What did everyone do before they found Sports trading/ Bet Angel

[Satoshis]

I was a twenty-something aspie guy working humble data entry and web dev jobs in the mid-2000s, trying to find a career that suited my numbers-obsessed introverted personality.

As with many others like me there seemed to be a natural gravitation at the time towards either poker, betting, sports trading or financials. I chose Betfair, the meritocracy aspect really appealed to me, as did the ability to work alone all day then have plenty of energy afterwards to socialize on my own terms, rather than being drained by 5pm.

Had a really enjoyable, challenging, successful 13-year run before being suddenly cut off due to being born in the wrong place.

Currently getting into financials but hoping to move abroad ASAP to go back to trading on Betfair. PC or not there's something just so comforting about those markets

Where are you from out of interest?

[RalfusDawes]

Agency drone/semi-automated meat popsicle, breaking a sweat so my bosses could take 3 or 4 holidays a year. Trading is still a hobby that pays, but as I finally escaped the BEGOD last year, I'm starting to take things more seriously.

I was wondering if there is a telegram community or any IM community? It would be cool to chat live with everyone! Maybe I could make a thread about?

Cool idea. I tried a trading chat group found through another sports trading forum, but there wasn't much substance to it, just a bit of chat and guys posting their 'green screens'. The Today's Racing thread, amongst others, has been a goldmine of info and insight, and a telegram/IM version of that would be sweet

[CallumPerry]

Went from full-time primary school teacher to supply, my friend from school starting working for a football tipping website shortly after 6th form and made me £1k betting from an initial £20 deposit. Saw huge potential and did heavy research. It was at this point I realised how incredibly lucky I was with this initial profit blindly following a group of tipsters who have not performed that well since!

I took that money, found matched betting, found BetFair trading mentioned a few times. Did some dutching using some other software called Score Grid or something like that which was as simple as it sounds; a grid interface. Everything from the matched betting part onwards was only around 2 years ago I believe. Decided to take things more seriously as an after-work hobby.

I then found Peter's YT channel. Got hooked and watched pretty much every vid over the summer hols while researching financial trading and refreshing myself with Excel stuff I learned at secondary school a few years prior. I'm 26 at the end of this month and still mess around with ideas daily, think of new ideas at work, log in to this forum etc etc profit-wise, just starting to see the fruits of my labour but have really enjoyed the learning up until this point.

To me it has always been a Maths hobby. Some people get home and play Sudoku or some other simple Maths game to pass the time, this is my 'fun'. The upside always being if you get good at the game it makes money which you can enjoy in the real world.

[Satoshis]

Went from full-time primary school teacher to supply, my friend from school starting working for a football tipping website shortly after 6th form and made me £1k betting from an initial £20 deposit. Saw huge potential and did heavy research. It was at this point I realised how incredibly lucky I was with this initial profit blindly following a group of tipsters who have not performed that well since!

I took that money, found matched betting, found BetFair trading mentioned a few times. Did some dutching using some other software called Score Grid or something like that which was as simple as it sounds; a grid interface. Everything from the matched betting part onwards was only around 2 years ago I believe. Decided to take things more seriously as an after-work hobby.

I then found Peter's YT channel. Got hooked and watched pretty much every vid over the summer hols while researching financial trading and refreshing myself with Excel stuff I learned at secondary school a few years prior. I'm 26 at the end of this month and still mess around with ideas daily, think of new ideas at work, log in to this forum etc etc profit-wise, just starting to see the fruits of my labour but have really enjoyed the learning up until this point.

To me it has always been a Maths hobby. Some people get home and play Sudoku or some other simple Maths game to pass the time, this is my 'fun'. The upside always being if you get good at the game it makes money which you can enjoy in the real world.

Nice story mate!

You're going to smash it!

[godchild22215]

Hi, all!

Before dealing with sports I was a real estate agent. (22years old back then). Unfortunately shortly after we open the first office, the financial system collapsed and the FUD in the TVs, newspapers, internet, etc. was enough for me and my partner to close the office. With some debt left I needed to find some way to payback.

Then one of my friends introduced me to bonus seeking, so for the next two years, I was abusing the bookies and the sweet bonuses they were giving for new customers!

After they managed to collect enough customers, I started changing the rules and requirements so I stopped.
8 years later- here I am! using BA and enjoying it!

Great forum and great minds here btw!
Happy to be a part of the community.

KR
v.m.

[sniffer66]

I've 30 years in IT behind me, desktop support, server and now the last 20 in Systems Management. Have a long background in automation as we always look to script\automate any repeatable manual tasks to save time and effort.

