fred77's Blog

Re: Betfair API performance

Yes yes I know you said so lol. But as I've said before - if somebody says something is impossible or that they have failed in their own attempts - then that's something I will have a look at (subject to sufficient motivation levels).
I figured x-games success would be down to large funds and betting speed, and with my experience of attempting 1.01 IR horse lays (which I finally gave up on) I thought I might get somewhere. Turned-out to be more a case of having extremely large patience than anything else. I could have used bigger stakes to target the better value bets but couldn't be bothered making my test bot into a proper reliable bot that I'd trust with bigger stakes and funds. The edge is so small that it seems feasible to lose for months before turning a profit.

Talking of javascript, not a bot as such, but the new racingtraders app Evolution is javascript based, I had a quick glance through its code the other week.
I played with greasemonkey on firefox a couple of years back, I managed to do a bf API login but didn't do anything else. There's a few security issues to overcome with javascript - probably why the Evolution app sets up a local proxy to connect through.

Re: Betfair API performance

Well done on the promotion birchy, that's quite a nice raise. It's about time you had some joy from your bot endevours though, hopefully your poker bot trend will be the real thing.
I got so fed up with sports botting recently that I looked at bf x-games for a break. That was a mistake though, there's slow and there's slow, the margins are so tight and perfect that x-games is ... the perfect vehicle for earning bf commission lol

Re: Betfair API performance

API is fine but the BDP site has been stuffed for me on and off for days, the link I gave doesn't currently work for me.

Yes birchy I'm still botting. I thought you were too as I saw your Python API library download on your website. Are you finally making a killing with other online activites?

Re: Betfair API performance

http://forum.bdp.betfair.com/showthread.php?t=519

The API seems fine. There were performance issues the other day because a new application(s) with a significant user base suddenly started making use of certain API functions. I imagine the API servers had insufficient resources available to meet the sudden demand. BF are working on it.

Re: Fresh blood coming?

All they need to do is pop along to the bdp forum and ask Mumbles or Vossie for help, job done !

Re: Fresh blood coming?

Fresh blood mmm. I've lost count the number of times I've now looked at neural nets and lost interest again before getting anywhere.

Yes you're bad Mike. But then so are bankers lol. I'm so bad that I'd proudly wear a bf t-shirt and even have a full size bf logo on my car ! Unfortunately not even so much as a mug from bf towers :(

Re: How's everyone doing?

Things are slow here. I've had a few strategies go pear shaped of late and haven't replaced them yet. I also lost an income stream due to betfair's bet matching logic change but I've still got a bunch of bots that usually make an overall monthly profit. I'm still wishing I could trade but haven't found the motivation to get there yet.

bennean, yes I've been watching the dynamicnotions blog, my best betting day dreams involve an AI or 2 :)

Re: scraping prevention

"dynamic data appears static" sounds more like a cacheing issue. Could be caused by many factors. Try adding anti-cacheing headers. If you are adding time based parameters to the request then check the time/time zone etc. For more clues you'd need to compare the full exchange of headers over several requests, using browser / your code / your code on other pc.

Re: scraping prevention

If you wish to scrape live betfair prices then you need to emulate a normal browser login. The login requirement was added when data charges were brought in. You have to login to identify yourself so that your number of requests can be correctly tallied.

If a site behaves differently when scraped then your browser emulation probably isn't convincing enough. Check that you're sending the right headers and handling cookies properly.

Re: Automatic Exchange Betting, Colin Magee

The book states that its example code can be downloaded from http://www.betwise.co.uk/ I think you might need to register as I can't see any direct links.

Re: API request XML - hand rolled

Ah well, that explains that then. I guess <locale></locale> actually specifies an (invalid) empty string rather than total absence of value.

I used this date calculation:

future = datetime.datetime.today() + datetime.timedelta(3)    #3 days (72 hours) ahead
toDate = future.strftime("%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.000Z")

Re: API request XML - hand rolled

Here's PHPs version (sorry can't be bothered formatting)

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<SOAP-ENV:Envelope xmlns:SOAP-ENV="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xmlns:ns1="http://www.betfair.com/publicapi/types/exchange/v5/"
xmlns:ns2="http://www.betfair.com/publicapi/v5/BFExchangeService/">
<SOAP-ENV:Body>
<ns2:getAllMarkets>
<ns2:request>
<header>
<clientStamp>0</clientStamp>
<sessionToken>laalaa</sessionToken>
</header>
<locale xsi:nil="true"/>
<eventTypeIds xsi:nil="true"/>
<countries xsi:nil="true"/>
<fromDate xsi:nil="true"/>
<toDate xsi:nil="true"/>
</ns2:request>
</ns2:getAllMarkets>
</SOAP-ENV:Body>
</SOAP-ENV:Envelope>

