Posts Tagged bot
Grey bot
Posted by Peter Webb in Greyhound racing on February 9th, 2012
Messed around in the Greyhound markets yesterday with a surprisingly good results. I don’t know whether it was the weather, other participants or what, but it seemed OK.
Because of the lack of scale I can’t really participate in the greyhound markets much, they are just too small for me. But I wanted to have a play to see what they were like in comparison to the last time I did it. Not much has changed.
Average turnover was between £15-20k a race, but there are up to 100 a day. So while the individual matched bet volume is small you would only need to get a small amount out of each race on average for the total to really begin to add up.
The same characteristics I noticed last time are still in the market, so I set up the automation to run alongside my efforts. It did surprisingly well and it dawned on me that I should probably set up an account to do this while I’m not using it for anything else. Pulling a quid or two out of a race can be very rewarding if it’s done automatically.
I suggest you have a look the Greyhounds during this rather barren spell for racing.
- This dog bot costs, rather than makes money
£1k account caused £600m Betfair error
Posted by Peter Webb in Betfair on December 30th, 2011
Betfair have issued a statement this afternoon outlining the error that caused the exchange to misfire. The full statement is here: -
But here are some bullet points:-
“This bet was placed by one of our UK customers trading the race via our API or Application Programming Interface (bdp.betfair.com/) using an automated program (a “bot”). Their bot had developed a fault causing it to try and place a very large number of bets on the Exchange. These bets were large in size and mispriced…… However, due to a technical glitch within the core exchange database, one of the bets evaded the prevention system and was shown on the site. This was an issue that was triggered because of a unique sequence of events that had never happened before.” – “In this case, the customer had less than £1,000 in their account so none of these bets should have been accepted.”
“The Betfair technical teams continued to investigate the details of the fault and, having identified the issue, worked on putting a fix in place which was applied at 10.15pm on December 28th.”
“Following extensive testing, we can confirm that there have been no subsequent occurrences of this fault and we’ve taken steps to prevent its reoccurrence in the future.”
“Again, I would like to clarify that the account in question has no commercial relationship with Betfair other than being a customer. Our reputation has been built on integrity and we have been pioneers in the industry in ensuring that betting is carried out in a fair and transparent manner. By making the voiding decision, I can assure you that this decision was not taken lightly and that we have implemented what we believe to be the fairest solution in these truly exceptional circumstances.”
Botfair
Posted by Peter Webb in Bet Angel on July 20th, 2011
I read some comments yesterday evening from some ‘traditional’ punters about how they were pleased Betfair’s new charges were going to get rid of the bots. Unfortunately for these posters, the opposite is almost certainly likely to be true. There is some pretty simple logic behind it.
Say you have a winning bot that makes money on a market and you suddenly face higher charges. At this level you would most likely work more aggressively to make more to offset those charges. Dropping down a level, say you had something that generally worked but took a lot of time as you had to manually do certain tasks. Losing a lot of that income to a third party for no reward means it could suddenly be unviable if you manually intervene, so the answer is to automate it to save your precious time. OK it may not yield as much, but at least it yields something and doesn’t take any of your time.
Less bots because of increased charges? I bet you it’s more.
If you are interested in automating your activity give Bet Angel’s spreadsheet functionality a try, http://www.betangel.com/excel/. It can pre-load multiple markets to one sheet, or automatically switch to events as the day progresses. It also includes some unique scripting capabilities to enable you to automate key trading functions.
Fat fingers crucify punter
Posted by Peter Webb in Bet Angel on October 23rd, 2010
I see lots of strange things in the markets but few stranger than what happened just a moment ago at Newbury. While I realise we all, in some way, take money of each other now and again. I feel a great deal of sympathy for what they did, we all screw up from time to time. I can’t imagine how they felt after this error.
The long and short of it is that they backed a 400/1 shot down to only 1.08, with significant amounts of money. All this occured before the off. Why, is anybodies guess. But you feel it could be a bot error. There is a discussion on the forum, but here is an image I took quickly after this happened.
It’s going to take some getting back I think.
Ouch!