Topic: Euro 2008

As many bots as I can fit in there :)

So how was Euro 2008 ?

Me - up and down.

Small profit but mainly ran in a few bots. There are more ways a bot can go wrong than I originally had planned. Not always consistent results via the API. I appear to have canceled bets that come back to life a few call later.

Fun fun fun.

Brendan

This actually leads me to an interesting question

How do you make the bots play nicely with each other? If two strategies have unmatched bets how can you stop bot a from cancelling bot b's unmatched orders?

I have looked at tagging each order id with a strategy name however this becomes difficult if there are partial fills coz you have

1 order placed and unmatched with id 001

then 1 fill for £1.50 id 001
then 1 fill for £0.50 id 002

If you have two bots running its hard to know which strategy is responsible for the order 002.

thoughts?

Each of my Strategy objects holds a Set of betIds and each time it places a bet it just adds the id returned to the set.
If I want to cancel all bets for a given strategy i just use the ids in that set.

I had an eye-opening moment 35 minutes into Germany v Turkey semi-final, when Betfair suddenly decided to add a few more asian handicap selections to the market.
Luckly for me, I was only logging market prices.

I have the same system as austinpodhorzer. Each betId has a nickname for the bot that placed it - in within the database table. The fun comes when a canceled bet comes back to life. So I decided to on run one bot per matchId.

eskei - What fun! I find the bot logic is easy. I have a large framework around the API which tries to capture the pitfalls. The bots are abstracted away from this framework. The pitfalls eat in to my profit the most. Thanks for the tip another possible bullet to dodge.

BMS

mmm, I took the lazy option, instead of tracking betIds and stuff I just opened more accounts to run more bots. Recently I've rolled 5 of my bots into a single bot to help synchronize them, they bet overlapping markets and I was concerned that they may have been triggering each other.

If you have multiple accounts don't you miss out on potentially greater commission discount?

Yes of course, that's the price I'm paying for being lazy. I have no idea how much it's actually costing me. Moving my bots to a single account and recording betIds to track their individual performance is something I've been thinking about, my main reason being to increase my bot portfolio rather than to reduce commission though. I think the combined net effect of a bunch of bots playing the same markets will amount to trading and generate low commission anyway.

Imagine you you put an order in for £4 @ 6.5.
If this order is matched say i.e. £2 @ 6.5 and £2 @6.6 will both the matched orders have the same id so as you can net them together? i.e. to create consolidate them into a matched bet of £4 @ 6.55?
If so its easy, but otherwise its a bit tricky.

I think the api gives you the option of seeing individual matches or the aggregate as a whole ...

Blackmagic. Each betId can have one or more transactionId. Therefore the £4 @ 6.5 would give you :-
betId: 12345678 transactionId:98765431 matched Odds 6.5 stake £2
betId: 12345678 transactionId:98765432 matched Odds 6.6 stake £2

If you call with out the details, the amount matched would change. It is worth getting the transactionID to see the detail.

Hope this helps,
Brendan

Excellent, that is what i was hoping for. Thanks.