Here's my hand-rolled version (not bothered specifying any empty elements which seems to work fine)

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<s:Envelope xmlns:s="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"
xmlns:n="http://www.betfair.com/publicapi/v5/BFExchangeService/">
<s:Body>
<n:getAllMarkets>
<n:request>
<header>
<clientStamp>0</clientStamp>
<sessionToken>doodoo</sessionToken>
</header>
</n:request>
</n:getAllMarkets>
</s:Body>
</s:Envelope>

Re: API request XML - hand rolled

Very good, sounds like an interesting plan. I find that rewriting the wheel is usually more fulfilling than writing strategies - even when my wheels come out square... lol

Re: API request XML - hand rolled

I reckon both of those will work fine, they both sort of say the same thing. I don't really know why they're different, maybe just because different soap libraries choose slightly different (but valid) ways to represent data. They may include superfluous bits. Some of the references that are in those samples aren't even needed, e.g. when I was mucking around hand rolling I chopped login down to this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<s:Envelope
xmlns:s="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"
xmlns:n="http://www.betfair.com/publicapi/v3/BFGlobalService/">
 <s:Body>
  <n:login>
   <n:request>
    <ipAddress></ipAddress>
    <locationId>0</locationId>
    <password></password>
    <productId>82</productId>
    <username></username>
    <vendorSoftwareId>0</vendorSoftwareId>
   </n:request>
  </n:login>
 </s:Body>
</s:Envelope>

Re: A return to botting

GetAllMarkets will certainly do the business, it will return all markets or a cross section of markets selected by sport type and or start time.

As market acquisition can be totally separate to betting you could easily use the API for that and stick with your scraping for betting if you wished.

Re: Flutter...

Nah I never saw exchanges in the early days. I didn't discover the internet till 2002 (I had resisted up till then, thinking what a waste of time it was - how right I was!) and I didn't discover betfair till 2005. Yes I'd love to be a time traveller too...

Re: pip calculator

lol, you'll kick yourself!

A runner at a price of 1.04 will win 0.96 (96%) of the time.
A runner at 2 (ie evens) will win 0.5 (50%) of the time

All the inverse function does is convert either way between implied probability and betfair prices

1 / 2 = 0.5 and back again 1 / 0.5 = 2

Re: link broken

Try pop a post on Nadat's thread in the code snippets section, maybe the forum will email him a notification and get his attention.

Alternatively, just look at Brendan's version of the code http://code.google.com/p/pythonbetfairlibrary/

Re: Attention any PHP magicians

If you are otherwise happy with them then imo there's no need to look for another host (though I certainly would if it happens again). Getting hacked is a risk no matter where you put your content, one of the reasons for maintaining back-ups.

Back in the days when I was running and writing my own websites I had a host that was TOO security conscious for my needs. I would get numerous complaints from my users because the server would reject harmless forum posts because they contained trigger words / sequences that it didn't like the look of!

Re: Attention any PHP magicians

Surely it is on the OSSEC site as an example of what OSSEC defends against? c99shell is not good.

edit, yes it is:

here

Re: Attention any PHP magicians

Interesting. c99shell is a remote shell tool, used by hackers to take control of websites/servers. Probably uploaded onto the server using an insecure upload form.

Re: Recent changes to forum

I'd love to make 1% of my bank daily, and what with compounded funds, this time next year Rodney ....

Re: Recent changes to forum

It's not going to be an issue now, I think the new bdp forum will become the main place for newbie questions. Especially if bdp staff are going to answer questions and provide sample code :)

Re: What would you do with Full Access?

Keep doing whatever it was you were doing to inspire such a gift :)

Build a bot that will automatically discover your favourite markets andrecord them in order to provide you with lots of test data.

Take your best performing bot and mutate it 10 different ways?

Re: Recent changes to forum

LOL

edit: oops, sorry for my worthless contribution.

Yes the editor is a pain, I don't like these modern new fangled things.birchy, move your bed away from the wall - try getting out the otherside tomorrow ;)