The first test of a good company to trade or gamble with is actually how quick and easy it is to get money out from them. There are plenty of casinos in particular which give dozens of ways of getting money into their grasp, but suddenly get very evasive when it comes to paying out. Expect to make frequent use of a digitized copy of your passport and a recent utility bill. But even they won’t help you should you have been foolish enough to accept a first deposit bonus!

Lets talk for a minute about bonuses. Unless you have a degree in contract law and a lot of time to kill you absolutely should not accept a first deposit bonus from anyone (even the very reliable organisations whose banner adverts I have installed at the head of the page). The reason is that they have been burnt so often by “bonus abuse”, that they have hugely tighened up the conditions under which you can withdraw the bonus, your winnings and any fresh money you have put in of your own. Be clear about this. You can place £100 in an account intending only ever to play roulette, be given a bonus without asking for it, play a few spins of roulette, then find you can’t retrieve your £100, your bonus or any winnings until you have risked thousands of pounds on slot games (as roulette and other more popular games are generally excluded from wagering requirements for bonus clearance purposes). I have been caught out by this enough times that I refuse first deposit bonuses if asked and request their removal without playing a single spin should they be added automatically. The only real exception to this general rule is if you are using a bonus clearance robot specifically to play through your wagering requirements with perfect strategy, and even there you need some pretty good discipline and preferably advanced accounting skills.

So why does Betfair get the big thumbs up as my favourite betting exchange even when its bonus clearance rules are just as bad as anyone else’s? Well, for a start it is amazingly accepting of and helpful towards bot users, even providing a few Application Program Interfaces for software and bot programmers to connect to for automatic market analysis and bet placement. Second, the depth of most of the markets is so deep and the price disclosure so transparent, that the spreads and overrounds are much tighter than those of traditional bookmakers. Third, they occasionally reward customer loyalty with real bonuses, such as reduction of commissions or a wager-free cash deposit in your account. These ones, of course, are worth hanging on to and using. And I have received £50 to £100 in the past for contributing to a market research panel, composing a poem in the Exchange Games forum and a few times just because they hadn’t seen my face for a while. Now that’s the sort of behaviour that builds customer loyalty even more!

Betfair is my favourite spot for horse and dog racing, in fact all sports gambling, as well as their unique exchange games market. But its casino suffers from the fact that its minimum wager is £1, whereas for bot use particularly I am more able to withstand the drawdowns at 10p or even 1p per bet.

Only Betvoyager (of the bottable casinos) has 1p betting, and it has some major drawbacks in terms of stability and speed of the platform. For speed and robustness you have to go to a Playtech software site and the most reliable and fastest of these I have come across is William Hill Casino Club. It was WHCC, in collaboration with Roulette Assault and a Virtual Private Server, where I first saw speeds of 10,000 spins an hour in real money play, and experienced the new strategy possibilities which such velocity opened up. The Roulette Pro game seen in most Playtech sites seems almost optimised for automated play, despite the terms and conditions of most casinos warning against it. I guess that if they feel the house edge is unassailable, they probably welcome people being beaten by it as fast and as often as possible.

William Hill Casino Club’s first deposit bonus should be looked at as carefully as anyone else’s (and probably turned down). But in any case, if you end up running strategies at thousands of spins an hour for any length of time, you are likely to catch management’s eye as a high value customer. I found that shortly after ramping up the frequency of my visits and speed of my spins I started getting wager-free bonuses added to my account (ie money which I could withdraw immediately if I wanted) by my “VIP Manager”. Again, I’m a sucker for a little special treatment, so wouldn’t dream of going anywhere else as first choice for my robotic spins, unless and until they kick me out.

In the field of financial trading, the perspective is a little less clear. ODL disabled my account for making money, then a year later reinstated it and gave me £100 to play with. Now, it looks as though the commodities, metals and indices which were the main attraction of the new service may have been blocked for small accounts like mine. Alpari UK has improved its service considerably since I began with them a few years ago in terms of ways of funding accounts and variety of offerings. They have never suffered from the issues of other brokers of price slippage, widening spreads arbitrarily and taking out stops. And on the few occasions I have been in a position to withdraw money from my forex endeavours, I have never had the slightest problem or delay in doing so.

