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ribbet
16 Mar 10 21:37
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Date Joined: 22 Mar 08
| Topic/replies: 33 | Blogger: ribbet's blog
The bots which jump a tick in front of your offered bet or lay are so annoying. One of my favorite games with these is to put an offered bet or lay at a stupid price and see the bot jump ahead of me again, only to have the bot's bet get snapped up. Hee hee. Come on folks, join in :)

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Replies: 50
By:
gus
When: 16 Mar 10 21:49
one of my bot's favorite games is fooling some dummy into putting up a stupid price and then matching it :)
By:
ribbet
When: 16 Mar 10 22:01
Hee hee - yes, even better :) . Check out the virtual racing - there's a bot going there tonight - you may be able to force it to your advantage.
By:
kohaku
When: 16 Mar 10 22:23
It passes the time.
By:
brendanuk1
When: 16 Mar 10 22:34
i get my bot to post here while i am out and about
By:
SHAPESHIFTER
When: 17 Mar 10 11:15
That's why I always put a limit on my exposure :)
By:
Wedged
When: 17 Mar 10 12:52
^^^ That was the court order.
By:
IB Gaming
When: 17 Mar 10 12:53
My bot suddenly turned nasty, has been holding me hostage for 5 days and threatening me with violence unless I upgrade my laptop memory.
By:
catfloppo
When: 17 Mar 10 14:41
Bots that can be pushed that easily live very short lives.
By:
Wedged
When: 17 Mar 10 14:41
^^A Stuart Lubbock reference?
By:
zipper
When: 17 Mar 10 17:59
Bots DONT Win Long term ... why they are programmed with guys who have no opinions or brains .......
By:
zipper
When: 17 Mar 10 18:03
Bring on the bots ....... zip will slaughter em .
By:
aye robot
When: 17 Mar 10 18:07
Bots DONT Win Long term

How do you know?
By:
Powelliphanta superba superba
When: 17 Mar 10 18:30
If bots won long term then about 40% of Betfair users would be paying the Premium charge.
By:
catfloppo
When: 17 Mar 10 18:36
It depends what you mean by long term but bots do win.

And that doesn't mean they incur pc either.
By:
brendanuk1
When: 17 Mar 10 18:40
bots are just automated bettors, no reason they lose or win more than the general public. They are seen as some sort of bogey man by some though
By:
heynoodles
When: 17 Mar 10 20:17
they are the bogey man when u cant even put up 20 quid without £9 jumping ahead of you. feckin bots
By:
Lori
When: 17 Mar 10 20:20
:^0
By:
SHAPESHIFTER
When: 17 Mar 10 23:28
brendanuk1 17 Mar 18:40
bots are just automated bettors, no reason they lose or win more than the general public. They are seen as some sort of bogey man by some though


Correct. The only gain I have is it allows me to manage more than one position on an event.
By:
catfloppo
When: 17 Mar 10 23:32
heynoodles, jump the £9
By:
Lori
When: 18 Mar 10 09:18
One good thing about betting against bots is it's much easier to work out if the opponent you're betting against is making mistakes or not.

My biggest online win came from testing against a bot for 36 hours before logging in at a time I knew the owner must be asleep and taking it to the point where it ran out of money on some selections and I had to back and lay the others until it was all red for either every penny it had, or every penny it was prepared to lose.

That being said, I'm not smart enough (or maybe I'm too paranoid) to be happy using a bot myself, so I wish others weren't allowed to. :D

More seriously, I do think that there should be some kind of throttle to slow down the bots, I have no moral objection to people using them, but as the site is so horribly unstable, it would be nice if slightly fewer orders per second were submitted.
By:
catfloppo
When: 18 Mar 10 10:40
That's what the transactions charges are for Lori.

And if you have managed to outwit a bot the chances are you would be good at designing one.
By:
Lori
When: 18 Mar 10 10:46
The charges don't really slow them down though, at least not enough. I don't see why anyone would need more than ten hits a second IF nobody else were allowed to do it either.
By:
Lori
When: 18 Mar 10 10:46
*per market.
By:
catfloppo
When: 18 Mar 10 10:48
Transaction charges apply to anything over 1000 bets per hour which is less than 3 per second.
By:
catfloppo
When: 18 Mar 10 10:49
And that is in total not per market.
By:
Lori
When: 18 Mar 10 10:57
but people are quite prepared to pay them, presumably at certain times to keep the total down.

If the site didn't crash 10-20 times per week it would be fine, I wouldn't give a hoot, but until they can keep it up for 24 hours or so without having an imaginary "The site is down for a scheduled maintainance" (Which is obviously never actually scheduled), perhaps they could consider lowering the amount of traffic.

