Comparing horses from different sources – the problem

A recurring problem in developing automated betting strategies is accounting for differences in horse names from different data sources, when in fact each source is referring to the same animal.

We discuss the logic behind betting strategies that use different sources in Automatic Exchange Betting.   In summary, an automated betting strategy may require various inputs that are only available from multiple data sources, – just as a manual betting strategy does.  For example, one data source may contain a horse’s form, another may contain current exchange or bookmaker prices for the horse, and another a news feed we want to scan for information on a specific horse before betting.

This problem isn’t just limited to programming betting robots, it also applies to basic research – for example collecting and retrieving Betfair market prices for any given horse name, when the horse name you want to fetch prices for does not come from Betfair to start with.

In fact, the Betfair case is the most frequent issue that we deal with in automatic betting.    Take a few examples from today’s racing:

Raddy ‘ell Pauline runs in the 4.30 at Chester, Mioche d’Estruval runs in the 5.25 at Newton Abbot, What’s Occurrin runs in the 6.50 at Wetherby, and Mandy’s Princess runs in the 3.55 at Chester.   These horses are listed in Betfair as Raddy ell Pauline, Mioche DEstruval, Whats Occurrin, and Mandys Princess, respectively.

Spot the problem?   In most cases, Betfair simply misses the apostrophe from horses’ names as a matter of policy.   Occasionally there are also capitalization problems, as with the Betfair rendition of Mioche d’Estruval above.

Let’s imagine that these four horses came from an automated selection list produced by Smartform (which lists all the horse names correctly, ie. as they were registered by their owners).   We now want our betting robot to use the Betfair API to retrieve prices for each horse, and if those prices meet a certain minimum, we want to bet on each horse.

Unfortunately, if we simply present the correct horse names to our betting program we will be in trouble – the Betfair API won’t recognize them.   We’ll get neither the prices we asked for, nor will we be able to bet on these horses – or do anything else with the Betfair API for these runners unless we take some action first.

Fortunately there are a number of simple  approaches to resolving this, the easiest of which can be done within Smartform without resorting to using a programming language at all – more on this tomorrow.

Tags: Automatic Exchange Betting, Betfair API, data sources, horse names, Smartform

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