Got into making money online via poker about 20 years ago. I used to play live every Monday night and although I was\am a mediocre live player I became intrigued with online play and whether strategies could be automated. There was a product around at the time called WinHoldem, which was based on C++ I think and it was a framework on which you could build your AI strategy to play automated Holdem. I teamed up with a couple of guys on their forum and started to test. In those days you could buy millions of hands of data to analyse and we spent a good few months working out the best way to beat humans online.
Finally hit on our simplest strat as a winner. Horrible way to play but was basically shove all in or fold on the top 12 pre flop hands, leave table if win or lose regardless.
The hard part was coding our bot to join and leave tables and teaching the AI to recognise the cards\bets at each stage. I ended up manually screen scrapng about 15 poker sites looking at pixel colours and location for each site's 52 card deck - that took some effort and was boring as hell.
There was a lot of buzz at the time re poker botting and humans were loath to play against them - I assume they still are with the improvements in AI. It was perfectly legal but against the sites T&C's - if you got caught they would confiscate your entire bankroll. We had as much anti-detection in place as we could - bot hidden by a rootkit, random pixel clicking on buttons, time variation on button clicks, you name it
Anyway, we started off small playing a few hundred hands a day but soon started to scale up. Virtual machines were still in their infancy, though one of the team was running a large server with VM's. Poker sites were looking for VM's running as part of their detection so I went the cheap hardware route and at one stage had 25 PC's running in my loft, all playing 12 tables at a time. By the time I finished I was playing up to 10k hands a day - playing as friends, relatives and anyone I could beg or borrow ID from. I also had to lease a bank of unassociated IP addresses and use VPN's to hide location.
The heat sig from my roof must have looked like I had a weed farm in my loft so was always expecting a police visit lol

In the end we had a pretty slick,totally automated set up, machines booting up and shutting down automatically, site logins\logoffs, auto-cash out to e-wallets to protect the bankroll and all results written out to Excel. It took a year or so but on the last month ran it I made over 7k - and this was on .25c/0.5c, cash tables.
It was a constant battle with the sites to avoid detection though and I lost a few k in banks along the way. As the sites became more adept at detecting us we had to get cleverer at remaining hidden.
We were really taking money off the fish (mug punters) who were throwing in a tenner after the pub and not fussed if they lost it - mainly from US players. But then a US Senator tacked on an amendment to an unrelated bill - UIGEA, I think it was and effectively blocked online gambling in the US overnight. In one swoop most of our market disappeared.
We limped on for a few more months but struggled to turn any profit - the edge had gone. I also had a few more bankrolls confiscated so at that point decided to call it a day. I had 2 young kids so just didn't have the time to get it working again. Shame though, I thought I was made for life at one point

Anyway, scroll on a few years and I started looking at matched betting to bring a few quid in, last year. Pretty much exhausted most of that and now find myself about to retire this year and looking to make a few extra quid from trading to help pay for some luxuries.

[Satoshis]

I've 30 years in IT behind me, desktop support, server and now the last 20 in Systems Management. Have a long background in automation as we always look to script\automate any repeatable manual tasks to save time and effort.

Got into making money online via poker about 20 years ago. I used to play live every Monday night and although I was\am a mediocre live player I became intrigued with online play and whether strategies could be automated. There was a product around at the time called WinHoldem, which was based on C++ I think and it was a framework on which you could build your AI strategy to play automated Holdem. I teamed up with a couple of guys on their forum and started to test. In those days you could buy millions of hands of data to analyse and we spent a good few months working out the best way to beat humans online.
Finally hit on our simplest strat as a winner. Horrible way to play but was basically shove all in or fold on the top 12 pre flop hands, leave table if win or lose regardless.
The hard part was coding our bot to join and leave tables and teaching the AI to recognise the cards\bets at each stage. I ended up manually screen scrapng about 15 poker sites looking at pixel colours and location for each site's 52 card deck - that took some effort and was boring as hell.
There was a lot of buzz at the time re poker botting and humans were loath to play against them - I assume they still are with the improvements in AI. It was perfectly legal but against the sites T&C's - if you got caught they would confiscate your entire bankroll. We had as much anti-detection in place as we could - bot hidden by a rootkit, random pixel clicking on buttons, time variation on button clicks, you name it
Anyway, we started off small playing a few hundred hands a day but soon started to scale up. Virtual machines were still in their infancy, though one of the team was running a large server with VM's. Poker sites were looking for VM's running as part of their detection so I went the cheap hardware route and at one stage had 25 PC's running in my loft, all playing 12 tables at a time. By the time I finished I was playing up to 10k hands a day - playing as friends, relatives and anyone I could beg or borrow ID from. I also had to lease a bank of unassociated IP addresses and use VPN's to hide location.
The heat sig from my roof must have looked like I had a weed farm in my loft so was always expecting a police visit lol