However, the financial trading firm that really deserves my highest recommendation does not even have the ability to run Expert Advisors or other robots on it, and all of my dealings with them have been manual.

I have had an account with IG Index for around 13 years and have always been hugely impressed by their professionalism of service and sheer range of products. As the “grandfather” of spread betting, they have had time to develop a keen awareness of what their customers are looking for and they deliver it by the bucketload. My favourite products are at the high-volatility end of their spectrum, the daily (and hourly) binary bets on indices, which settle at 100 or 0 depending on whether you were right or wrong, and the options on indices, where an out of the money call or put, bought for a few pounds, could end up being worth hundreds. Introduce an API to make these markets bottable and my joy would be complete!

On the customer service side too I have particular reasons for my fondness towards IG, having lost more there on two occasions than I have ever risked or lost elsewhere. The first of these catastrophes was documented on the Motley Fool website in its early days, and continues to be reprinted in version after version of their Investors Guide (The Foolish Futures article). On this occasion the staff of IG were the soul of discretion in allowing me to disentangle myself from a position gone badly wrong. A dozen years later, when I was in a similar position, one of their dealers took it on himself to give me a call to explain that if he executed my market order exactly as instructed I would lose far more than I anticipated, because of the poor liquidity in the underlying stock. Instead, he worked the order for a day and a half and got me out with only half of the potential loss.

For this reason I have submitted my application to act as an introducing broker for IG Index and IG Markets in complete confidence that the service I am introducing is of a standard which can’t be found anywhere else. Oh, and if you get offered a bonus, you can snatch their hand off, as it is wonderfully free of the level of complexity discussed above – as long as you pick your spots for trading, it should be the next best thing to money in your pocket!

When you install the EA it goes away and performs a backtest to see whether recent market conditions are favourable for its strategy.  As it can trade 4 currency pairs, this gives you a basis on which to decide which to run, though in my case all 4 looked to be profitable so all were left live.  What’s more, as you can see in the top right of the screen, it then keeps track of your forward trading results, to show whether the strategy is remaining profitable and therefore should be continued.  I can’t think of any other EA I have come across which gives you so much information so ready to hand.  Add to this the great performance in the short time I have been using it (50% gain in just over a week) and it starts to command serious attention, and looks even less like a typical Clickbank forex product. 

The clincher, and another big differentiator from the pack, is that the EA has a support desk, which not only responds pretty promptly to enquiries but also sends out unsolicited tips and updates.  The upshot is that, even if the performance were to dip below the impressive early pace, Xtreme Pip Poacher would still merit a botfarm commendation (the first for an EA for many months!).

I do hope the site redesign isn’t causing too much dismay.  I did it as the first step towards improving on-page SEO, and also bringing in a few more monetisation features.  In tandem with the next post I am considering a rotating banner for Will Hill, Betfair and IG Index or Alpari.  All facilitated by the wonderful Socrates WP theme.

A further big step towards fully automated blogging is covered in detail at http://clickbankrefunds.com but deserves a quick mention here – the WP Syndicator plugin selects posts, whether manual or automated and publishes extracts from them in 15 other blogging and bookmarking platforms across the web, with links back to your main site.  Initial results have been a massive leap in traffic to all ten sites where I have implemented it.

My final consumer of time and money at the moment is the mobile marketing world, where I am slowly homing in on the SMS and mobile web offers which won’t burn through my budget in minutes while delivering zip by way of conversions.   Fingers crossed to hit a lucrative combination of offer, geography and advertising network before the remaining funds go up in smoke! 

The WinRouletteBot acquisition was a sort of spinoff from a half-baked Clickbank strategy. My thinking was that while thousands of people are competing for the buying public’s attention for well-presented glossy products like Mike Geary’s Truth About Abs, there may be perfectly good products being overlooked because the product’s developers don’t know how to construct an effective website or marketing campaign. I wondered whether WinRouletteBot might be just such a diamond in the rough – it certainly had a downbeat sales page and virtually no active promotion. Sadly, as Winston Churchill might have said, it is a modest product with much to be modest about. It is not entirely clear what the various staking strategies are intended to do, and there is no documentation or Help facility to clarify the matter.

The systems on offer are the Hawks strategy (which is basically a martingale where bet selection is whatever didn’t hit last time) and Perso, which isn’t familiar to me.

