Can Bet Angel give a list of winners?

Help improve Bet Angel.
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EyePeaSea
Posts: 258
Joined: Sun Jun 12, 2011 11:18 am

Ok - admit it - how many of you reading this thought that I was asking for a list of winners before the race start ;)

It would be great if BetAngel retrieved a list of race winners and stored them in a file, a new worksheet or even just adjusted the horse name field in the appropriate 'Bet Angel (x)' worksheet.

I'm not being lazy (well, actually, I guess I am). But I already screen scrape venue/runner/odds/results from a bookies website (for a separate Betting system) and basically it's a pain (re-coding every time they change the website format). And also the names used frequently don't match the exact names used by BetFair, and so there's more fuzzy matching to do.

Bookies and other companies subscribe to the race result data and whilst that's out of the reach for most punters, I'm sure it's an added value service that BetAngel could provide.

Thanks

Ian
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EyePeaSea
Posts: 258
Joined: Sun Jun 12, 2011 11:18 am

Whilst it would still be nice if BetAngel showed the winners, I've found that http://www.sportinglife.com/ has all the Horse event data I need and the result pages are very Web-scrape friendly.

Ian
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legendz
Posts: 145
Joined: Wed Jan 25, 2012 11:57 am

Been asked before , i believe its a condition of the Bet Angel licence not to replicate that information.
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Fidib665
Posts: 55
Joined: Mon Jun 15, 2009 10:42 am

Doesn't betfairs RSS feed contain the info that you need?
http://rss.betfair.com/
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Euler
Posts: 26331
Joined: Wed Nov 10, 2010 1:39 pm

Ideally we need a Betfair resulting services via the API. Scraping from web sites doesn't work as it can't correlate the scraped data with the API data. You would have to link them manually which sorts of defeats the point of doing it in the first place.
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EyePeaSea
Posts: 258
Joined: Sun Jun 12, 2011 11:18 am

Euler wrote:Ideally we need a Betfair resulting services via the API. Scraping from web sites doesn't work as it can't correlate the scraped data with the API data. You would have to link them manually which sorts of defeats the point of doing it in the first place.
Agreed about BA, and I'm not sure why Betfair wouldn't allow BA to do this (unless they plan on charging for this in the future).

Screen scraping does work - I've got it working against 50 race venues. Now that I've done it, I'll just add additional venue names as they crop up. My biggest problem is that some races don't appear on the SportingLife website (several companies seem to use the same feed, and none of them like the French Races!). As it's been pointed out, I could use the RSS feed (more coding - sigh) but that only goes back 24 hours... so if I miss some...

Ian
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EyePeaSea
Posts: 258
Joined: Sun Jun 12, 2011 11:18 am

Fidib665 wrote:Doesn't betfairs RSS feed contain the info that you need?
http://rss.betfair.com/
Hi Fidib,

I'd forgotten about that. Yes, that will help. I'll scrape that and just go for the other websites if I need historic data. Wish BetFair would do the RSS feed for more than 24 hours...

Cheers

Ian
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EyePeaSea
Posts: 258
Joined: Sun Jun 12, 2011 11:18 am

Grumble BetFair and BetAngel grumble grumble...

Not convinced that the BetFair RSS is particularly complete (well... it is only a Beta...). And more to the point, the RSS feed shows race times in UTC, whilst BetAngel is showing times with DST. :evil: That caused a bit of head scratching. But at least I won't have any more confusion for about 6 months :)

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pdupre1961
Posts: 410
Joined: Fri Feb 18, 2011 8:01 pm

You tell me how much its worth to you and I'll tell you how to get a list of winners...

I'm not suggesting you pay me....
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EyePeaSea
Posts: 258
Joined: Sun Jun 12, 2011 11:18 am

If it's a reliable list of winners, with good international coverage and accessible in a reasonable format (XML, CSV), then.... one large box of Krispy Cream Doughnuts.

It would have been two boxes, but I found a bug in my code which was preventing it matching some race data (errr... about 178k lines) and so now that's fixed, I'm in a less desparate position than yesterday :D
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EyePeaSea
Posts: 258
Joined: Sun Jun 12, 2011 11:18 am

pdupre1961 wrote:You tell me how much its worth to you and I'll tell you how to get a list of winners...

I'm not suggesting you pay me....


Just realised that you may have been posing a serious question. In which case - a serious answer :D

I would like one of my trading systems to make money (I'm not greedy, just one of them)I've invested about 800 hours of my time and about £500 in having custom software written (not to mention BetAngel subs over the last couple of years).

So, I'm willing to spend money to get where I want to go (no such thing as a free lunch), but I'm also aware that sometimes it's better value to do something myself (and more fun :geek: ) than just paying for the results. Hence the original question - I'd be happy with an uplift for an enhanced BetAngel service or the equivalent elsewhere. Probably. ;)

Regards

Ian
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pdupre1961
Posts: 410
Joined: Fri Feb 18, 2011 8:01 pm

Bet 1p on every horse in the WIN market, obviously.

The winner(s) provide you with the answer.

Don't ask me how much that will cost though!!!
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EyePeaSea
Posts: 258
Joined: Sun Jun 12, 2011 11:18 am

:lol: Very good :lol:

On the 28th of October (last full date I've processed) it would have cost me £10.90 at 1 penny per horse. But with a minimum required bet of £2, that adds up to about £2k per day - a very expensive exercise ;)
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pdupre1961
Posts: 410
Joined: Fri Feb 18, 2011 8:01 pm

EyePeaSea wrote::lol: Very good :lol:

On the 28th of October (last full date I've processed) it would have cost me £10.90 at 1 penny per horse. But with a minimum required bet of £2, that adds up to about £2k per day - a very expensive exercise ;)
Well, you're probably not quite right there as Wincanton would have given a nice profit...
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pdupre1961
Posts: 410
Joined: Fri Feb 18, 2011 8:01 pm

Based on last Sunday, 28 races, about 150 points profit.

1p per bet, £1.50 profit.
Or if you could only bet manually £2 per bet £300 profit.

Plus, you get a list of all the winners.
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