Tuesday 12 January 2016

Battle Cries And Champagne

I may have written about this before, but it continues to be very annoying that Betfair allow someone to potentially make a profit with no risk. I put my standard £200 bet on Alabama last night to win straight up asking for 1.45 pre-game and was robbed:

  
Why someone is allowed to lay 1p (or any p) for zero risk is beyond me. If I'm not sure that I have mentioned it here before, I am sure that I have spoken to Betfair about it. Unfortunately whoever was on the other end of the Betfair Chat at 1am didn't have a clue what my problem was, and I gave up. 3p is of course neither here nor there, but had the whole £200 been taken in 20,000 individual bets of 1p to win nothing, I would be a little more upset about it. How hard can it be to have a check in the code saying if risk = zero, reject the bet and lock the perpetrators account?

The Alabama -7.5 bet recommended here yesterday traded at 1.1 but came up short with Clemson scoring a late touchdown and making the final score 45 - 40 to Alabama. A 'bad beat' but fortunately I only had 1p matched... 
The bill for James getting my daily hit total over the 2,000 mark, if only for one glorious day, has been received:
Invoice: Consultancy for increased web hits £1000. Payable within 7 days. --- Let's hope that you are not about to get what I got a few years ago. A Melbourne IP address that would hit me not 1000 times a day but 50,000 times a day. It wasn't a DDoS attack and did not prevent people from viewing my pages. However, it did skew my stats so much that I decided to block the IP address. I presume it was someone who took exception to my being the contrarian that I am.
50,000 hits a day - I'd be caught up with Full Time Betting in just a few weeks! (I've provided the link as good etiquette mandates, but please don't click on it or I'll never catch up). Sadly the daily hit count yesterday returned to its 30 day average, but it was fun while it lasted. Perhaps I should start being contrarian myself?

Good to see an update from former commenter Matthew Trenhaile - the Crazed Alchemist, explaining his sudden disappearance after his blog showed much promise when it was launched in July last year. His quality writing will be missed, but I wish him well in his new job.

The news is all about David Bowie right now, a South London legend and his matinee performance at Croydon's Fairfield Halls on June 24th 1973 (Ziggy Stardust Tour) was the first concert I attended as a very young boy - one of those firsts in life that we all record as we come of age. I also saw him at Wembley, both at Live Aid in 1984 and on the Glass Spider Tour, almost exactly 14 years later, but he'd gone off a bit by then - or perhaps my coming of age enthusiasm had become a going of age apathy.

1 comment:

James said...

As you confirmed elsewhere, you placed your £200 as an offer to be taken on the Betfair order book. Being 1p lays they are unlikely to be attempts at balancing someone's book. Actually, I recommend in my book (Programming for Betfair - available in all good Amazons) that people use 1p bets to test new bots, but only sparingly. Do it too much and Betfair will close your account. Do it once and the bot is tested.

Although a 1p bet appears to be risk free I am sure that Betfair notes the fractions of a penny in actual risk. Do this trick thousands of times and it all gets added together to create a real risk, but your account will be closed in addition to any loss incurred being taken.

Another sub £2 bet I employ is for bot baiting, placing 10p or 50p between large spreads to see where Betfair's and other bots are interested in taking volume. This gives me an idea of the current price range they are willing to trade at. Fundamental and technical trading are two different worlds. What appears to be odd behaviour to a fundamentaist such as yourself is perfectly rational to the technicians working in the same market.

A little light bot reading... http://www.betfairprotrader.co.uk/search/label/bots

PS I await my fee.