Life in Bots-ville

Wow! I've not posted for a while. I've also not done much trading, in fact, the last trades I did were in February for the grand gain of about £6! I havn't been completely quiet though, I've been playing around with some laying systems, for a bit of a change. I'll write up the results in a forthcoming post. I know, I'm normally all about the trading, but as I've not felt like trading, why not explore other options?

Anyway, the main thrust of this post is about the world of Betfair bots, or rather, what recent events have happened to affect them. First up are the new changes that Betfair are making if you want to use data from their site or API. They've decided to apply extra data charges if you make more than 20 calls a second to their API or web site. Now, that doesn't sound too bad, but if you are trying to access multiple markets at once then it can happen.

I usually use the free API and only track one market at a time, so I'm okay, but its something to bear in mind when you're planning what you want to do at the start.

And finally... We see the death of a site/forum that has been a centre piece to bot builders for quite a while now. That site is http://www.fred77.co.uk/. It's gone! If you want a new forum, then I've set one up. Whether it'll take off, will depend if people use it. If it doesn't get used I might take it down again, but if you want a look, its at: http://thebreakthroughpartnership.com/simplemachinesforum/index.php

And finally, finally, if you are interested in building your own Betfair bot, please have a look at my eBook on the subject (hey, nothing like a self plug!). Go to: http://www.thebreakthroughpartnership.com/tradingbot/tradingbot.html

Bots without the Betfair API

If you want to write your own Betfair bot or an application that is driven from Betfair data and you don't want to use the API, then you could try screen scraping. The API is the fastest and safest way to go, but it is a bit pricey (£100-£200 per month). You could, of course, use the heavily throttled free version (60 updates a minute of prices from one market and then having to decode the information sent to you) but it is quite hobbled. Screen scraping is a free option but if the web page layout changes, you may need to revisit your code.

So, what is screen scraping? Well, basically, it is just automated web site reading. You tell your computer to go to a web site and look for specific bits of information and then return them to your program, every second or so. The Betfair web site is quite "busy" (it has lots of tables, images, etc on it), but there is another web site provided by Betfair that just has the essentials and this is much easier to screen scrape. The site is http://lite.betfair.com/ and is intended for mobile users. The nice people at Betfair have also provided some sample code, in the form of an Excel spreadsheet, which contains all the code you need to get started. Have a look at the Excel Tracking worksheet at: http://labs.betfair.com/labs.aspx

Good luck!

Using the BetFair API

If anyone out there is considering having a go at using the BetFair API to develop their own bot or tool, then you might want to initially look at the BetFair developers programme web site and then have a look here and here. The second link is to the web site of a guy who is developing his own set of automatic bots in PHP. The third link is to the developer of BF Explorer. He offers some coding demos and other good stuff.