Betfair Automation – Trading Tennis markets
This is a guest post from Dallas
My, automated, Tennis trading journey
When I first looked to trade tennis with automation, my initial mistake was trying to create a single automation file and apply it to all the day’s matches. I soon learned this was never going to work and instead started taking some time to use the wealth of stats and data available for tennis from a number of websites and other sources to carefully select matches most suited to the specific strategy/rule I was trying to use.
Then, while looking at these stats, I began building up a few more rules to fit specific players, matches & situations, etc. So now, with just a handful of different automation files, it’s possible for me to cover a large percentage of all the day’s matches with a strategy that fits those players and matches.
Not a sign, but a signal!
Regarding automation in Tennis, the ever-increasing options now available within Bet Angel make the possibilities practically endless. For a long time now, it’s already been possible to do what now seem basic things like triggering bets when a score line has been reached by using the existing Tennis ‘fixed score and ‘relative score’ conditions, but with the addition of ‘Signals’ to automation’s arsenal, even more, possibilities opened up.
To give you an example of just one-way signals that could be used with a tennis automation rule is to now test for earlier scores during a match as a condition before triggering a bet or green up.
Using Tennis statistics
Using some data/stats on players, a characteristic I found was how a specific player’s service game can be affected by what happened in their previous serve.
Some players who win their service game comfortably are then more likely to go on and hold their next serve, whereas if they have defended a breakpoint or struggled to hold their serve (even if they still won that game), the chances of them being broken on their subsequent service game increase substantially.
This can be for any number of reasons, including fatigue, lack of confidence, or opponents’ increased confidence etc., but whatever the reason, it means a ‘Lay the Server’ in this situation can become a good value trade on that player’s next service game.
Putting it all together
So with this info and by using the latest ‘signals’ I put together a new automation rule that would set a signal if the player serving faces a break-point; the rule then uses this signal to trigger a lay bet on that player at the start of their next service game – and of course green-up as expected at the end of the game.
Another way signals can be used within tennis automation (including existing rules you may already be running) is to delay bets or green ups that are being triggered on score lines during the match.
Rather than submitting your bet simultaneously as everyone else’s, your signal can delay your bet by a number of seconds while the odds settle down, letting other bots jump in first and often taking the worst price.
Sound complicated?
Once you have decided on a strategy to try automating it and using it on several matches is then actually quite straightforward in Tennis. Even basic strategies can be very effective when used on the right matches but just to help you that little bit further and get new users to automation started both the examples detailed above and a number of others are available to download from the shared files library of the Bet Angel forum.