Automated Betting
 

I have had a little success at placing Quinella bets based on the Quinella odds of each pair compared to the Win odds of the individual horses making up that pair. My starting with a bank of $50 just before Christmas on WA TAB was last night sitting at $545. Not a huge amount of money, but the direction is OK.

I consider ALL horses and trots, and I consider ALL pairings. My method requires that the bet is placed at the last possible moment, so I miss about 20% whch is fine. It is all done automatically - I set the program running in the morning and leave it.

Unfortunately WA TAB Quinella pools are abysmally small and so any increase from my minimum $0.50 bet tends to screw the percentages (really!!). Being in WA I can't look at Betfair (I don't think they do Quinellas anyway), therefore, I have spread my view to other TABs. Last week I started using Queensland TAB as they provide a means to automatically fetch odds and post bets. A little more cumbersome than WA, but it works. My starting $50 was at $94.50 last night. Also as their pools are generally larger than WA's there is scope to increase the bets down the line.

I would dearly love to expand into NSW and Vic, both TabCorp. TabCorp do provide a means to obtain the odds I require, but do not have a readily available means of submitting the bets automatically. I know it is possible as I am told there is third party software which does it.

My question is this: Can anyone here advise me, or point me in the direction, of where I might find this information?

Very interesting SeeDee, im curious too.

Do WA TAB provide a means of automated betting?

WA TAB may take 20% but.........
 

Oh yes, GA. As I said before, WA allow direct postings to an http address and and one can post to QLD via Netbet Pro.

Being direct you have to include all the bells & whistles in the transmission to WA TAB, including ID & password. With Qld, you must have Netbet Pro running and be logged on, set up a batch file (in my case with one record) and place it in the assigned directory on your PC.

I just want to work out how to do it through NSW/Vic TABs. They use the same sytem for Live Odds over the Web but only seem to accept bets, individually or by batch, interactively. I understood that some 3rd party software actually posted bets, but maybe I was mistaken and they only suggest wagers which you then have to post manually -- not for lazy people like me.

If you are comfortable with VB, I can point you in the right direction for direct posting to WA TAB.

I ave an automated bet placement program using Unitab which covers all the exotics including Quinellas,exactas and any2.
Unfortunately I cant give you a link to the site here. I am sure there are several programs around. Keep looking.
Cheers.

See Dee,

Where do you get live quinella odds on the Quesland TAB site ?

Good Luck.

Westmip,

I use UniTab Netbet Pro Advanced Usage. You have to sign up as an internet user and request the documentation from them. It's really quite a simple system. If you want, say a list of all the meetings today, you place a file called 01T.qry in the designated directory and it is replaced very quickly by a file containing the details.

01T is their code for Today's meetings. They have a couple of dozen other codes, but I use only about 8-9 of them. It's a bit of a root, but once the program's complete it seems pretty good.

Oh - the code for Quinella odds is 10B. So a file called 10B.qry will fetch that.

Although not thoroughly explained i like your thinking. Years ago Doubles were a big thing among professional punters. It was a great tool to use to follow the 2nd leg ( & probabaly still is ). If the first leg winner was $2w on the tote you would be able to see what horse was their choice in the 2nd leg by means of the doubles divie. i.e if a horse was $5w in the 2nd leg then $2 x $5 = $10. If the double was to pay only $7 you would know what the pros were gunning for the day.

Is this the type of method your using but with with Quin's not Doubles?

Well, that's food for thought KC. Are you saying to look for a sudden bump (ie slide) on one horse in the 2nd leg indicating their selection?

My method is much more basic and relies on the "great unwashed" actually having a collective clue. I simply look for an "edge" or margin. I don't care if my selection is popular or not; favourite or complete outsider. Advice on refinement would be welcome, but I am just looking for the pair which are under backed in the quinella, hopefully resulting in a percentage edge.

I sometimes bet 3 x 50c for a win of less than $1.50 (sigh), but my best selection was gained me $362.40 for a 3 x 50c bet

Yea CD

Back when there was just W,P,Q,T & Doubles betting, it was pretty much the best way to bet for big punters to make decent money as it was the only form of multie betting over more then 1 race. If they liked something in the 2nd leg they would back a few runners in the first leg all into their 'special'. My best mate was the bagboy for the biggest family name in bookies to grace our tracks ( related to get the job ) According to him this was a massive indicator, and well known in the ring as to a most favoured selection of the bigger punters. THese days of course doubles pools are a nothing..... but many years ago they were very very big pools to bet into where value could easily be found for big punters whose money was in with mums & dads Saturday punters. Those days everyone took a Daily Double or an Extra Double. It was a bit like The Melbourne Cup and the mass amounts of value to be gained on any of the multiple pools. (Of course not in the $m's)

I thought that too was your angle. You seem to be going ok with yours anyway, sounds very interesting what your up to.

