Betfair Auto Trader Bot
Posted in From My Inbox by StefanBelo
I've been playing with the Auto Trader over the last couple of days and really like the feature. One thing that scares me is that by using it a lot I could possibly go over the 1000 bets per hour maximum that betfair allows, and incur charges from them (especially as changing a bet's odds seems to be classed by Betfair as placing a bet, whether or not it is matched). Is there the possibility of a bet counter being added to Bfexplorer (similar to the API counter)? If it could show "bets placed this hour" since the hour started it would be a huge help.
I've read in the forum of another API product that bets under £2.00 are actually counted as 3 bets - I'm not sure how true this is with Bfexplorer but if this is the case, I guess this would need to be taken into consideration.
One other thing I've noticed today is that Auto Trader kept on placing bets in-play in a race today. I had wanted it to stop as soon as the race went in-play. My computer's clock was running slow (the time was showing as being about 7 minutes behind the true time ), so I'm not sure if this affected Auto-trader. I've noticed that the time-until-the-race-start which shows at the top right of the Market screen seems to be based on the client computer's clock, so if my computer clock is wrong, the time-until-start is also wrong. I was using a 30 second refresh rate and at one point (I think it must have been when the race started) all bets were cancelled but then whilst in-play, Auto-trader started going again and placed the offending bets which turned what would have been a winning position into a losing one...eek!
I noticed a similar situation of bets still being placed in-play when I was using the dutching function last week (my computer clock was running behind again then) - although that was just in practice mode.
I'm still loving Bfexplorer though.
You are right you could exceed 1000 bet operations per hour depending on how many AutoTrader bots you run (on how many markets) and what is your data refresh rate. The bot logic is executed at the moment when there are detected changes on market data. So if you set refresh rate of 500 mili seconds, the bot is executed twice per second if data changes.
The AutoTrader bot is speculative type of bot trying to make use of gap between best offered back/lay price so being the first in queue to open its position and then to close it with preset profit, that means that also bet updating occurs only when best offered price changes or your bet is not first in queue, and that could be quite a lot.
But my experiences are so that people exceed betfair data charges more often, actually up to now no one reported such problem with betfair bet charges. You can manage both charges by wisely setting the data refresh rate and number of markets you monitor simultaneously.
When placing bets under the minimal stake the bfexplorer executes 4 bet operations:
- 1 place bet command
- 2 update bet commands
- 1 cancel bet command
3 of them are counted to betfair bet charges limit you have got per hour.
Any bot executes its strategy, and you can use bot parameters to exactly set this strategy execution. Unfortunately nor AutoTrader bot neither the Dutching bot has parameters which could tell the bot if it is allowed to run when the market is turned in-play, such features are supported only by PlaceBet or PlaceBetClosePosition bots.
The Bfexplorer PRO supports the bot development so you can make your own bot scripts if you are familiar with C# or Visual Basic programming languages. You can read more about it in couple articles on this web site or on my blog.
Some betting or trading strategies you could run depends on right timing therefore it is necessary you synchronize your computer time.
