12/04/2022
Tennis: the "magic" price at the beginning of a match
In tennis "Match Odds" markets, soon after the beginning of a match (as per my observation, between around 2nd and 4th games) you can take notice of the player's price (take any of the two players).
If you take a look at the price graph, you will see that the player's price will have several occasions to get up or down to that value you remembered at the beginning. Note how it will both increase and decrease to that value.
Bottom line: you will have a few opportunities to green up a bet placed at that initial price.
Graphs source: BFCharts.
Why do you need SPs and how they are calculated
SP (Starting Price) is the bettors' averaged expectation of a selection's chances for winning.
To calculate SP, the exchange accumulates data on the volume and prices of bets placed before the market turns In-Play.
In liquid markets, there are also the so called Far SP and Near SP. The former is derived from SP bets already placed by that moment, while the latter takes into account SP, matched, and unmatched bets. (Mind you, all prices you see on betting buttons are in fact prices of unmatched bets sitting there, waiting to be matched).
A Near SP is the forecast of the future SP. The closer the start of the event, the more precise the forecast is.
A Far SP is similar to the "weight of money" indicator: it shows how much the offer on one of the sides (back or lay) outweighs the offer on the other one.
SP are mainly used as "the most adequate" price in racing markets. Since there is no considerable price movement in football, basketball, or tennis prior to In-Play, there is no real sense in using SPs there.
Force-matching bets in MarketFeeder Pro
Many of you do not know of the force-matching feature in MarketFeeder Pro, and yet you should, as that's a great tool to quickly match all your open bets.
For example, you might want to first lay on a greyhound at the last traded price and wait for 30 seconds if anyone matches your bet. The last traded price in greyhound racing will normally be better than the current lay price.
Half a minute later, the trigger will automatically match the remaining unmatched part at the best possible price (or best prices if you have a large bet).
What are triggers and what are they for?
Bet lifetime in MarketFeeder Pro.
Here is a follow-up to the previous topic.
If instead of matching a bet you want to cancel it 30 seconds after placing it, simply set its lifetime to 30 sec in the trigger that executes the bet. You don't have to do anything else.
Tips on not vexing the exchange
Don't forget that BetFair is not happy when you are refreshing volumes of market data without placing real bets in any of those markets!
So follow this simple advice at all times:
- at the first opportunity, delete the markets in which you are not going to place any bets; For instance, if a market does not qualify by its distance or number of runners, don't leave it sitting there in "My Markets". Delete it either manually or using a trigger;
- reduce the refresh rate dramatically. In football or tennis you rarely need to refresh prices more frequently than once in 15-20 sec, even if you do scalping in tennis;
- if you desperately need refreshing the data after all, place at least one bet of £5 - £10 once an hour. You can trade it out in a few minutes with a small profit or loss, but even this will already be enough for the exchange to flag you as a good customer;
- don't abuse market search with Market Locator. Run it no more often than once per hour!
- you can debug and polish most basic strategies offline, for example using Time Machine: instead of refreshing ten markets in real time and risking to be banned by the exchange, you can run the same ten markets in Time Machine (the data costs pennies) and have your strategy tested in a few minutes.
What happens to football's Over 1.5 after the first goal?
Let's look at how Over/Under X.5 goals markets behave over time.
What happens to Over 1.5 shortly after the teams score the first goal?
In theory, the price will drop straight away, right? The probability of scoring two goals significantly increases when the first goal is already scored, and we remember that the selection's price is in inverse ratio to the winning probability.
In practice: for up to 90 seconds after a goal, the market will go wild. The gap between back and lay prices will be over 10 ticks.
After that, a lot will depend on the minute at which the first goal was scored. At the beginning of a game the price will drop dramatically, as there are still high hopes for scoring later in the game.
However, if the teams score at around 80th minute or later, this will hardly affect the price in favour of greening up, as it will likely remain high.
Keep this in mind when planning to trade out your Over 1.5 bet after a goal: you might end up with a loss.
Screenshots are taken from Time Machine