Automated Betting (Privilege2Invest)
Project Summary
"Privilege2Invest" is a sports betting investment business, trading on the Betfair Exchange Markets on behalf of its clients.
The owner (Garry Johnson) had developed and refined a number of betting systems over many years, and these had been built into an enormous (and exceedingly complex) Excel Workbook that applied his system and calculated the amounts to bet on each race.
However, the workbook had become too large and unwieldy and required substantial amounts of manual effort to update and operate throughout the racing day.
Garry needed this to be rationalized, automated, and developed into something which could be the basis of a practical business service.
Garry had a number of key initial requirements and long term objectives:
Firstly, he needed help to continue to develop and maintain the master Excel workbook (which at that time already comprised more than 100 worksheets). At this size it was becoming very difficult to update and maintain, and development had ground to a halt.
Secondly, he wanted to automate the operation of the workbook. Initially this needed to be manually populated with details of each day's races, and bets were placed on the Betfair website by hand. This took hours of preparation each day, and hours working at the PC throughout the racing day - keeping up with price movements, placing bets, and tracking results.
Thirdly, the workbook needed to be converted from a standalone calculator designed for use by one person, into an autonomous "bot" running on a server, making its own trading decisions and operating in parallel with many other instances of itself - each working on behalf of a different syndicate member.
This I did (and much more). I rationalized and standardized the structure and organisation of the entire workbook so that all the diverse betting algorithms were represented in a standard format.
I wrote lots of software to implement an autonomous, real-time betting engine, based on Excel, and interacting with Betfair's Exchange server to track the movements of odds on upcoming races, place bets according to Garry's algorithms and to monitor the outcomes of the races.
The Excel workbook became one of a fleet of bots that would be launched in the morning, and would trade autonomously throughout the day with no manual attention required.
I also interfaced with a MySQL database built by another developer to hold each client accounts and balance details, and built tools to view and manage the bots as they carried out their work.
To be determined.
Privilege2Invest
Excel Wizardry helped turn our vision into a reality.
Kevin took onboard an already large and extremely complex workbook, and over a number of months of helpful dialog and development, transformed and improved the workbook design, added hundreds of new systems, and wrote software to automate almost every aspect of running this unique betting system.
He supported me with attaining technical approvals with Betfair, developed tools to manage the service once in operation, and was always on hand whenever there were any problems.
At times I think he was almost as excited about the project as I was. He's done a marvellous job and we will continue using Excel Wizardry in future developments.
Garry Johnson, MD, Privilege2Invest Limited
