Automating the betting process was possible for some time before the emergence of the Betfair API and writing Automatic Exchange Betting, but making the process reliable was a challenge.  Betfair’s API created a robust way to programmatically access market data and place bets via the exchange (as opposed to a web scraping approach), but there was still no good way to automate the selection of bets themselves.  This required unreliable and/or manual processes to either export data from one of the traditional interactive racing databases, such as Raceform Interactive, or to write robots to scrape the web from online form sources (which was unsatisfactory for various reasons – grey area of site usage, changing page formats, incomplete data, to name a few).

So, to make the selections part of automating the betting process more robust, Betwise created the Smartform database before publication of the book by licensing copious racing data for Members’ personal use back in 2007, designing it for automated updates from original sources, and making it as easy as possible to create and run programs to do just about any aspect of form analysis and output selections for automated betting; no manual ‘data exports’ necessary.

Along with the Betfair API, the service completed the DIY betting automation picture.   For sure, programming is not everyone’s cup of tea, but if a bettor has a manual betting process that can be well described, it is a good candidate for automation since any good betting strategy, automated or otherwise, begins with data.

An example I used in a magazine article just before the book was published illustrated just how simple the principles of automated betting can be.  We looked at a straightforward case that can be considered at one particular racecourse to show how even analysis of a single variable could be turned into a useful automated strategy for certain types of races.  For a more general approach to all races, of course, it makes sense to look at more sophisticated models for predicting performance which use multiple factors.

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