Just a question to see if anyone knows if any TAB's allow home computers to be able to connect to their system.

What I need is to be able to place about 50 bets made up from my PC. But I also need to be able to feed into my PC the latest prices for the horses from the TAB.

Does anyone know if this is possible?

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

Jonho,

I should also add that the NSW TAB also has a system that allows direct connection into their betting system via the Austpac system (I think that is right) - this gives you quicker bet placement and, I think, updated odds feed back to your computer. You could contact their customer service for more details but I believe there are some significant costs involved in setting it up with the Austpac connection and the software you need so it is probably only if you are a serious better. Also ACTTAB does allow direct connection via dedicated modem but again this is only for serious punters as there is quite a high minimum bet value per month before they will consider it. Not sure about any of the other TABs but I suspect most of them will have some facility if you are serious (but you would have to talk to their customer services and you would probably need to be betting thousands of dollars a week).

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