I tried out a couple of variations with a £50 bank – 500 units of 10p a go – and quickly ripped through the lot.

The one virtue of the system was its cheapness to try out – only 50 Euros from Clickbank. And you get what you pay for in this life. Or at least that’s what I thought until I tried the next bot….

The screenshot below is one of the most depressing pictures I’ve seen in a long time. (Click to enlarge)

Up until the 800,000 spins mark I retained the belief that this was an overall winning system, albeit with huge downswings. But the last few hundred thousand (of a no-zero spins file obtained from random.org) showed it to be no better than a coin-flip. Added to this, I ran over 40 live money tests, using a variety of profit and loss targets. Having saved all of the spin sets and after rerunning them with a variety of different options, I reached the same conclusion. The results were no better than for the proverbial “sticking it all on red”. This was far greater testing rigour than I normally apply to anything. I think I was desperately trying to make it work because of a) the respect I have for the guy who markets it and b) the amount of money I invested to acquire it. But no, I have to grudgingly concede that Roulette Bot HGE edition is not the Holy Grail (in case it wasn’t clear, HGE stands for Holy Grail Edition).

To begin at the beginning, I first heard of the HGE via a mail circulated to purchasers of Roulette Bot Pro. As well as mentioning some welcome upcoming enhancements in the RB Pro v3, such as inclusion of Microgaming casinos, it spoke of this special bot which would be sold to only 10 people, but was winning 7 or 8 out of every 10 sessions. Here I should have remembered my own advice when speaking about forex Expert Advisors “Buying a higher priced EA does not guarantee a better return – it just means that a different type of marketing has worked on you”. But no – so keen was I to see the money flooding in that I didn’t even wait around for an on-screen demonstration, but bought it unseen (ironically using Super-Roulette to rustle up a large part of the downpayment). Had I seen it in action I might have had some doubts, but the first dent in my confidence was when I installed it and saw that it looks like a very cut down version of a very small subsection of Super-Roulette (whose full version costs a small fraction of the HGE price).

Specifically, it is very close in concept to the SR Even Chances system, even using the same d’Alembert staking strategy. Now, the d’Alembert is probably my favourite staking system, but it has a tendency even on a no-zero table, for the stakes to drift up and up, so that what start off as little oscillations in your returns end up as huge wild swings up and down. In SR there are four different mechanisms to control this tendency – you can reset the stakes after a set number of spins, after the stake has grown to a certain point, when you are in overall profit of a certain amount for the sub-series, or when you hit a specified loss level. The HGE has only the last of these control mechanisms.

Although there are many points in common between SR’s EC and the HGE, the latter has a few twists which mean that it can’t be exactly emulated in SR. But to my eye, these differences are not worth the extra cost and the lesser flexibility of HGE. I suspect that by now the HGE marketer may have either hit a downturn himself or have been notified of problems by his other purchasers. I don’t really look on him any differently because of this. I myself have often been too quick to shout from the rooftops when I have hit a temporary winning streak. But my regret is for the money invested which could have funded other things, such as a very respectable bankroll for the Index and Commodities trading which I have yet to start at ODL.

The review above should have minimal impact on anyone’s purchase decisions or sales pipeline, as the 10 copies are probably long since sold. And I still recommend the regular version of Roulette Bot Pro, even more so when v3 comes out and I can finally automate my use of Ladbrokes Casino. But I have to learn to develop a little caution when it comes to reading sales literature, even from the best respected and most well-intentioned marketers!

The final robot tested can’t be so neatly tied up in a bow for review purposes, as there are aspects of it that I’m still exploring. Spin4profit isn’t a single bot, but a range of products with different characteristics. The Spin4profit Deluxe bot for instance is basically a sleeper/progression system, with little to recommend it over other similar bots, though I do like the concept of paying a basic fee, then paying a modest upgrade ($10) for each casino that you want to enable. The second and more interesting option is the Spin4Profit Ultimate system, which automates a flat-betting strategy closely based on the Reverse Roulette system. While this is a very interesting system concept, I have always been concerned that as your losing streak continues, you are betting on longer and longer odds and covering less of the board with your bets. Intuitively this didn’t seem to be a long term winning strategy. Spin4profit Ultimate has given me the chance to confirm this impression at high speed. The last of the versions I have tried, Spin4Profit Ninja, provides a system creation facility which is a bit like a simpler version of the trigger creation facility in X-feeder, and unlike anything I have seen in the roulette bot arena.

