Simple Tennis Automation

With the Australian tennis open about to start, I thought I would look at automating some tennis markets and see what can be done.

The Australian Open is mens tournament a is played over five sets, there is no tie breaker in the final set either. Out of the grand slams, only the US Open has a tie breaker in the final set. Without a tie break matches can, in theory, go on indefinitely. Although the longest ever grand slam market was the Isner-Mahut match at the 2010 Wimbledon Championship.We remember it well!

Automation on Tennis can pose a few challenges. It is common for games to start later than the advertised event start time. If the first game on court number 1 over runs by an hour then the second scheduled game will be delayed. So using event start times when setting up any automation is could cause problems. Luckily, Bet Angel automation also provides the relative to in-play event time we can use. But play could be suspended due to rain? So it’s important to think through all scenarios when preparing automation.

There are things we can do without automation to give ourselves a decent chance of success.

The strategy I’m going to automate here is to LAY one of the players when the price hits a certain range. Let’s say between 1.25 and 1.50. I’m going to offset with greening.

We can choose to offset by 1 tick or 10 ticks. The more ticks we use to offset the less chance we will have of our trade being successful.

One exercise I would recommend you undertake is to see what effect changing this value has on your strike rate. You might have to analyse quite a few markets but this would be good practice and is what all professional traders have to do when approaching a market.

First we need to create the LAY bet. Add a market to Guardian and click on the automation tab. Make sure the market is highlighted then click on ‘Create a new rules file for selected market’

General Tab

Call the rule “Lay with offset” and select ‘Place Lay Bet’ as the rule type.

For the rule trigger times we need to take into account any possible delay. If we are actually watching the market we can adjust these figures accordingly. But if you plan to leave this automation running whilst you are away from your computer then you need to specify some kind of window. Here I have set from 0:00:00 after event goes in play to 10 hours.

I have chosen to apply the rule to selection in row 1 (Betfair order) as this will not change during the game.

And finally I want the rule to trigger up to ten times. You may wish to adjust this as you get more comfortable with automation.

Parameters Tab

Here I have chosen to place the bet at the best market price. We could choose to ask for a better price but with this strategy I want as many bets to be matched as possible. I’m going to use a liability staking method. Since we are placing LAY bets, Bet Angel can automatically calculate the stake required in order to risk £10 with each bet.

 

In the global settings area I have chosen to use offset with greening. Offset by 1 tick with a 10 second fill/kill delay. This is a safeguard against the initial bet not being matched in fast moving markets.

Since we are using offsetting I have to specify the number of batches used before the offset bet is placed. I just want the whole thing to be done at once so specify the default of 1.

Conditions Tab

I want to set a couple of conditions for this automation. Firstly, I want the bets to only be placed if the match is in-play.

So click on ‘New’ and add the InPlay condition and set to ‘The market is in play’

Secondly, I don’t want to pour all my money down the drain in case the market decides to never match an offset bet. So I can choose to add a condition that says only place a bet if there are no more than 2 unmatched bets in the market.

This is done by clicking on ‘New’ and selecting the Number of Unmatched Bets Condition and setting to less than 3. This says this condition is met if there is 0, 1 or 2 unmatched bets in the market.

 

And now we can add the price condition. Since we want the bet to trigger if the price falls between 1.25 and 1.5 we need to add two more conditions.

Click on ‘New’ and select ‘Fixed Odds Condition’ as the condition type. Choose the current selection (you shouldn’t need to change this) and choose the selections ‘Lay price’ is ‘Greater than’ 1.24.

Do the same again and this time choose the selections ‘Lay price’ is ‘Less than’ 1.51.

We can repeat the above and add a second rule to the rules file to cover the other player. Using the same parameters and conditions add the new rule to the file using the green ‘+’ button in the top left hand corner.

Now we can apply this rule to a market. If you want to be lazy then I have provided the rule here for you to download. Right click and choose ‘Save as’ then use the import rules file button in Guardian automation to add it to your library of rules files.

I hope you enjoy using this. Try tweaking it to see what happens. Use a larger tick offset for example.

And remember to use practice mode until you are familiar with how the automation works and are satisfied it is suitable for the markets you wish to trade.

Download Simple Tennis Automation File

Tags: automation, tennis

Category: Using Bet Angel