I honestly don't remember the last day that it didn't crash at least once.
By:
ShowMeGreeen
When: 18 Mar 10 11:02
I used to have a seperate account that had a bot running 24/7. I set it up on a few different markets laying 1.01 in lots of different markets. I set it up that if the price for a selection hit 1.05 or less, then I would pull my money. I was actually making a decent bit of money until I decided to expand into a couple of other less liquid markets. This is where I made my mistake. One night, I had my bot running in some two-bit university American Football game. Because it was so illiquid, the market went from 1.11 to 1.01 which meant the trigger to pull my money was never hit. Ended up losing 30% of my bank with two months of profit being wiped out.
By:
Lori
When: 18 Mar 10 11:06
Seems like that was basically a trap betting bot?
By:
catfloppo
When: 18 Mar 10 11:10
People placing lots of bets isn't a problem unless they aren't getting matched. The transaction charges are designed to hit those who have a low rate of matched/placed bets and the amount is set to pay for the system costs of placing each excessive bet i.e. 1p

So the answer isn't to limit the bots any more imo, its to use the money to improve the service.
By:
Lori
When: 18 Mar 10 11:12
Sure, I'd prefer that option I agree.

Given that they have no intention of spending money for what they claim (PC being used to attract new customers, while having no adverts other than during football matches for instance), then I'd rather the site worked !
By:
aye robot
When: 18 Mar 10 11:35
The kind of crude "jump in front" bots that are easily pushed around are unlikely to do very well, it's not a game I would ever play. I expect 70-80% of the bets I put up to match immediately as from a bot perspective a "sitting" bet is unlikely to get value.

Pushing £20 around to trick some one else's bot doesn't really light my fire but I'd have to admit to being impressed by some of the spoofs that go on in running which can be colossal and don't always come off.

On the wider point, there's also no reason for manual players to see bots as a bogey man. Sure enough there are some annoying ones but there are annoying manual players too. Although they may not realise it most manual players are actually benefiting from bot activity. This is because most bots make their money by correcting prices from "panic prices" to close to true value and taking part of the difference, this is good for most manual players as they get prices that are closer to true value and so so can therefore keep playing for longer. Most players are losing, they have to be to keep the whole show going, bots help these players to loose more slowly. Pro manual players are probably dis-advantaged by this process as they are dependent on inefficient markets to make money, but they must be a small minority by definition and we don't need to feel too sorry for them.

For a specific example of how this works- What my bots do is analyse price movements in running, look for specific signs and compare them to various models to ask whether the betting is likely to be sensible or not. If they think that a horse is likely to be trading too short (for example) then they lay it at a price closer to true value. Ideally I want every bet to match immediately so they ALWAYS try to offer the best price available, this means better prices for backers of that horse. I'm here to make money so it's still a probable lay value price, but it's a better price none the less.
By:
Lori
When: 18 Mar 10 11:39
Not that I'm willing to go into much detail aye robot, but you'd have been suitably impressed with the one I took apart. I worked out where it's data source was and manipulated that accordingly :p
By:
aye robot
When: 18 Mar 10 11:47
Fair play Lori- plenty of people take money off bots and good luck to them. I place about £10,000 worth of losing bets every day, if there's one person out there who's go me pegged and gets all that money then all I can say is well done and they're welcome to it.
By:
Chilly the Dog
When: 18 Mar 10 12:04
one of the first decent threads here for ages.
By:
brendanuk1
When: 18 Mar 10 12:20
dont think bots cause the site to crash. They all go through the api portal. Any bottle neck could be easily traced back to there. Plus there is transaction charges which are designed to protect the api site.

Sure Betfair wouldnt be slow in increasing/widening the transacton charge if api users were the cause.
By:
Moonlight
When: 18 Mar 10 16:45
I suspect people are confusing the transaction charge, which applies to placing bets, and starts at 1000/hour, with the data charge which is set at a much higher level, and applies to getting prices.
Imo the transaction charge is self-defeating as it penalises people for putting up money, a quite irrational idea. It also doesn't take account of how many markets you are trading in, which is silly.
The data charge is an insufficient deterrent to the high-frequency traders who are swamping the site with data requests, sometimes at a rate beyond the site response time.
The best solution is to abolish the transaction charge or modify it to be per market, and throttle the data requests at a level significantly higher then the free API, but well below the excessive rates which some people use, for misguided reasons.
I think the HFT boys don't really understand the difference between BF and the stock exchanges.
By:
Chilly the Dog
When: 18 Mar 10 16:50
The betting charges are there to stop people doing huge amounts of spoofing. Almost no one does a thousand bets an hour without a bot, and even those with bots might not get there.
By:
Feck N. Eejit
When: 18 Mar 10 16:53
TBH Moonlight I'm probably one of the confused as I was unaware there were two seperate charges. In fact I was about to post that it wasn't the placing of bets that was the problem but the excessive requests from information bloodsuckers.
By:
catfloppo
When: 18 Mar 10 17:21
Moonlight, it is offset against commission so you are not actually penalised for placing lots of bets if a good chunk of them get matched. It is to deter bots placing bets with little or no chance of ever getting matched.

Feck, keep up please :p
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