The bot is tightly integrated with the support website, so that any system you create online is immediately available to the bot. You can also call the system creator or editor directly from the bot. As with X-feeder, you don’t always get what you think you’re going to get, but there is a sufficient variety of options to keep me tinkering for a while to come. One little disappointment is that none of the users apart from the developer appear to have shared their strategies with the rest of the user base, although this is an option on the editing screen. It would have been useful to see a ready-made example of how to construct a complex betting and staking structure.

Of the three bots reviewed, the only one I will continue to test with live money is Spin4Profit. It is supplied under a variety of purchase options, but to get the full works you need to subscribe for $77 per month. At least that means that when your patience (or bankroll) runs out you just need to cancel the subscription.

It is hard to believe that a month went by between my previous post and this one. Internet marketing and the day job are still keeping me very busy, but now I have a week’s downtime, where I may finally catch up on watching and reading some of the materials I have been buying over the past few weeks. And, with any luck, to get back here with a long-planned review of the firms which provide the gambling and trading infrastructure for all of the botfarm’s activities. Betfair, William Hill and Alpari… take the stage!

But that doesn’t mean all has been quiet on the bot front.  Automated money-making propositions are the real remit of the botfarm, rather than it necessarily being exclusively about trading or gambling.  That’s why I make no apologies for talking about my latest acquisition in the Internet Marketing domain, as it falls squarely into that definition (unless I get something horribly wrong).

The Article Marketing Robot lent automation muscle to what would have otherwise been the very tedious task of editing and submitting articles to hundreds of directories.  But it does so on a one-off basis, with quite a bit of human intervention.  What WP Robot does does truly seem to be a set and forget automation of the blogging process, incorporating enough monetisation features to provide a steady dripfeed of income for every blog you set going.  To show how I’ve been able to set up and populate 5 blogs over the past 5 days, I’ll set down in bullet form the exact steps I take to get my blogs up and running.

1. Buy relevant domain name for your blogging niche at Godaddy.  this can be as cheap as 89 cents if you go for a .info domain (though a .com is recommended if you can stretch the extra $10)
2. Create an add-on domain at your hostgator unlimited hosting account (what do you mean, you don’t have one – go here now)
3. Change Godaddy default domain nameservers to hostgator ones.
4. Install WordPress to your new domain on hostgator with fantastico or (recommended) with Expert WordPress automated installer
5. Change the default admin password on your blog to something you have a chance to remember
6. Process WP and plugin updates
7. Add Statpress Reloaded or similar stats tracking plugin
8. Load Socrates or other premium theme (optional)
9. Load WP Robot plugin
10. Enter affiliate ids and adjust WPRobot parameters.

Some of these steps can be skipped, and number 10 is more than a 5-minute job.  But this is mainly because of deciding which of the many possiblities you will exploit.  Automatic content for information purposes only can be brought in from article directories, yahoo answers, YouTube and Flickr, while monetised links and promotions can be automatically brought in from Clickbank, Amazon, Commission Junction and Shopzilla (and Ebay once they approve you for their partner network!).  So your main design and commercial decision is what percentage of your content you want to pull in from each provider.  You then supply keywords for it to use in content selection, specify frequency of posting and set it going.  Or you can decide to back-populate it with as many articles as you want, to get you off to a flying start.

The WP Robot can be bought in modular form, but you get the widest range of options with the full version (and the ability to use it on as many blogs as you want).  The Expert WordPress Auto Installer provides a highly functional alternative to Fantastico, and makes sure that the most useful plugins for Search Engine Optimisation and spam protection are installed from the outset.  However, although this installs the EWP theme, I immediately overwrite it with Socrates, which gives me much better options for Header construction and page layout.  In total I spent just under $200 on the above products, but the marginal cost to set up a new blog can be as little as the cost of a new domain name and the time it takes can be less than half an hour, providing GoDaddy is propagating new nameserver information fairly briskly.

