Topic: Bot-Writing Experiences

I had been wondering for a while how to compare botting results with other places you could put your money - then a couple of weeks ago I found the funky Excel function XIRR - it turns any results into an Annual Equivalent Rate AER.

Populate two columns, one with dates, and one with all deposits (-ve) and withdrawals (+ve) into your betfair account (betfair will send you this if you don't already have it), and a final entry with todays date and your account balance. And then use =XIRR(<values column>, <dates column>)

Very nicely, my betting beats any other savings or investment I've done (although this is largely due to one very lucky result that let me take out everything I had put in and continue with free money) - but at least I now have solid figures to support spending more time on this!

Just joined here and thought this is probably a decent thread to say hello in.

I started writing bots because I was doing a Java programming course at Open Uni and thought a bot would be a nice little personal project. As it turns out, it has been a hell of a learning experience. Just started placing my first real bets yesterday with the bot (done a lot of simulated bets) and so far everything seems to be going pretty swimmingly. I post on the bdp forums as thenakeytaxidriver and very occasionally in the soccer forums at betfair as ThanksFish.

Now into the 15th or 16th evolution of my bot - amazing how many times a rewrite is necessary - and I think I have it down to nice object oriented, gui driven code. Nice to see a decent forum out here about this - I was going a bit silly thinking the forums at bdp.betfair were all that was out there.

Alan

Ahhh ... This is where you all got to.
I used to work for a bookies, first as a shop manager then in Head Office. One of the things I did was QA testing of betting software (a few years ago now, before betfair or even internet betting).
I used PCs to help with my own bet selection quite early on (Turbo Pascal on DOS), but even when online bookies and betfair came along I still placed my bets manually. I always realized that automating things was the way to go, but that seemed to need 'real' programming skills, at least in the early days.
It wasn't until about a year ago I looked at automation seriously again, and after finding Fred's site I saw that this was now within the capabilities of hobbyist programmers, so I took the plunge (Thanks, Fred!).
I use perl / MySql on linux for my bots, running against the free API. Most of it was slapped together as Proof of Concept, with a view to doing it 'properly' later; needless to say, all of those shabby hacks are still there a year later :-)
I don't think that you have to be a great programmer to make a successful bot, but you do need sound knowledge of mathematics and gambling. If you bet like a mug in real life, your optimized, modular, object-orientated, gui-driven shiny new bot is just going to be a (super efficient) mug punter :-)

ooops.......
I just read some other posts, especially inksmithy's above mine. My comments about guis and oop weren't directed at him, just general waffle. Good to see new people here, in fact. The main thing I gained from Fred's page was a feeling that I was not alone, which is important when you are starting out.
Sorry, inksmithy, if my previous post looks like a flame, it wasn't intended to be. I'm sure you are no mug. Welcome to the brave new world of bot-building, and I hope you get as much support here as I did at Fred's.

ahaha, its all good.

I completely understand the sentiment though. It doesn't matter how shiny the gui is, if the theory behind it isn't firm, it might as well be a plate of jelly for all the good it will do. I quite like that metaphor, I just made it up!

All a good GUI does is prove you can design a GUI.

Unfortunately for me, I got into computing quite late, in 1996 when I was just over 25 years old. Consequently, I never really had to learn how to deal with command lines and shells. I can now, because my eyes were opened to the unbelievable pile of poo which is Microsoft and I have pretty much boycotted them. Ironically, I'm typing this on my Vista laptop which shares its hard drive with a Kubuntu install. Unbelievably, the Open University decided to do a course on a platform independent programming language, then supplied the software needed to do the course only for Windows machines.

All this doesn't change the fact that when I think about writing a program, I generally think about how it looks first, then put the logic in later. Curse of a GUI driven computing upbringing perhaps.

For general waffle myrddin, it was a remarkably well aimed shot sir! Perhaps just call it a stray round.

Cheers and thanks for the welcome, looking forward to bouncing some ideas off you all. At the moment I'm struggling with parsing GetMarketPricesCompressed. The method I have works well when all the fields are full, but when there is no money in the market it all falls to pieces and I can't figure out why.

Alan

Hi guys, have been using my bot through the free API in testing for the last three months (on-going project for over a year). Since being made redundant have had more time to invest. The bot works horse races and after refinement upon refinement upon - yeah you guessed it - refinement it's returned over 100%. Still tweaking and experimenting.

I would love to learn to code PHP (have bought the book etc). The issue I have, the web host I use does not support SOAP, I'm contemplating using a dedicated server. Any advice or tips would be greatly appreciated.

Toy.

toy, I'd agree with inksmithy, all my php stuff runs locally on my PC via apache. I just installed xampp which is free and instals apache,mysql and php. All very easy to set up and does away with any limits your web host might apply as even some of the pad ones don't have safe mode off in their php instalation which will stop any scraping you might need to do

Hi Guys, Hello Fred and Birchy. It's been a while since I saw you both on Fred77.co.uk.

I started to get interested in betting when I worked for Channel 4 racing, as a broadcast engineer, and spent a couple of years living on the road and going to race meetings every day of the week for a living. Working with these guys, it became apparent that there were ways of making money, and in some cases substantial amounts from betting on horses. I remember my first ever bet on the tote at Cheltenham, where I had £2 each way on a horse at 2-1. Yep I like to learn the hard way! :) I was a winner but out of pocket to the tune of £2.10. Anyhow this happened about 10 years ago and I left Channel 4 in about 2000, but was in profit, mainly due to the tips of the guys behind the scenes.

It wasn't until a couple of years ago that I found Betfair, and like any well produced web applications it was fun and simple to use. I started playing around with small bets, by backing clear favourites, and over time started to make enough money for a few beers at the weekend. I had a system that I had worked out but never really had tried, but was sure that it worked. So I downloaded betfair mobile on my phone, and went and sat in the bookies for a few days, and to my surprise I started to make a lot of money. Like Birchy mentions earlier in the forum, systems that make a lot, also have the potential to lose a lot, and sure enough my system fell flat, and the £400 I earned in the first few days, disappeared in one flat race meeting at Nottingham.

So I returned to the drawing board, and started refining my manual system, in work time whilst I was supposed to be working. It was around then that I discovered the API, and realised that to avoid getting the sack that I needed to program my system rather than sitting there all afternoon betting manually. So my boss no longer saw the betfair website, just a few lines of code, that he new nothing of, and when questioned I would just tell him I was working on the automation of the workflow through the dept! ;)

Fortunately I had a bit of experience of basic programming from my ZX spectrum days and writing my own games, I was interested in web technologies and had noodled around with server side web pages, so had a basic understanding of PHP. As an engineer I was able to work a few things out and with my trusty apple mac running os x (unix) was able to quickly knock up a very rough bot that actually worked. Thank you Fred for your assistance, as it was your pointers that made it so much easier. I installed SOAP on my machine and was up and running with api4 and my bot started to produce. However I soon came to realise that to protect my bank, it would take approx 1 year to double the bank. Then last year the bet id's became too big for php to handle, my bot ground to a halt and I haven't run it since. I actually got to the point where I bought a mac mini, which was sat there just to run my bot.

Anyhow I looked at Fred77.co.uk the other day with the intention of getting back in to bot programming, and up and running again and noticed that Fred had been bitten by the charges and directed me to this site. So my next target is to re-write my bot with the api5, and to learn object oriented programming.

So chaps, any help I can be give me a shout. And I'll see you all around.

Hi again nobster. I thought betIds had been too big for PHP for some time. Does the (float) trick not work on macs?