Tag: betfair
Friday 13th unlucky for Betfair
Just days after their latest ‘upgrade’, the Betfair site crashed again. How incredibly frustrating! I’ve lost count of how many times the site has been down over the last year and each time the site is upgraded it seem almost certain now that a major crash follows.
If you want to trade today, why not give Betdaq at go. BetDaqAngel is the same Bet Angel platform you are familiar with but it’s compatible with Betdaq. Best of all its 100% …
Betfair market anomalies
An interesting couple of days so far this week in the markets. Interesting for an anomaly that we have seen. It’s only a couple of days old, so I can’t draw any conclusions just yet, but it is unusual so I thought I’d post about it.
We monitor the markets cloesly and ‘felt’ that matched bet volume on occasion was much higher than we would expect. We noticed this because, in the latter stages of a racing market just before …
Betfair to compensate Leopardstown losers
Hot off the press, just received this email from Betfair: –
“Dear Peter,
Since the 2.00pm race at Leopardstown on 28 December 2011, we’ve looked in detail at all the circumstances surrounding the technology failure and the anomaly it created. In addition, we provided our Gibraltar regulator, the Gibraltar Gambling Commissioner (GGC), with a detailed technical and operational report on the incident and the GGC made a number of recommendations. We have also consulted with customers and taken their feedback …
Will Betdaq take off this year?
What an open question that is! I’ve stuck up a poll on the right that you can give me your answer on.
For years Betdaq has been a much weaker market than Betfair. In 2008 it got a boost when Betfair increased charges. A few vendors, including Bet Angel, rushed to make their applications Betdaq compatible. But the majority didn’t however. This rush to Betdaq was short lived and things very soon, sort of, carried on as normal. I say …
£1k account caused £600m Betfair error
Betfair have issued a statement this afternoon outlining the error that caused the exchange to misfire. The full statement is here: –
But here are some bullet points:-
“This bet was placed by one of our UK customers trading the race via our API or Application Programming Interface (bdp.betfair.com/) using an automated program (a “bot”). Their bot had developed a fault causing it to try and place a very large number of bets on the Exchange. These bets were …
How to lay £600m worth of bets on Betfair?
That has to be the #1 question after yesterdays debacle in one of the feature races at Leopardstown.
To summarise, a mysterious lay bet appeared and stayed on the winning favourite at 29’s right up to the finish of the race. The ‘layer’ offered up £21m at 29’s creating a £600m liability. Betfair voided the in-running market.
Betfair have come out officially and ruled out that it was them or any account controlled by them or that they had a …
Biggest ever loss on Betfair?
One of those remarkable events happened today on Betfair when, in the Christmas hurdle at Leopardstown, Voler La Vedette was offered up in-running for massive money at massive prices despite the fact it won.
Seemingly, over £21m was offered and held in-running to get filled at HUGE prices. £1,642,094 was matched at 29’s meaning the loser would have to pay out £44.8m on their bet at 29’s. In order to be able to just place the bet the user would …
Satisfying chaos
OK, yesterday didn’t seem that chaotic in the end, just a bit frustrating. I had to wait ages to find races that really set themselves up nicely, but eventually I did and they were OK. But it was a little dull overall.
Kauto Star lit up the day when I took a few races off to watch the King George VI produce a bit of history. What a great horse we have been treated to and it looks like we …
120% Premium charge!
As premium charge payers know it’s PC day today. What a surprise then to see Betfair have double debited my account. So this week I paid 120% premium charge, ouch!
Obviously a mistake, but I suggest all premium charge payers check their account immediately and flag it to Betfair. It looks like everybody is affected. Nice timing Betfair!
[EDIT : About two hours later the duplicate charge was refunded. I imagine this is applicable to everybody, but please check, just …
What are the odds?
A bit of a laugh ahead of the Christmas break. Vote now!
Back when I joined Betfair, nearly 12 years ago now. They sent me a nice diary for my patronage. I didn’t generate much commission for them back then and didn’t write articles, design software for use on Betfair or anything like that. The following year I also received a small gift, and so it continued. Calendars, playing cards and the odd email with seasonal greetings.
About four or …
Betfair profits up on flat growth
See the full press announcement here: –
At first glance revenue (comissions) have declined, but so has the cost of sales, producing an increase in the bottom line. Admin expenses have also fallen adding to the bottom line.
I’ll have a proper read of the full statement when I get into the office. Betfair shares are up a bit in early trading this morning.
If you want an update of content of the conference call, I’ll be tweeting updates: …
It’s jungle out there
Another week and another amazing betting system drops into my inbox.
Each one is similar to the last, as for only a few quid, limited to just a few people; you can have a system that requires little work yet prints money. Sounds fantastic, but as we all know it’s just not true. Why sell something for a fraction of the profit it allegedly generates? Just doesn’t make any sense.
In the past I have noticed that most of these …
Betfair maintenance this morning
Please be aware Betfair has site maintenance going on this morning around 7am UK time: –
An ‘interesting’ Saturday
Well that was an interesting Saturday. I sort of got the feeling that the day may not go as planned right from the off.
Went shopping with the kids to stock up the office and got back a little late which left me no time to put the stuff away. I just had to dump it on the stairs. Sat down to the early start and immediately realised there was a problem… The Internet was at a virtual standstill. I …
Bombs away
Every now and again in the racing market an individual arrives that doesn’t make much sense. From a trading perspective at least!
