Fairbot – Review

Fairbot Advanced Automation – Strategy Editor

Today I’m going to show how you can program Betfair to place and trade your bets given certain criteria.

You can do this using an Excel spreadsheet and link the spreadsheet into Betfair trading software, but, frankly, doing this is quite complicated and requires quite a bit of knowledge.

Recently I reviewed Fairbot and as well as the features I have covered in that review and also further features of Fairbot that I used in the review of Dobbing Secrets, Fairbot software also comes with a “Strategy Editor” which is considerably easier than using Excel, yet is still powerful in its features.

Fairbet by Binteko calls this “Advanced Automation”. They describe it thus: “Strategy Editor Advanced Automation consists of an ability to create single or multiple automation rules, which are then grouped into a named strategy. This strategy is then assigned to one, or more, markets, and so will work with each relevant market in automatic mode. Within a strategy each automation rule consists of a single Action, (for example, it can be an action to “Place a Bet”), and also one or more Conditions under which the action will be performed. For example, a condition can be a certain period of time before the off, or the current back odds on some market contestant, etc. It is important to understand that an Action is executed only if ALL conditions associated with the rule are true.”

I’m going to create an automatic trading strategy for races which are competitive, where more than one horse is likely to be involved in the finish. Beware, this is not a recommended betting strategy, I am just using it to demonstrate how to use Fairbot’s Strategy Editor.

Here’s the start of setting up the strategy, which I have called “Competitive”.

We are going to create a rule to place lay bets 1 minute before the start time and will do this only once. We set this up using the Editor “General” tab. Then we go to the “Action” tab:

We are going to lay all horses with £2 stakes at unmatched odds of 2.00 and keep the bets placed when the race starts. Next we set a “Condition” that needs to be met before the rule is implemented:

The condition is concerning the Market Bet Count:

Basically this condition states that the Action to place Lay bets will only be performed if there is no bet on the race currently.

Below is the rule in full:

We are going to place lay bets on all horses 1 minute before the start time with £2 stakes at odds of 2.00 so long as there are no bets already placed and Fairbot will keep all the unmatched bets in-play.

That is all well and good, but as it is, the strategy will keep laying any and every horse that drops to odds of 2.00 during the running of the race. You would need a close finish with three or more horses touching 2.00 to make the strategy pay.

So we add the second rule below:

This rule is going to start 5 seconds after the off time and run for five minutes.

It’s going to cancel all unmatched Lay bets.

So long as one Lay bet has been matched already:

So now we have the two rules combined into one strategy:

We are going to place a lay bet on the first horse to reach odds of 2.00 and cancel all the other pending lay bets.

Here’s the first race we try it out on (note we are using “Simulation mode”, while we are testing the strategy). The nice thing about the strategy is we can set it up long before the race time and it will wait until the time of the race.

Above, we have the strategy in place 14 minutes before race time. At this point you can link the strategy to other races, simply by clicking the strategy name under the “Automation” tab for that race. So you could do this anytime that suits you. You don’t have to sit watching the execution of the strategy during the race, once you have it set up how you want it to be.

The next picture shows the race 25 seconds after start time, but the race hasn’t started yet. The Lay bets on every horse are sitting waiting to be matched.

Below, the race is off and one horse has been matched at 2.0 and the other unmatched bets have been cancelled.

Our laid horse loses and our Lay bet wins. The race was a 9 furlong race lasting just less than 2 minutes. But the automated strategy handled the timing of the bets comfortably.

Testing the strategy on another race I noticed a flaw, which some of you may have anticipated. There was a race that was delayed for more than five minutes, so rule 2 didn’t kick in (the cancelling of unmatched bets, within 5 minutes of the official off time). Therefore, more than one horse was layed. Luckily we were only testing the rules under “simulation mode”.

Below, I edit rule 2 to get it to stop after 5 minutes of the race being in-play, rather than 5 minutes after the official start time.

For greater consistency it would be best to also set the start time of rule 2 to 5 seconds after in-play instead of 5 seconds after the official off time. However, next we test it on a 2m 7f Handicap Chase. The rules are in place more than half an hour before race time.

Forty-five seconds into the race and no runner has reached odds of 2.00 yet.

Five and a half minutes into the race a horse has been layed, BUT the race has been running beyond 5 minutes so rule 2, cancelling all the other unmatched bets, doesn’t kick in.

No other horse reaches 2.00 so our Lay bet is a losing bet.

Obviously a further tweak to rule 2 is needed so that it runs for the duration of a long race (a setting of 8 minutes after In-play should do it).

So there you have an example of how to use Fairbot’s Strategy Editor to program a race, without using programming or Excel. I hope my screenshots have shown how easy it is to do and how flexible the system is in eliminating errors while getting the strategy to perform how you want it to.

Once you have a strategy that works correctly and follows a trading system that produces a profit, you are all set to go. You simply link the strategy to the races you want to cover. You can do this long before racing starts and then leave your computer and Fairbot to do the trading automatically for you!

You can get a free 15-day trial version of Fairbot and registration costs $99 or currently £67.53 plus vat for one year and registration comes with a money-back guarantee. I highly recommend Fairbot for reliability, ease of use and effectiveness.

PS Since writing this review, Binteko have upgraded the Strategy Editor with more features, but this review still gives you a good idea of how to use the Fairbot Strategy Editor.

Rich Lyne