The proof of the pudding however is that on aesthetic and content grounds I am well-satisfied with the blogs I have created to date.  And while I haven’t yet started to see even a trickle of income from them, I haven’t started to drive any traffic in their direction just yet.  Once I have assembled a stable of around 30 sites, I’ll start on my off-page search engine optimisation.  Which is where the Article Marketing Robot will come back into the frame!

And here, for your perusal, are the fruits of those labours.  All I need to do now, on a daily basis, is stop by and check whether any irrelevant post has sneaked in which needs to be deleted.  Otherwise they are self-generating and should chug along ad infinitum.

http://forexjumpstart.com – treading familiar ground but a little (ok a lot) less selectively

http://roulettebotnews.com – I find myself checking in here to pick up news myself

http://blackhairfocus.com – just to try something completely different (which turned out surprisingly effective)

http://greyhoundfocus.com – I expected more gambling-related content but it’s ploughing its own furrow

http://thebookpalace.com – a site based exclusively on an Amazon bookstore feed, showcasing bestsellers.

and a late addition – http://bestdietmanual.info which is pretty self-explanatory.

The roulette bots enjoy the most impressive technical infrastructure, with 10,000 spins per hour easily achievable with the right tools (see previous post).  However, they are by far the most demanding of farmer intervention.  If you set the parameters to make a decent daily return you need to set a short unit-multiple target or else risk regular disappointment.  If your aim is to make £100 while risking £100 daily, your best bet is to look to make 20 units of £5 than to make 1,000 units of 10p.  Unfortunately this means that you will no sooner have logged out of your VPS than the bot will have either blown its bankroll or reached its target.

The greyhorsebot shows rock-solid performance in working through its list of loaded markets and applying the selection and staking criteria to each in turn.  I never have a problem when loading up markets the night before and then leaving the system untouched during the following day.  Unfortunately for most markets the selections for loading only become available the night before, meaning that this is a 5 minute job at least every 24 hours.  Still not a bad work to result ratio.

The Shanky poker bots need a little assistance to keep running for a long period.  Either a cash hopper or a tournament selector is necessary to close down one session and start another.  The best cash hopper I have tried (Hydra from Webber) enables me comfortably to set 250 hops or more and leave it to run unattended from my VPS.  What a shame that the poker rooms are on the lookout for bots  and that one of the giveaways is their continuous playing pattern.  For this pragmatic reason rather than any technical one, a set and forget approach cannot be taken in the poker bot world.

A good Expert Advisor will keep on running indefinitely, though very often they will benefit from having their parameters re-optimised from time to time.  The only reason the EAs would rank below the rest on this list is that the market is only open between Sunday night and Friday night – and 24/5 is beaten by 24/7 every time.

The Betfair exchange games bots can theoretically keep on running 24/7/365  while betting on exchange poker, blackjack or one of the other available games.  In reality no-one I have come across has developed a strategy which can be left unattended forever, unless they have bottomless pockets!  The odds are so perfect and the RNG so implacable on these games that all claims of guaranteed riches need to be subject to very careful inspection before you part with money for any vendor’s system.

The bot that I have used most continuously in the past few months and with least intervention from me has been the Psychic Soccer Profits bot.  I have omitted to make much mention of this for a number of very good reasons:

• its initial launch was something of a fiasco, with the bot settings not quite working and a few disastrous results sending people scuttling for cover
• its relaunch was restricted to the initial purchasers, so there was little point in my driving people to a Not Available sign
• I wanted to give the bot a decent trial before recommending it even should it become available.

One further reason for caution which has become evident is that the vendor is manually placing bets onto the server which the bots access and there are potentially risks involved with his not being able to place them in time, or even changing or overriding his “psychic” system.  Nonetheless, it is showing a small profit since its relaunch, as I would show you had my server stopped accepting uploads!  And for the moment I’m happy to have it chugging away in the background and not taking up any of my increasingly scarce time.

PS – Many more bets are likely during the world cup month and subscription to the service has been re-opened for a limited time.  I do believe that this limit is not the usual hurry-up-and-buy hype – the last time the doors closed they stayed closed for a few months.  Check it out if interested at  http://www.psychicsoccerprofits.com/Purchase.html (sadly not an affiliate link).

