Posts Tagged ‘Smartform’
Finding winners automatically
Thursday, April 29th, 2010Automating 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.
Analysing in-running comments
Saturday, May 1st, 2010In the May edition of Racing Ahead, Betwise take an in-depth look at analysing in- race comments in order to spot profitable betting angles – using the Smartform Racing Database.
Lots of handicappers will look up previous in-race comments for horses that they are interested in betting on. However, using these comments is not a recognized starting point in form analysis or standardized as a way of comparing form between one horse and another.
Each race is a unique event, after all, so the story of one race is different from the story of another, and the abilities of the horses will vary. Any number of race by race factors will also affect the way a race may be run – such as the race conditions, the going, the draw, pace in the race, how the jockeys decided to ride their mounts, how the trainers and owners instructed each jockey, to name a few. Therefore an argument could be made that comments can’t be compared meaningfully across different events, still less as a means of measuring horses of different abilities.
Leaving aside these concerns, the sheer magnitude of the task should be enough to deter any further manual investigation. A modest sprint handicap of 12 runners where each runner has had an average of 20 previous runs would be 240 comments to examine for one race alone, with no standard model to work towards.
So, in the Racing Ahead article we discuss the results of analysis achieved using the flexibility and power of a programmable computer database which includes full in-race comments for each runner. In total, we examined over 7 years’ of in-running comments from Smartform for different race types in UK and Irish Flat racing – over 492,000 comments in total, representing over 45,000 individual races, for over 48,000 different runners.
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Tags: front runners, in race comments, in-running, Racing Ahead, Smartform, sprint races, SQL
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