Its been a couple of weeks now since I switched off the in play football app and I only wish I'd done it sooner. It's nice to be back to making your own decisions and not 'worrying' everytime you check your Betfair balance to see if some random second division Romanian game on a Thursday afternoon has syphoned out a load of cash. Don't get me wrong, when an automated system is going well then there's no feeling like it and that's how it was with this app (oooo got to be 5+ years ago now) but time moves on and the markets are a lot harder and less forgiving these days. I thought I'd been a bit harsh on it after switching it off a year or so ago and for a couple of months this time it seemed I'd made the right decision to power it back up, then a nightmare run with loss after loss and it was time to draw a line under it once and for all. I'll even let you into a secret of how it used to run, I've always been guarded over the precise market and the way it worked before but now I figure I'll never use it again so what the hell.
It ran on the Next Goal market laying either the home or away team (not No Next Goal though) after working out a price that it perceived to be value. Quite simply I read a book (Betting On The Exchanges?) which had some great tables in there that someone had worked out that showed the odds on Team A to score next if there was 25 mins gone and their starting odds were 2.4 etc, I'm sure you get the idea. The beauty of it was that the book had showed it didn't matter one bit what the current score was, the likelihood of Team A scoring next was still the same based on time gone and their starting odds.
So I stuck all the table data into an application and wrote the app. It woke up a minute before the kick off and then recorded the last matched prices, it then slept and woke up every 5 minutes and worked out the 'correct' price for each team to score next. If that correct price was more than one tick higher than the current back price then I'd put a lay bet in one tick higher than the current back price (but obviously lower than my perceived value lay price), the Next Goal markets generally only ever go one way (outwards) unless there's been a sending off or one team really is battering the other. The app only worked during the first half of each game as I could never work out how to automatically track the beginning of the second half. The big winners were either 0-0 draws or when a minnow scored against one of the big teams, Sunday nights normally always meant you were laying against the Barcas and Madrids of the world and I had some massive wins as punters piled into the big teams to score next week after week.
When I first fired the app up it really was a license to print money, all I can think of is that punters didnt have the same sort of statistics that are available now (shots on target, possession, corner count etc) and were happy to take whatever price was on offer as Team A (typically a big name team) would score next anyway. Things changed when Betfair introduced cross matching as well as other automated apps also appearing on that market, I tried tinkering with a few settings (laying No next goal, only laying if there was a bigger value margin, parsing web pages to see when a game had moved into the second half etc) but it never got back to the way it was at the beginning and it was time to retire it.
Sounds a bit like a sob story re-reading it but its not meant to be, I just thought it might be useful for some people out there and it was good to finally explain what the app actually did after all these years!
I was going to post a few other bits and pieces but I need a rest after that, will post again tomorrow!
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