The come into the market and back a selection for a large amount of money, then back again and again and again! I’m not sure the oft quoted description of ‘mad bomber’ is accurate, maybe there is a better description. But what is certain is the impact they have on the market. You could view this as a …
Quietly moving ahead..
It’s interesting to see that liquidity and market conditions continue to improve on Betdaq. It’s quite possible to sqeeze someting out of most races now and thanks to the favourable commission rate it’s proving a good use of my time. We appear to have gone from waiting for perfect market conditions to a wider range of acceptable reasons to participate, which is encouraging.
I’d honestly recommend using both major exchanges as competition is good in all markets, but some of …
Should Betfair be more secure?
I’ve put a poll up on whether Betfair should be more secure, read on and vote.
As you may / or not be aware, Betfair suffered a security breach not so long ago but choose not to inform customers after consulting on the risks involved in the breach. Personally I feel, whether there was a risk or not, people should have been informed.
The following was recently pointed out to me in the Betfair terms and conditions under the “limitations …
That’ll do nicely
I had a feeling Saturday would turn out to be an interesting day, so I pulled out all stops to take advantage. I did well and it was a real pleasure to net my best day ever (At least before commission).
I managed to pick up a lot of decent results from a wide spectrum of events on both exchanges. Thanks to favourable commission rates and favourable liquidity conditions on Betdaq, it meant I found it pretty easy to beat …
Book%
I fielded a question from somebody recently about the book% and what information does that contain?
I’ve seen quite a few theories about what the book% can actually tell you, but here is what it tells me.
At it’s most basic level the book percentage is merely a broad measure of the market. A big number of selections will equate to a big book% and small field a small one. This is due to the spread between back and lay …
Dilemma
It’s just gone 08:30 on Wednesday morning and I’m up over £700 on the day already. On Saturday, I sat down to do a decent days work on the exchanges. Across both I earned somewhere between £3.5-4k which was similar to last year, slightly higher as Betdaq is contributing more than it did in prior years. What’s my point?
As you are probably aware I’ve been doing this for over a decade now, have collected a ton of data and …
Back to back
That’s woken me up from my slumber!
A very simple strategy would have made you money trading the racing today. Get a back order filled and wait.
Somebody was in the market a lot today, as we have seen before, with seemingly infinitely deep pockets. Race after race has had one horse or another completely smashed up with huge back orders. When trading you don’t need to catch many of these to make a huge difference. I am sure a …
Time for a chit chat
It’s been a while since I did my last webinar so I’ve decided to dust off the webinar service and give it another go.If it goes without a hitch I will do some more. Now the evening racing is gone, that will also free my time up a bit more. I plan to hold the webinar on Monday evening 8pm UK time.
There is no specific topic planned, but I am sure there will be lots of questions. The format …
What to do when Betfair API is down
Unfortunately Betfair suffered another outage this afternoon. Here is how I am set up to deal with such issues: –
I always have two version of Bet Angel running. One in API mode and one, with the refresh off, in non API mode (Log in via connection mode 1).
This means I can switch quickly between applications and if I am caught on one I can exit on another. We note that a site crash seems to happen in stages …
Cheaters never prosper
I saw this post on another blog recently and it shows up how statistics can actually reveal very little at all. This is obviously unintended in this case, but is a trap a lot of people fall into very often. Especially when gambling / trading.
https://www.soccerbythenumbers.com/2011/09/cheaters-never-prosper-connection.html
I first looked into the relationship with fouls and goals some time ago and the link is the attacking strength of one team over the defence of another. If your defence is under pressure …
Betfair AGM pt. 2
Having been to many AGM’s in the past I didn’t expect much from Betfair’s first AGM.
I almost didn’t get in as Betfair were blocking access to people who have nominee accounts. Not many people own shares directly any longer, but I’d never been blocked access to an AGM before despite this. However, I had contacted Betfair directly before the AGM to indicate that I was going to attend; so this piece of foresight was enough to get over this …
Betfair revenue down 7%
Full regulatory news release available from the following link: –
https://www.investegate.co.uk/article.aspx?id=201109060700136723N&fe=1
Passive Tennis trading
Missed most of the US open last night as I opted to play Tennis rather than watch it, but I still profited on the matches last night.
I also had a nice reminder of how using stats can show a different version of the match than the score. I won 6-4 6-4 last night, but the first set was quite tight and I effectively won it with a break of serve in the ninth game. The second set was not …
The right connections
First a history lesson.
A long time ago Betfair offered unfettered access to their servers. You could smash into their servers by requesting price information at will. Back then there was no API and you could only screen scrape information from Betfair. Because of this an arms race developed and Betfair considered banning the bots, but thankfully that never happened. What actually happened was an API was born and Betfair started slowly but surely changing the way their site …
Eye Watering
I’ve been playing around with spreadsheets and a number of other strategies recently. With the increase in commission charges levied against me, I figured it would make sense to look outside my normal activity. While it’s flattering to know you are better than 99.9% of market participants have ever been, it’s less flattering to give away the majority of your profit! By ‘normal activity’ I am talking ‘active’ participation. I now have a very big incentive to find less manual …
Free morning workshop
This summer we have been holding a series of morning workshops, we are currently conducting another one this morning. These have been aimed to improve your ability to use Bet Angel and your participation in the markets. Because of the small class sizes we do have a waiting list, but if you are interested in attending future courses, please register your interest now.
Connect
Connect with us on the following social media platforms.