A New Technique Using GreyHorseBot And Value Graphing – How To Profit From Betfair Markets
Any user of a bot on the Betfair market enjoys considerable advantages in comparison to bot users on most other gambling venues. For one thing, far from banning bot use, Betfair provide a free Application Program Interface (API) to allow developers to interface directly with its markets, including bet placement, without having to use the slow and inefficient web interface. Even better, provided your account is in reasonable standing, as judged by the number of Betfair points you have gathered, you can download gigabytes of results data direct from Betfair to underpin your own analysis. It is this data, correctly analysed, which can give you pointers as to which odds ranges to set up for automatic betting in GreyHorseBot.
The value graphing technique, in highly summarised form, is as follows.
1. Open up the data download page at data.betfair.com, logging in when prompted with your Betfair userid and password.
2. Select and download a recent .csv file from the list of non-horseracing events. These include the past few weeks results from sports such as greyhounds, soccer and tennis which are particularly suited to the method and which can be set up for automated betting with the GreyHorseBot.
3. Decide which market you are going to investigate and filter out just the rows with the relevant sports id, using a recent version of Microsoft Excel – older versions will not open the full file because of being limited to 64,000 rows. For the sake of this example I will reference greyhound data.
4. Add a column to create a numeric value for odds rather than the text value supplied.
5. Add a column to the end of the sheet to show proft or loss per row for every pound bet. Each row shows the total amount placed at specific odds for a particular dog and race. We will assume that we place a single unit back bet on each such betting opportunity. The calculated value will recognise the 5% commission on winning bets and take the result from the Win Flag field, where 0 is a loss and 1 is a win. The formula will therefore read something like
=if(winflagcell=0,-1,0.95*(oddscell-1)).
6. Copy the formula down through the sheet.
7. Summarise the results by calculating a total by odds value. This shows what your result would be over the two weeks if you had placed a bet on each of the odds price points.
8. Arrange the summarised totals in odds order, pretending that they occurred in that order, and add a running total, showing what happens if you started with say 1000 units, added the win or loss for 1.01 odds and carried right on through to 1,000.
9. Create a graph showing the p&l line of the odds-ordered summarised results.
10. Use the inclines and declines of the graph to show you what odds ranges should be put into the parameters of GreyHorseBot for backing and which ranges should be avoided.
An additional column should be appended for lay bets (betting on the dog losing) with its different calculation, as the graph for laying will never be a simple mirror image of the one for backing. These graphical depictions are invaluable in their ability to give you a new perspective on a market. And wherever you are reading this material, this is a cutting edge technique at the time of writing, provided to give experienced betfair users and beginners alike a substantive strategy to follow while using the GreyHorseBot. The author has had excellent results from some examples of this analysis, including the backing of very long odds (>190) forecasts of first and second places in the UK greyhound markets. And I know of no easier bot in which to program the profitable ranges discovered than the GreyHorseBot, the flagship program from the Sporting Bots development team.
Find out more about the GreyHorseBot at The Botfarm Recommends… The GreyHorseBot. Value graphing will be discussed over the next few weeks at The Botfarm, the authority site for discussion of all varieties of bot software.
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