The “why” of VPS use is pretty straightforward – it allows you to run bots and expert advisors round the clock without impacting on your use of local PC equipment and, more importantly, without your use of that equipment disrupting your strategies.  It is pretty much essential for running forex Expert Advisors, highly desirable for set and forget Betfair strategies and allows roulette bots to produce blisteringly fast spins, thereby making some strategies accessible which would otherwise be impractical.

One bit of my earlier posts which is now redundant is the whole debate of VNC versus RDP for regular access.  It turns out that this doesn’t matter a jot if you use the logmein.com service for your regular access.  In constructing the task list below I have simplified the job as much as possible and set out a way to get a roulette bot up and running at 9,000 spins per hour on a remote server while spending the grand total of £2.  In conducting the test this evening, it took almost exactly 90 minutes from start to finish, with occasional family duties intervening.

1. Go to Tagadab.com and navigate to the option to order a VPS500 for a trial price of £1 for a week.
2. Choose Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system for an additional £1
3. Pay and wait 10 minutes to be told by email that your server has been provisioned
4. While waiting, go to logmein.com and take out a 30 days free trial of logmein pro2, which you will use for regular access of your system.
5. When your server details are sent by Tagadab, create a desktop shortcut for the windows utility mstsc.exe (or run it from a command line).  You need to access your server with this at least on the first time in, using the Administrator userid and the IP address and password shown in your Tagadab control panel.
6. Having logged in to your server as Administrator, close down the configuration panels, which you don’t need, find internet explorer and go to logmein.com to install the local client on your server (using the user details you set up earlier)
7. Download a free 48 hour trial of Roulette Assault from rouletteassault.com and William Hill Casino Club or other Playtech Casino.
8. Configure Roulette Assault to recognise and control the Roulette Pro European Table within the casino you chose (about 10 minutes)
9. Spin and Win!  Or just collect spins for later analysis by setting ridiculously long wait periods (eg bet even chances only after 25 consecutive losses)
10. Once you have set your bot running, you can close down the mstsc window and thereafter use logmein.com for all access, whether via iphone, internet cafe or dayjob computer.

On a first pass through I would expect you to find at least one hiccup in the process, but if you are interested in setting up a fully functional botfarm, the above is about the most efficient and economical proof of concept you could devise.   If your interests are in forex, you would replace items 7-9 with the downloading of Metatrader 4 from the broker of your choice (such as Alpari or ODL) and your EA from wherever you purchase or develop it.  The pokerbots are a little fussy about screen characteristics, but the above setup should not give them a problem.

If anyone runs through the above steps, I would be interested to know whether it all runs smoothly and which points need further clarification.  Oh, and don’t forget to cancel your trial subscriptions for Tagadab and Logmein should you decide not to continue.  If you’re like me you’ll find them very hard to set aside once you’ve got a taste for what they can do.

Update – 20 hours and 200,000 spins later, I thought it might be interesting to capture the bot in action on the VPS I set up last night.  As far as I know this is the fastest roulette setup anywhere on the net, on course for a quarter of a million spins per day.  I deliberately set it going with a very long wait period before starting to bet – double dozens or columns have to miss 9 times in a row before the betting sequence starts.  In the 20 hour period the strategy made about 15 points (at 10p per unit as a base stake).  The things to watch out for in this very short snippet are the speed of spin shown by the time since start (19 hours) and spins this session (over 200,000). And you might want to maximise the screen for the replay!

Value Graphing – A New Technique For Using GreyHorseBot To Bet On Betfair Markets

Any user of a bot on the Betfair market enjoys considerable benefits compared to bot users on most other betting venues. For one thing, far from outlawing bot use, Betfair provide a free Application Program Interface (API) to allow developers to interact directly with its markets, including bet placement, without having to use the slow and clunky web interface. Even better, provided your account is in reasonable standing, as judged by the number of Betfair points you have earned, you can download gigabytes of results data direct from Betfair to underpin your own analysis. It is this data, correctly analysed, which can give you indications as to which odds ranges to set up for automatic betting in GreyHorseBot.

The value graphing technique, briefly described, is as follows.

