Help required for data.betfair.com

First of all, I've never used it, but as nobody has helped you yet, I'll give it a try.

First the screenshots. I had to take two, because one row does not fit on my screen without losing the explanation on the top. I selected an area where things change a bit, so you can hopefully understand a bit what's going on.

First screen: http://i50.tinypic.com/2ceneih.jpg
Second screen: http://i47.tinypic.com/ifa2q8.jpg


The first 2 colums are IDs. In column A, 1 means football. And column B is id for the market.

The Win_Flag is 1 when this selection won, and 0 when it didn't.

Hopefully you can figure out the rest yourself, as the top column should explain.

Sorry I couldn't get you more rows to maybe better understand it, but there should be enough data to get the gist of it. I saved the file, so in case you want to see something else there, let me know.

By the way, in this one spreadsheet there's about a million rows just for football, so if you plan on using it in some ways, you better learn Excel ;)

Also, happy to help if you want to download/see/use it yourself ;)

Thank you for your reply.
I'm probably going to have to call in the cavalry, if I decide to try to use such enormous amts. of data.
It was useful and helpful at least to see a snippet of the data presentation format.
Many, many thanks.

Iirc frog, it only contains details of matched bets and they are not time stamped so you can't tell how the market changed over time, just the range of matched odds. 

There is a company called fracsoft(.com) that record much more info about the markets and their data would enable your query to be answered.  You do have to pay for it though but, maybe they would give you a small sample to play with?

Once you have downloaded a file try to double-click it. If that doesn't work right click on it and choose "unzip" or something similar. You don't need any special program to unzip .zip-files. (If it's a .rar-file you need some program to unpack it, e.g. winzip or winrar.)

When you have unzipped your file you get a .csv-file that is too large to be fully opened with Excel. You can open part of it however to see what is in it. Depending on your version of Excel you might have to tell Excel that the fields are seperated by commas when you open the file.

You should get 16 columns. What the columns are you can see on the page you download from.

To open the full file you need a database program. E.g. Open Office Base, or Microsoft Access. Base is not very good and very frustrating to work with imho, but it kind of works and it's free. You can get a free 60-day trial of Access (included in Office Professional).

To do anything meaningful with the data you will have to learn to run queries in your database program of choice (not hard to get started, but will take some time to master). When you have a smaller amount of data you can export it to Excel or Open Office Calc and work with it there.

Thanks everybody for your replies.
I'm clearly too far behind the technological curve to cope with any of such data processing procedures, no matter how much my hand is held.
W will therfeore just accept that I will need to contract in some local pros, if I want to proceed any futher.

As an example, would I be able to find  all the pre-off prices ( the full range) and all half time/full time results on all matches offered on BF over ( say) the last 3 years or so ?

Quite simply no, frog.

The way the data's presented means it's pretty much useless, whether thats by design for the benefit of their commercial data buyers like fracsoft who knows? It's basically a list of prices with the first and last time that price was taken so no way of being certain of the off price and for half time results you'd need to be drilling down the won/lost indicator of those markets, probably lots of easier ways to find that data.

IMO the data is pretty good, and there is certainly enough to determine what the pre-off odds were.

Each odds tick has the amount matched, number of bets, and first/last traded timestamp. So, all you need do is find the last traded odds. Job done! If several odds have the same time, then work out average odds or something like that. You'll get plenty good enough results.

Some problems with the data are that they mix up half-time and pre-off betting for football matches though - be warned! You need to filter out matched bets that are clearly after kick off.

The data is a bit of a chore to trawl through. But as Magoo says, it's quite possible to pick out the information that you need if you know what you're looking for.   I'm quite used to picking out the relevant information from data files. I found the Betfair information quite tricky to use initially, but I spent a day writing a program that boiled it down to the relevant stuff (last price traded before the off etc.) and it's now reasonably straightforward to use. My programming skills are very modest, so if I can do that then I'm sure most serious users can do likewise.