Reducing the World’s Most Sophisticated Betting Market to a Fruit Machine

Welcome! I’m Russ. I’m a software developer and former Betfair employee who writes silly exchange bots for amusement and the vague hope of riches. Vague, that is, because the chances of my stumbling upon an automated ‘system’ that sucks money out of Betfair in sufficient quantities for me to retire, fat and idle, is about equal to that of a lottery player picking numbers based on their cat’s birthday and actually hitting the jackpot. Could happen, but won’t.

Of course, most of the country realised the lack of causative effect of feline birthing rates on lottery draws some time ago, which is why the whole Lucky Dip method of selecting numbers is so popular these days.

Random selection isn’t just fun for the lottery, though. Orlando the cat managed to make a profit on the stock market by heaving a toy mouse about the place, and Darius has been enriching his life recently with random purchases from Amazon. Why not apply the Lucky Dip approach to my exchange betting? Can’t do any worse than my other systems!

So, I wrote A Random Walk Down Betfair (with apologies to Burton G. Malkiel), which will randomly select a market from Betfair on an event happening in the next day or so, perform some simple liquidity and price-spread checks, and all being well place a small £2 back bet on a randomly-selected runner. All of that wonderful information available about traded volume, market depth, amount available, and so on? I’m ignoring the lot, and turning Bert’s invention into an insert-coin-and-pull-lever one-armed bandit.

Starting today, I will run the bot at irregular intervals (i.e. when I remember to) until it places a bet, and I will post the selections here along with a few witty comments and profit/loss updates. I’ll let it spend about £20 a month maximum, plus any winnings it might have, and maybe it will spark a new interest for me in Over/Under 4.5 Goals markets in the Bulgarian 2nd division.