dbowes's Blog

lol, its a difficult one to get into words but yeah thats what i was trying to say.

The whole concept of the exchange is changing. A lot of opportinites for bots are lost with this change. I think trading is the only way forward now.

You will be matched at what you ask for (or possible higher if price improvement allows it). Betfair will match your bet for you by offseting it against other selections. This will be internal though. For example if you ask to back at 3 when 3 is available to back, betfair may be able to give you 3.1 by matching it using the avaialable lays for the rest of the field. You would just see an order of 3 matched at 3.1.

It means that the layer of 3 for the same selection will remain unmatched, which i personally think is unfair.

If i understand it right then there they may aswell just have 1 selection available (the favourie). i./e Back Federer to win or lay Federer to lose.

Its better for punters making 1 off bets. A lot of bots try and offset bets for one selection against other selections to guarantee a small profit, whether this is waiting for an overround to occur or to offer a bet then hedge afterwards (like JPL does).

A casual punter who wants to back a selection doesnt get his calculator out to establish he's 1p better off by doing the opposite back/lay on the other selection(s). A bot can do this all day long... or could of done until now anyway. Betfair are essentially doing what bots do, but they get to do it before we see any updates via the website without any risk.

Shame really, i need to think of a completely new strategy.

lol i love the way they give their examples. They r so nice to us!!

So its a bigger change than i realised. So basically you can be at the front of the queue for 1 selection but the opposibe back/lay would actually be matched before you. There example uses evens but in reality the best execution will actually skim them pennies for every transaction that occurs.

I thought the cross matching only came into play when they couldnt do a match as normal. If a bet would be unmatched they would attempt to match it by cross matching, rounding to the nearest odds increment (and take the difference). What was the quote your refering to? cant get on the betfair siet from work :(

So basically you met a girl who probably worked in a betfair call centre and tried to impress her with you statistical and programming skills...

A good test Nadat (clearing the cache before actually logging in). I have now got my app working. I just retrieved a response from http://www.betfair.com and passed the cookie back to my LoginAction.Do request and it worked fine.

I think its something to do with the way .Net handles empty (or null) cookie containers when dealing with Betfair. Anyway panic over. Thanks again.

Good stuff Nadat, will try that tonight, thanks! It would explain why logging in via the website continued to work as normal but our apps didnt.

What is strange is that friends of mine who use MFC have been unaffected. They just post the LoginAction.Do as they always have.

It seems only people who use .net are affected. Can't get my head around this at the moment but if your approach works, thats good enough for me.

Perhaps this is the problem but im not convinced from that article that this is casuing the login problems.

A couple of friends of mine use MFC and seem to be unaffected. Im using .net, can anyone else successfully login using the HTTPWebRequest object?

Hi,

Ive had a problem too, although i got the exception "cannot resolve http://www.betfair.comnull". My bot has been logging succesfully since the charges started. I first noticed the problem this morning!

Hadnt had chance to look into it yet.

Anyone had any luck resolving the issue?

Dan