In the end we had a pretty slick,totally automated set up, machines booting up and shutting down automatically, site logins\logoffs, auto-cash out to e-wallets to protect the bankroll and all results written out to Excel. It took a year or so but on the last month ran it I made over 7k - and this was on .25c/0.5c, cash tables.
It was a constant battle with the sites to avoid detection though and I lost a few k in banks along the way. As the sites became more adept at detecting us we had to get cleverer at remaining hidden.
We were really taking money off the fish (mug punters) who were throwing in a tenner after the pub and not fussed if they lost it - mainly from US players. But then a US Senator tacked on an amendment to an unrelated bill - UIGEA, I think it was and effectively blocked online gambling in the US overnight. In one swoop most of our market disappeared.
We limped on for a few more months but struggled to turn any profit - the edge had gone. I also had a few more bankrolls confiscated so at that point decided to call it a day. I had 2 young kids so just didn't have the time to get it working again. Shame though, I thought I was made for life at one point

Wow, what an amazing story man!

Anyway, scroll on a few years and I started looking at matched betting to bring a few quid in, last year. Pretty much exhausted most of that and now find myself about to retire this year and looking to make a few extra quid from trading to help pay for some luxuries.

Wow, what an amazing story man!


There are a lot of talented and interesting people in this community.

[Euler]

Out of interest why haven't you therefore gone back to financial markets with your new knowledge about yourself and the markets?

I would have thought you could make several multiples of what you can make on sports exchanges due to the scale limits on sports markets which you often talk about but there is almost infinite scale possibilities on financials.

I never really left them. I've always been active, but have adopted a longer-term investment approach on them.

On a short term basis, I've favoured sports markets as I find them easier and more time-efficient. You can be in and out in minutes and your risk profile is complete. OK financials are more scalable but harder to trade for a number of reasons. But that did change last year when most brokers when 0%, so I was a lot more active again last year.

[PDC]

Out of interest why haven't you therefore gone back to financial markets with your new knowledge about yourself and the markets?

I would have thought you could make several multiples of what you can make on sports exchanges due to the scale limits on sports markets which you often talk about but there is almost infinite scale possibilities on financials.

I never really left them. I've always been active, but have adopted a longer-term investment approach on them.

On a short term basis, I've favoured sports markets as I find them easier and more time-efficient. You can be in and out in minutes and your risk profile is complete. OK financials are more scalable but harder to trade for a number of reasons. But that did change last year when most brokers when 0%, so I was a lot more active again last year.

Thanks for that Peter, interesting.

The 0% changes have changed the market place in the US and I am sure it will filter to the UK in time. On the face of it 0% commissions are a good thing but I actually think they are a bad thing for "investors" as it will make it even easier now for people to trade which on the whole people are terrible at.

I was reading about a study recently about the people who make the best investors based on client performance, I think it was done by Fidelity, the people with the best returns.....dead people!

Fractional shares will become wide spread next in the US and eventually the UK is my guess, Robinhood are launching soon in the UK and that should shake things up.

[Satoshis]

Out of interest why haven't you therefore gone back to financial markets with your new knowledge about yourself and the markets?

I would have thought you could make several multiples of what you can make on sports exchanges due to the scale limits on sports markets which you often talk about but there is almost infinite scale possibilities on financials.

I never really left them. I've always been active, but have adopted a longer-term investment approach on them.

On a short term basis, I've favoured sports markets as I find them easier and more time-efficient. You can be in and out in minutes and your risk profile is complete. OK financials are more scalable but harder to trade for a number of reasons. But that did change last year when most brokers when 0%, so I was a lot more active again last year.

Thanks for that Peter, interesting.

The 0% changes have changed the market place in the US and I am sure it will filter to the UK in time. On the face of it 0% commissions are a good thing but I actually think they are a bad thing for "investors" as it will make it even easier now for people to trade which on the whole people are terrible at.

I was reading about a study recently about the people who make the best investors based on client performance, I think it was done by Fidelity, the people with the best returns.....dead people!

Fractional shares will become wide spread next in the US and eventually the UK is my guess, Robinhood are launching soon in the UK and that should shake things up.

I agree man. If you head over to WSB on reddit you will see the results of Robinhood and dumb money. Refer the the "guh" video on youtube.

In fact here is a link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-tNkuYV4_Q

The problem in the US is they have pretty much banned leverage. People use options to gain more buying power. = more rekt plebs