Bet software and betting bots have been around for awhile

but does Bet Software really make money for you?

What is bet software, otherwise known as a Betting Bot?

An exchange betting bot is either a specially written software interface, or spreadsheet (Excel), that aids in the automation of placing bets on horse racing, football, darts, cricket and all other events Betfair covers. Software bots are also available for poker.

Betting bots are nothing new, as similar software has been around for city trading for years, but it is only recently that they have been used for sports betting.Betting bots can be used for trading, hedging, dutching, arbing, automatic betting, and much more.

It's been awhile since I first reviewd bet software on this website so it's timely to revisit the subject to see what advances have been made.

BF Bot Manager (for which there is a FREE 3 day trial) is recommended so I took the plunge and below I reveal my findings....
Just like any tale of fluctuating fortunes, this review of BF Bot Manager v2 has a beginning, a middle and a happy ending.

After Rade, the author of the software, kindly sends me the licence keys the software downloads without fuss and I am soon up and running.

I am presented with a choice of bots that place and manage bets using the Betfair API and include horses, football, greyhounds, tennis etc :

Back/Lay favourites (horses) is my first choice as I know most about laying horses to lose and I choose to include the racing markets from UK & Ireland, Australia, USA and RSA - well might as well make a meal of it!

There are numerous settings that you can adjust and even some you are advised to leave well alone, unless you know what you're doing!

You can also choose the simulation mode to test your options before parting with your cash. But you will have to have a funded Betfair account before you can do anything, although this need not be large, as stakes are accepted as little as £0.01.

As my trial licence is only for 9 days I opt to use minimum stakes and leave all other settings on default.

Day 1 23rd August

The bet software places lay bets on the first or second favourite and after a fairly uneventful session I end the day with a £0.16 loss

Day 2 24th AugustI take the chance to read the manual on Back/Lay favourites and made the following changes to the settings:

Betting Bank £20

Use % Staking 0.5% = £0.10

Loss Pot Recovery 100%

I also try placing a user selection lay bet on one of the Irish horse races but fail to notice I need to press a place bet button. Next time I try this it works ok

A useful add-on function called BF Notes enables you to add notes to any horse and the program highlights your comments whenever the horse runs

Day 3 25th August

I set the bot up to run in the afternoon and let it run without interefence until mid evening by which time a profit of £2.82 is realised so I stop the horse lay bot and decide to try the soccer bot which starts by laying all matches for a draw, changing the settings to;

Hedge if price changes by 40% - max liability of hedge bet £2 and if no lay bet on the draw then back fav for £0.50 when price below 1.15

What you have to be aware of with the soccer bot is the fact that as matches run for a relatively long time, many bets can be running at once. I don't make anything running this bot so decide to stop further use of it

Day 4 26th August

Start bot before leaving for work as racing starts before I return around 2.30pm - check Betfair at work and no bets placed - check bot back at home and discover I forgot to click the Resume button which sets The bet software in action - doh! So there's a warning! Worth double checking everything when betting live on Betfair

Ran Horse lay favourite bot from 2.30pm to 10pm made £6.40 using 0.50% of bank, stakes generally 17p but loss recovery on of £0.50, so some stakes were £0.67 - excluded one race Lady Sledmore who I thought would win) by clicking the tick in the S column on the left of the markets page - see graphic above

I visit the forum and register - although you need to be confirmed by admin to post, you can search and read existing posts - seems to be quite lively with plenty of comment and owner is open to suggestions for improving The bet softwares systems. Rade the programmer plays a leading and active role responding to users requests and suggestions for improvements.

For example here is a discussion of the merits and explanation of Loss Pot Recovery

Day 5 27th August - when I open up the bet software I make this observation (Saturday - could encounter turbulence)

Started bot at 10.30am and first race picked up by bot at 10.50am RSA Vaal - after a long days betting I end the day reducing the profit on all horse bets to £0.11

Day 6 28th August

I realise after a small loss today that loss recovery needs careful management but there is plenty of advice on this in the forums. Many folks successfully run the bot without resorting to this facility

Day 7 29th August

Ifirstly turn off the loss recovery I am using. I then adopt a staking plan called D'Alembert and I end the day with a small loss of £0.07

Day 8 30th August

Today brings a new dawn - I discover Maria who is introduced to me somewhere on the forums and with Maria's staking plan taking over I move smoothly into profit again

The Maria staking plan (available in version 2 as one of several plans) has the following rules

stake 1% bank if price below 3.5 stake

0.60% bank if price below 7.4 stake

0.40% bank if price below 11.0

I also stipulated there should be a minimum of 8 runners for a bet to be placed

Much better day ending in a profit of £0.11 using minimum £0.01 stakes

The user who devised this plan went on to make over £11,000 profit in the first year

Start software at 2.30pm and Bot runs smoothly, placing appropriate bets thanks to our new staking friend, Maria and the day ends with a comfortable profit of £0.48 using minimum stakes.

