Archive for May, 2024

Introducing GitHub

Tuesday, May 14th, 2024

Betwise has created an area on GitHub for Smartform community members to share their ideas, code, etc:

https://github.com/Betwise-Smartform

GitHub is one the most popular sites for hosting open source software and other types of shared information. I have kicked things off by uploading a simplified version of a race card tool I built using Excel/VBA:

https://github.com/Betwise-Smartform/ExcelCard

In my next blog post I’ll outline some of the techniques used to get data from Smartform into Excel using VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) to query the database. Then in subsequent blog posts I’ll add a variety of interesting predictive statistics columns that will turn the race card into a handy tool for analyzing races.

Eventually we’ll end up with the race card that I use daily to inform my own betting selections. Here’s an example of the 15:50 at Haydock on 7 June 2020, won by Golden Melody with Velocistar coming in last. My selection was to lay Velocistar. I won’t go into the details of what these columns are just yet, but a quick eyeball of the various numbers (mostly % strike rates aggregated in various ways) shows big numbers for Golden Melody and small numbers for Velocistar, suggesting back and lay opportunities respectively. Click on the image to blow it up.

As we progress through the series, I hope this will inspire you to try out some of the ideas, contribute back your own improvements and even create new GitHub repositories yourself to share your own work with the Smartform community.