Jonho,

For placing bets both the NSW TAB (racetab.com.au) and WA TAB (ozbet.com.au) internet sites allow you to enter a text string containing all your bets - I have used this facility in the past to send bets by copying and pasting the bet string from my database into the web page. The WA TAB is linked to Tabcorp so it is the same as betting with them (ie Supertab pools). The WATAB is actually my favourite site from the point of view of placing bets quickly - instead of the tedious bet confirmation you get with NSW, ACT, etc they place your bets immediately but allow you to cancel them up to 1 minute after placing (provided the race hasn't started). The QLD TAB site betting system also allows you to load in a text file containing your bets (I think NSW does as well but haven't tried it).

As far as getting prices from the TAB onto your system there are a few options. One is just to grab the prices from their websites (I have a program which does this for all TABs) but the disadvantage here is that the prices tend to be a bit slow updating and if you are on a limited download ISP you could be in trouble with the amount of data transferred. There are also a couple of hardware decoders/software packages that allow you to use the Teletext data feed - problem with this is the cost for the software and hardware! Finally there is a company that is supposed to be offering the BettorData data feed via the internet - http://www.subscriptiondata.com This was supposed to be available at the end of last year but last I heard they were having trouble getting a licence from Channel7 to distribute the data - you could try emailing them to see if there has been any progress on this.

If you have any specific questions you can email me at the tipping competition email address - you can get this from the tipping site at http://www.tlcbc.com.au/tipping.htm (sorry I don't post the address here anymore as every time I do I get viruses and/or pornographic ads emailed to me).

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"Computers can do that????" - Homer Simpson