Hi SeeDee,
I'm interested in the automated betting option for WA TAB. Can you share some more information as to how to go about it? Thanks, Gary

Swooper (Gary),

First off you will need to be a competent programmer. I use VB.NET, but I am sure you could get by on other languages. The sales and, where necessary, the technical staff at WA TAB were extremely helpful in providing some basic programming routines for fetching data and posting bets.

Basically to fetch detail, look at the screens in their web site and where there is a download prompt, press it and note the http address of the output screen. This gives the address which you have to embed in your program. You can pretty easily identify the bits you must substitute (Date, Meet, Race) indeed you can try it out manually first.

You then have to deconstruct the text output which is very straightforward do your calculations and post your bet.

The bet has to be wrapped in their expected proforma transmission. Again not hard.

I make one call at the start of day to fetch all races which I hold in an Access table. I read the table in time order and as the race becomes due I check previous bets, do my calcs and place the current bet.

I would be happy to provide the 'bits' needed to write your program but be aware it may take some effort on your part. My email address appears earlier in this thread; if you want more detail contact me there.

SeeDee why do you need to bet into the STAB pools automatically, when you are already doing that via the WATAB?

Simply because the WA pool is so small. The Quinella pool is not combined with other TABs and increasing my bet actually affects it.

For instance, the winning combo for today's NZ race 7 was $116.80 from a pool of $730. That represents $5 on the right pair (ie $730 less 20% commission = $584 divided by Quin odds of $116.80 means $5 was bet on winners). Had I bet $1 then Pool = $731 less 20% = $584.80 over $6 leaves $97.45. Had I bet $2 my winning would be ($732 x 80% / $7) x $2 = $167.30. This is better than $97.40 but I risked double, ie I am 14% down. Spread across a day, if my average daily gain was 10% (I wish!) I would actually turn a winning day into a loser merely by increasing my bet amount.

Now, not only does doing the same thing in Qld give me a whole other pool, the pools are generally much greater. The same NZ race on QTAB had a pool of $3,127, over four times greater. The winning combo actually returned $177.70, but for the sake of argument, if the win was $116.80, ie approx $21 of winners. Using the same maths, adding my $1 would reduce this to $113.70. Doubling my bet would leave $108.80 ie I am 7% down, meaning I could maybe increase my average bet without screwing the pooch.

Incidentally, the Vic TAB Quinella pool for the same race was $3,886, paying $89.50 and the NSW pool was $4,408, paying $192.70, therefore I would like to have a go at these and any other TABs also.

Got it - didn't realise that not all the WA pools went into STAB. That's very odd.

Hi SeeDee,
Thanks for the offer. Struggling to see you email in the earlier posts. I must be going blind!

Seedee,

Love your work. It's very generous of you to share your methods.

Are you concerned that others will try similar methods now, making it increasingly harder to gain an edge? Especially considering the small pools that you have outlined.

Hi Chinbok,

No, not really...
1) It isn't easy to set up.
2) As you point out there is a law of diminishing returns at work.
3) This method ebbs and flows; long rows of outs with the odd decent win. Typically, if you try a method which starts badly, or hits a bad patch, your average punter will give up on it.
4) The actual selections may vary depending on when, exactly, you run your calculation. One person may fire at SP, another 30 sec prior, I vary depending on pool size.

I am always looking for ways to improve (decrease losses) so any suggestions would be well received.

SeeDee,

do you happen to have a list of the codes handy for the available data queries? (or a link to the documentation?)

Nibbler

SeeDee,


I tried to look for your email adress in this post but its been deleted probably. I have a method of collecting the information from WA however I have not been able to find the dirrect posting of bets could you help me out?
mmichal & aapt.net.au . I have Vb.net

Thank you

Hi Michal,
I dont think WA has any way of posting the bets automatically except through their website you would have to craft the http requests yourself or send the data to the clipboard for a quick paste into their bet area

UniTab have NetBet pro which can accept bets in a file system folder that is pretty efficient from what I understand.

They also have a query mechanism using netbet pro to get race information which saves the pain of scraping a website

Does anyone happen to have a list of format of the commands the data query netbet pro supports?

Nibbler