How's everyone doing?

[cluckhead]

Hi fellow automated betting folk.

Im making an automated trading system, currently at 1500 lines of vba. And in my head it cant fail, too much time invested. But as i start to hit a bit of a wall, I was wondering if i'm wasting my time, will I just be feeding the Betfair Machince with my 5%. Or are there people with bots who are actually making a decent return?

Rob

[Norwegian Would]

Good start for a thread Cluckhead ! I am certainly one one of the BetUnfair 5% 'ers and not one of the BF 2% that make a bob or two with the "gambolling"; and I think I speak for most but not all of the good peeps on here.

We all have a little dream of a Set; Bet; Bot; Forget 'n then COLLECT system - I guess.

Keep doing what you are doing is my advice. You will probably get lots of help from the peeps on here - great bunch of guys as you know.

As it's Gary's day off, it may be a good time to have a 'lil chat. I also have a little "project" going......

I have a selection process that throws up some good each-way returns.The down-side is that it has some quite large downturns and need quite a large bank to make it work.

So I have made an In-play bot to take the BACK price 60 minutes before the off and then LAY off at 5 ticks below in-play. I tried this yesterday and lost BIG TIME - why because the prices in the in-play market 1 hour before were seriously over-round! Example I was backing at 5.2 and just before the off the odds were say 2.7 to lay. Of course many times the lay price was not matched.

The basic idea was to just take a few ticks trading each selection and get out - It didn't work for me but in the spirit of the light bulb inventor Edison - I am another step nearer to making it work ! (Summat like that..)

Anyway - my advice is keep doing what you are doing as long as it makes you happy and you are only playing with money you can afford to lose! Good luck with your project !

Cheers

[alrodopial]

currently at 1500 lines of vba

If you are good at coding you could easily automate this:

http://uk-betting-tips.co.uk/showthread.php?t=24798

It wouldn't be very difficult and currently it's going very well.
Even I can give it a try few months later so for someone good at VBA wouldn't be a problem.
Of course you can tell us later how your results match with author's results.

[Spike]

If it's any consolation I'm doing fine- considerably better than most people do in their jobs.

I keep it pretty simple, if you add up all the code I've ever written it wouldn't add up to 1500 lines, I probably average about 30 per sheet along with a bunch of formulae.

I'm not going to give away my strategies but I'll offer a few tips, at the very beginning when you're just getting going there are three things to concentrate on:

1: Ask for as little as possible, the most important thing is to get your bets matched so don't ask for too much, take this as close to it's logical extreme as you dare and you will almost always find that you make more money. I can't over stress how important this is.

2: Concentrate on NOT LOOSING, especially at the beginning. If you can bet without loosing you're 95% of the way to making a profit.

3: Get stuck in and betting, there is no other way of knowing how things will go, no amount of paper trading or simulation will do. Just think of something that's got a good chance, make it as safe as possible so it can't just piss away your money then get some real results to work with. Take comfort in the fact that even the worst strategies will only loose at 5%, so you can get a whole lot of bets in before any real money goes up the spout. Keep your stakes as small as possible and don't increase them too quickly and you won't go very wrong.


Once you're up and running with a strategy that makes a little bit of money you need to work to wring it's neck. In many cases this is a matter of gradually taking out safety measures to let your bot off the leash, but I'd also make 3 more specific suggestions:

1:Once your conditions are met pour in as many bets as you can as quickly as possible. Getting lots of bets in is the key, many small bets are inherently better than few big ones.

2: I "bracket" my bots, by which I mean I run several similar bots at the same time with the triggers set up slightly differently. As long as your strategy is basically sound this will help you even out ups and downs in your results and get a better return, you can also use this to directly assess the affect of changes to your bots.

3: Keep the right kind of records and do the right kind of analysis- concentrate on how many of your bets are matching and where your winnings are coming from over a large series of results. In the beginning I used to analyse every strike my bots made but really that was a waste of time, now I'm quite happy to run anything I can think of for a thousand bets and then pick that over afterwards for clues. At the end of every day I check out in basic terms how each bot has done, even my "bankers", I record how many bets each bot struck, how many matched and how much they made as a multiple of their permitted liabilities. I've learned a lot from comparing the performance of different bots and improving one in the light of another.


There is no reason to loose money if you're determined not to, If you put on your thinking cap you can turn a small profit from day one, there are plenty of ways to win if you can find them.

Good luck.

[cluckhead]

Thanks for the encouragement Norwegian Would and Spike, Your advice has been taken on board. Glad to hear some people are making money. As for alrodopial’s test of my VBA (never said I was good, probably would have taken a professional a tenth of the time and would only be 300 lines), if I get a chance I will give it ago but to be honest I’m up to elbows with my project, and since my Bot avoids horse racing (figure that’s where the completion is) not really inclined to spend time on a horse staking plan.

I’m planning to go live with a basic version of it early this Month and In the style of The Betfair forums I might set myself a challenge and bore you forumites weekly with my “Double my money in a Month (2.34% per day)” hopefully putting my results up on here for your scrutiny will stop me giving up at the first hurdle.
Rob