This is the last day of the trial as the licence expires but with the discovery of how to properly regulate the use of BF Bot Manager I realise that good steady profits can be made and I look forward to renewing my licence which as I mention previously is a one-off payment

Using the Maria staking plan it is possible to increase your bank on a daily basis by around 3% - so starting with £100 within 4 months your bank could be £4000+

This includes all future upgrades and improvements and you can get a FREE 3 day trial to the two versions of BF Bot Manager V1 £59.95 and V2 £99.95 obtainable BF Bot Manager bet software Epilogue:

Finally this what the author Rade has to say when I show him my review:

"I read your review and it seems fine to me. If you continue to use software and chat on forum I am sure that you will learn how all settings work and find several different other ways to use our bots.

In members section there are several test settings by other users, some are profitable and some are not.

Most users that use loss recovery have high strike rate, 90+% so that rarely they have two losses in a row."

Please feel free to publish this review. Kind regards, Rade

How do they work?

The betting bot used in my first 4 week trial was Auto-BF

Each day the bet software downloads the Betfair details of the top 4 horses in the betting for each race at every UK meeting except for evening cards. The software employs formulae contained in an Excel spreadsheet for which the parameters can be adjusted as desired, otherwise it operates on the default settings.


How much do they cost?

The price you pay obviously varies - some such as Market Feeder Pro can be bought outright for £225. Others that require the vendors to provide an after service will impose a monthly charge e.g. Auto-BF bet software charges a monthly cost of £59.99 for week day trading (nothing at the weekend).

The bet software strikes a bet in the place only market, usually the favourite, using the Betfair interface software Marketfeeder Pro, within a few minutes of the off. There is no facility for in-running transactions. The stake is calculated as a percentage of your Betfair bank. The default is 0.25% but the recommendation is 0.01% The reason for such cautious stakes is that the software relies on a loss chasing system to recover any losses and gradually increase the bank. The main drawback is using the place market where odds are typically around 1.7 although the software default is 1.33%. After only 4 consecutive losses the stakes can become very large and there is a danger of the bank being wiped out if the losing run continues, although there is a facility to provide a cut off point.

Below is a typical racecard

I started with a bank of £150 and let the bet software run on the default settings, which aim to produce 25p profit on each race. Two things quickly became apparent. First that stakes could become very large after just 4 losses, which tempered my inclination to increase the stakes, even though I had increased the bank to £400. Second that although in theory there could be as many as 30 races per day, in practise it averaged only 6 races per day.

There are several reasons for this:

1. The place odds for the favourite are too low i.e. below 1.33 for a bet to be placed

2. The bet software can only move on to the next race if the last bet has been settled by Betfair

3. There may be a delay in the start of a race at a meeting which results in the races getting out of sync

4. The bet software is set to stop placing bets if it becomes apparent that the day may end in a loss if it continues. Usually it stops at least 6 races before the end.

Below is the Triggers panel

My only attempt at adjusting the default settings resulted in the only days loss. I changed the setting to allow the bot to continue trading to the end of the day. If you do this you have the option for the bot to continue trading the next day where you left off and thus recover any losses. Sod's law of course states that my last trades are losses and I was not sufficiently confident in the system to allow it to try to recover the losses the next day. So I ended the day with a loss of £4.32.

At the end of the trial I decided to check whether the class of race had any bearing on the win ratio. This certainly proved to be the case as the following statistics show:

class 1, 1 win from 3 races

class 2, 0 wins from 1

class 3, 4 wins from 9 44%

class 4, 18 wins from 24 75%

class 5, 11 wins from 21 52%

class 6, 6 wins from 13 46%

All Weather 9/15 60%

Flat 23/38 60%

Jumps 16/32 50%

From this it is apparent that if you restrict the bet software to bet only class 4 races the odds of a win increase to 75%

There were 2 occasions when the stakes rose alarmingly - in the second week after a losing run of four races, the 5th race required a stake of £97.79 to recover losses. In the fourth week after a losing run of four races the 5th race required a stake of £99.07 to recover losses. At the end of the trial the total return was £30.21 resulting in a loss of £29.69 if you include the cost of the 4 week subscription.

Conclusions

Despite the drawbacks to the system, it has to be said that I did not make a loss in trading and if the bank is large enough and bet only class 4 races it would be possible to use suitable stakes to produce a profit without the risk of losing the bank.

Since writing this article I have received notification of different bet software from Steve, who has this to say about BF Bot Manager

I've just read your betting bot page and have to say its now a bit dated. I've been using bfbotmanager.com's bot for some months now and its miles better than the ones in your review/comments.

Version 2.0 was released yesterday. I only used it for 1 hour last night (after downloading) and I made a profit on the dogs...and you can bet ANY market that uses the befair free API.

(I can't wait to use it today!) you can check it out free for 3 days. Rade, the programmer, doesn't know I've written this to you - I just thought you might like to update your page a bit! :)

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