Automating Betting Tips

Let’s look into the ways to automate bets on tipsters’ selections.

A tipster is a person or service who make predictions of winning or losing selections, such as horses or teams. There are many offers on the web, and you can either get their daily selections on your email or download them from their website. They can supply selections in a plain text file, Excel spreadsheet, HTML page or even an XML file.

A typical list can look like this:

Typical tipster's list of selections

The first column has the name of the event, in this case a horse race. The second column has the name of the actual selection, in this case a horse. The third column is often optional, as it suggests the price limit at which the bet should be placed, e.g. the maximum or minimum odds. You may ignore it and go for any price available.

It is fairly easy to connect this list to MarketFeeder Pro and make the program place the bets automatically. Here are simple steps:

  1. Prepare a text file with selections. 

    MarketFeeder Pro expects this file to have a specific format, i.e. each selection’s name must be placed on a new line, and all associated values must be separated from the name with a tab character.

    If you expect that all selections in your list have unique names, like horses or tennis players on the same day, it is not necessary to specify the event, as the program will search through all available events and find matching selections.

    I have put together a text file for today’s horse race meetings.

    Text file ready for import into MarketFeeder Pro

  2. Add all required markets to the program. Whether it is all today’s races or football fixtures, it’s easy to add them with one click using the built-in Market Locator tool.

    Use Market Locator search templates to quickly add markets

  3. Import the file into the program using the “Import selections for auto-trading” button.

    Use this button for importing selections from the tipster's file

    You will immediately notice the result, as all other selections, except the ones in your list, will be greyed out. The inactive selections will be completely ignored by MarketFeeder Pro.

    Bets will be placed on active selections only

    Watch a video on how to import selections into MarketFeeder Pro from a text file:

  4. Add a basic trigger that will back or lay (depending on the type of bets recommended in the tips) on matching selections if their price is above (for backing) or below (for laying) the tipster’s odds.

    Trigger for laying on tipster's selections

  5. Schedule the automated refresh of your markets at 1 minute before the off and let the program do the rest.

    Setting the start of monitoring

    Here's the tirgger in action:

    The trigger in action

Just make sure that the selections in your file are named exactly like they are on BetFair (although the words’ case does not matter). The text file will be different every day, so you may want to invest in a simple VBA script that will convert your tipster’s format into MF Pro compatible file. However, the trigger file is the same, so once you have it tested well (do it in Test Mode!) it’ll work for you every day.

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