The Footy Trader

I was sent an email from Interwetten on Friday and they gave me  a free fiver to bet with, all I had to do was to place it on odds over 2.00. The first bet I did was on a football game with Espanol against whoever. I backed Espanol on Interwetten and then layed the bet off on Betfair. That cost me 4 euro. I won on Interwetten and lost on Betfair. So I was 4 euro down on Betfair and I had 11.50 euro to use on Interwetten.

On the next bet I went for Blackburn versus Aston Villa and I backed the draw on Interwetten and layed it off on Betfair it cost 10.75 to lay off and the game finished with Villa winning and the money came into Betfair. At the end of the deal I was over a fiver better off in betfair with no risk at all.

You might consider looking into this yourself because often bookmakers will give you a bonus when you start with them and sometimes they have other bonuses. The idea is to lay off the bet in Betfair and eventually you will lose the money in the bookmaker but will have gained the free money in your Betfair account with no risk.

I will let you know if I see any of these offers come up.

Looks an interesting piece of software. Still trying to get to grips with it after just a short look to start with. It does have a nice ladder trading function very like the Bet Trader Pro which is good to see. It works off the free Betfair API which seems to be slower than another betfair API. I didn’t know there was more than one ??

I struggled to understand how to get it to watch the market I wanted to watch and it half crashed on me while using it. But it is Beta software and maybe that can be expected.

I sent an email to the writer of the software asking some questions and he sent me a long reply which I will quote below. I think in the long term this BF Explorer will turn out to be a good Betfair trading software although it is sort of usuable now.

There is a function in there to be able to write your own bots to trade on Betfair. I am not sure about the level of nerdyness you need to be able to do it though. I will have a look at the details in the for the included bot for trading the under 2.5 goal market and report back on that one.

I am still not able to trade much at the moment as I have taken a job which claims my body and soul during the time I would have been trading but I will be getting back fully into this as soon as I can, which could be as far away as the 1st of October.

Here is the reply I got back from the developer of BF Explorer.

Hi Wizardgold,

Well, the user interface (UI) is designed the way how I use the Bfexplorer
and as I wanted to visualize any information which I could get from betfair
service it may seems for the first sight too complicated.

The Bfexplorer is not only trading platform but as well a tool for
monitoring data which could help in a process of deciding on which market
and at what moment to enter, and as well a platform for BOT development.

As there is really a lot of information which could be presented for any
market I decided to use the dockable windows and tabbed panels as a main
parts of the user interface for Bfexplorer. You can open and dock only those
windows you need and the tabbed documents which are useful only for certain
actions could be closed if not more necessary.

At this moment there are four tabbed panels:
•       Start Page
•       Monitored Markets
•       Find In Play Events
•       My Bots

And eleven dockable windows:
•       Choose Your Selection
•       Market Information
•       Market Statistics
•       My Bets
•       My Favorite Events For Today
•       Output
•       Runner Property
•       Traded and Available
•       Trade the Market
•       Watched Markets
•       Tennis Score Board

Tennis Score Board is actually a tool for people betting/trading on tennis
matches, but its UI is done by dockable window so I added it to the list. I
hope the similar tools will come for the rest of trades. I am open for any
suggestion what it could be.

If you are just a punter you only need to open Browse Betfair markets,
select a market you want to place a bet and then place a bet using the My
Bets window or if you prefer a one click user interface by Trade The Market
window. That is all what you need. The Monitored Markets panel is the main
part of the user interface, the dockable windows just present additional
information or actions, you can find all in menu View.

The concept and components of UI are common and used in many applications,
for instance Microsoft Office uses the dockable windows for help assistant
and any tools UI where it makes sense of using it. If I may suggest if you
open any new application, first just look at the menu it tells you what
application can or could do.

It seems it was your first experience with dockable windows as they have
auto hide functionality you need to dock them by dragging on the place you
want, if you prefer the other place than default one, and then clicking on
pin button to switch off the auto hide functionality. If you want to show
other window, for instance Watched Markets, just click on the menu
View/Watched Markets, or you can click on tab Watched Markets and the window
will show up.

By the way, as there is really a lot information and if you switch on
everything you need a lot of space on your screen, as I am a software
developer I use two LCD monitors a couple of years, now there are LCD wide
screens, but if I buy a new ones, I will take again two monitors. Then you
can customize your Bfexplorer working place as you want.

If you want to run a bot on selected market just select it in the Market
Details, then select your selection/runner, click on View/Runner Property.
The runner property window displays the set of parameters/attributes which
could be set for any selection in the market. The Runner Properties are
devided to five groups:
•       Analyze
•       Bot
•       Bot Parameter – Place Bet
•       Bot Parameter – Trading
•       Odds

All those parameters are accessible by bot code and are used as a mean for
entering bot input values.

To setup Football Over/Under 2.5 goals bot, set the following parameters:

BotType:                        FootballUnder25BackLay
TestTheBot:                     True (First test the bot on some match)
Stake:                          your stake here, for instance 10
MinPriceDifference:     your minimal price difference between back and lay
odds/price, for instance 0.05
RepeateTradingCycle:    True, if you want to repeate trading cycle, otherwise
False

That is all for this type of bot type. You can find the source code of this
bot in C# or VB project for testing and debugging bots for Bfexplorer at:

http://www.esnips.com/web/BetfairExplorer

The algorithm for this bot, in the case that goal was scored increases
initial stake by ten times and opens a new position, then waits for minimal
price difference to close the position and ends processing.

To run the bot just click on tool bar button Start Bot, or click the right
mouse button to open the context menu for selected selection/runner and
there you can Start Bot as well.

All bot activity is displayed in the Output window.

It is really simple bot, can be coded a lot of better, for instance when the
goal is scored it place the bet on the first offered back price, in some
cases it is good in some not, so there should be some logic done to do it
the better possible way. Other issue is how the bot acts in trading, because
it could waits for better conditions maybe as well, by checking actual trend
and so on, but I think it is a good starting point.

If you are interested we could code something together if you have any
experiences with coding.

Unfortunately just for now the Bfexplorer will run only on Windows platform,
actually I have some experiences with development for Mac OS X platform, but
how many people will use the Bfexplorer on the Mac OS?

Regards,

Stefan