worth the money if only for the time it saves. If you ccould exclude bookies from the calculation then I think I would definitely buy it.

[Mitch]

I must learn to do web queries!

Not for the system you are using, because I'm never going to have accounts with bookies as well as betfair, but I'm sure I could think of some useful ways to use them.

Just a thought on what you've said above though, and this is me trying to think logically so I could be way off the mark

You make win/win situations by arbing bookies against Betfair, but since a) you can only back with the bookies and all the laying must be done on Betfair, and b) you win enough from the bookies for them to close your account, it suggests to me that the back part of your plan provides selections good enough to make a profit on their own.

i.e. Back any horse (or maybe make the selection process more selective) which is shorter on Betfair than the best price at the bookies.

That would make sense, as generally you can get better prices on Betfair so prices that are shorter on BF would have McCririck shouting "THEY KNEW!"

Am I making sense at all. Anyone agree/disagree?

[Kinyo]

Mitch,

What you are sayng is correct .. there is value (at times) in having off-site fixed-odds bets,
especially each-way, when the race is framed correctly.

Arbing it back, is just a method to reduce swings .. but sure, if you had a limtless bank, if
your expectancy from a bet with an on-line company is positive, then you could argue a
case to just keep the bet, and let it run.

[Ian]

Kinyo is right. When Sporting Odds first restricted my bets I started to not lay them back and was still winning. My max. stakes kept being reduced until, now, I don't even consider their prices. The same has happened with Bet365 although they went straight from reasonable bets to nothing.

It's not only horses this can be applied to either. Golf is not too bad and, with Federer being odds on all the time, tennis, is also good, although they don't always have a place market on tennis.

[thunderfoot]

I don't & wouldn't use online Bookies because a) they will close you down if you start to win , so any strategy you have goes out the window & b) half of 'em are very 'shady'!!!

I spent all that time developing the 'Ladder' system in EXCEL, and it's been on the back-burner since, while I try to find a decent strategy on the 'Exchanges', who won't close you down . If I were to use the system the same way as Adam Todds application then it would work the same, but my problem at the moment is 'reading' market movements. . I did see on another Forum a good link to an explanation of market movements (it was partly Powerpoint & partly online video), but that Forum is now closed down, and I don't think I kept the link ...... however I know some of you were members of that Forum, and if you think you know the link I'm on about please post it here.
Edit: it was here all the time http://gruss-software.co.uk/forum/viewt ... ight=#2686

Tried analising the Betfair datafiles as 'funky' mentions but they're not big ............. THEY'RE $%*?@£ HUGE!!!!

Here's one theory that might be worth testing (which I haven't), but if anyone does then a feed-back to here would be appreciated. This was received from a Forum member ....

I have found one way that can help extremly well with price movements.

Logon to www.racingpost.co.uk late each evening, select each race for the
following day, then goto the tipsters section. There you have selections from
all the main newspapers and racing post tips. Back the top 3 selections
(depending on odds) that the majority of tipsters are picking. Then the next
day, when people buy newspapets etc, they will back the tipsters selections
which will force the prices down.

I have found that 97% of the horses i placed a back bet on had dropped by upto 4
ticks 5 mins before each race start. This meant i could then lay at a lower
price. This obviously doesnt mean you will win every race but you should at
least break even if you dont.

[tkp]

Hi all,

Turned into a nice little thread this.

I use my spreadsheets thus:

1:- Auto winner finding - (although this has wiped out any profits I make on several occasions). Basically I have excel set up to wait for the price to drop to 1.03 with the next price at 12+ ............. just when I make a nice profit there will be one horse that gets caught in the last. However, I've found this incredibly profitably on tennis (especially when there is game by game betting).

2:- Arbing - I arb tennis - produces a nice consistent profit. Although there sometimes isn't enough money in the market to make large profits there is usually enough to make around £10 - 20 per night. I have this running on 2 or 3 markets. Sometimes I have it monitoring back and lay or just one.

3:- I use my ladder trader to trade the friday and saturday horse racing markets. And occasionally the US horse markets. Most of the time I use stakes of around 50-150 pounds. So far I can usually generate a profit.

As for a strategy for trading - I concentrate on the inbalance of the money available on the lay and back sides combined with the weight of money. I also watch for the patterns in the movement of the prices (which is easier with a ladder style layout).
Using this I can then employ 1 of three backing strategies.

a: If the price is just moving up and down between 2 or 3 ticks I'll place 2 orders - 1 lay and 1 back with a tick difference - within the tolerance of the movement

b: If the price is slowly creeping up I'll use my automated tick trade to try and catch a tick....I place a lay at the current back price...and my system waits until that is matched to then place a back at 1 tick up...... the opposite applies if the price is slowly moving down.

c: If I haven't got a clue - I will trade using just 1 click trading - and try and get in and out as fast as I can..........cancelling or squaring if I don;t think the trade is going my way (like Adam Todd shows in his videos).

d: (did I mention 4 options....?) I guess and cross my fingers....

tkp

[thunderfoot]

1:- Auto winner finding - (although this has wiped out any profits I make on several occasions). Basically I have excel set up to wait for the price to drop to 1.03 with the next price at 12+ ............. just when I make a nice profit there will be one horse that gets caught in the last. However, I've found this incredibly profitably on tennis (especially when there is game by game betting).

Been there, done that, got the T-Shirt!!!
Have you tried checking the 'Next Price' in the 2nd or 3rd price option. i.e. Horse 'A' odds are 1.03, Horse 'B' odds are 12.00 = possible wipe-out, as you have said, but if you also check the 2nd & 3rd price options, you might find that Horse 'B' is trading at much lower odds than the 12.00, say 1.50 & 1.25, and that should set alarm bells ringing. If the 2nd & 3rd price options are nearer the 12.00, then it's a much safer bet.