1. Open up the data download page at data.betfair.com, logging in when prompted with your Betfair userid and password.
2. Select and download a recent .csv file from the list of non-horseracing events. These include the past few weeks results from sports such as greyhounds, soccer and tennis which are particularly suited to the method and which can be set up for automated betting with the GreyHorseBot.
3. Decide which market you are going to investigate and filter out just the rows with the relevant sports id, using a recent version of Microsoft Excel – older versions will not open the full file because of being limited to 64,000 rows. For the sake of this example I will reference greyhound data.
4. Add a column to create a numeric value for odds rather than the text value supplied.
5. Add a column to the end of the sheet to show proft or loss per row for every pound bet. Each row shows the total amount placed at specific odds for a particular dog and race. We will assume that we place a single unit back bet on each such betting opportunity. The calculated value will recognise the 5% commission on winning bets and take the result from the Win Flag field, where 0 is a loss and 1 is a win. The formula will therefore read something like
=if(winflagcell=0,-1,0.95*(oddscell-1)).
6. Copy the formula down through the sheet.
7. Summarise the results by calculating a total by odds value. This shows what your result would be over the two weeks if you had placed a bet on each of the odds price points.
8. Arrange the summarised totals in odds order, pretending that they occurred in that order, and add a running total, showing what happens if you started with say 1000 units, added the win or loss for 1.01 odds and carried right on through to 1,000.
9. Create a graph showing the p&l line of the odds-ordered summarised results.
10. Use the inclines and declines of the graph to show you what odds ranges should be put into the parameters of GreyHorseBot for backing and which ranges should be avoided.

An additional column should be appended for lay bets (betting on the dog losing) with its different calculation, as the graph for laying will never be a simple mirror image of the one for backing. These graphical depictions are priceless in their ability to give you a new perspective on a market. And wherever you are reading this material, this is a cutting edge technique at the time of writing, provided to give experienced betfair users and novices alike a tangible strategy to follow while using the GreyHorseBot. The author has had excellent results from some examples of this analysis, including the backing of very long odds (>190) forecasts of first and second places in the UK greyhound markets. And I know of no easier bot in which to program the profitable ranges discovered than the GreyHorseBot, the flagship program from the Sporting Bots development team.

Find out more about the GreyHorseBot at The Botfarm Recommends… The GreyHorseBot. Value graphing will be discussed over the next few weeks at The Botfarm, the authority site for discussion of all varieties of bot software.

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I don’t mean to expand too much on the precise method, though I will probably load up a completed spreadsheet to the Amoeba Freebies directory.  But what will probably best illustrate the purpose of the technique is a graph taken from a completed sheet.

What the graph line ends up representing is the sum of money which is won/lost at every price point for the period and market under review.  By arranging the results as though they were sequential and the profits cumulative you can see where are the optimal ranges for backing or laying.  The above graph represents money backing the soccer overs/unders market and shows, for example, that those people who backed overs and unders at any price up to 2.0 were net winners, but that advantage decreases above 2.0.  If this were a graph of returns from roulette, there would be a gradual and smooth decline over any large data set, representing the house edge.  However, the markets involving animals and humans rather than random number generators are much more complex and rewarding of analysis.  It is far from being an exact science of course and only really works in highly liquid markets where normal users can achieve almost the same prices as market making bots.  There also seem to be seasonal factors at play which mean that the analysis would need to be reperformed periodically.  But the three things which I love about this approach are that 1) the data to support it is freely available to download from Betfair, 2) nothing more complex than a current version of Excel is required to perform the analysis and 3) once you have identified the best value odds ranges, it is simplicity itself to program them into the GreyHorse bot to carry out a practical test.  Maybe early days, but one particular sub-market is producing very heartening results.   And it would be uncharacteristic of me to hold my tongue until I could give concrete assurances.

Another more directly election-related boost came from IG Index. It wasn’t actually a bot strategy, but out-of-the-money simultaneous calls and puts on the FTSE value yielded another 180% in 24 hours. God bless volatility!

These are the benefits of diversification. As the roulette and greyhound strats are hitting a cool spot, the slack is being taken up the financial markets and football (with the revised version of the Psychic Soccer Profits bot having just been released).

I am starting to diversify my blogging activities too, with a new baby blog devoted to Clickbank Refunds and the Internet Marketing Wall of Shame (which will fill up in no time).

Now – here are two blog-related puzzles which I’d very much appreciate comments on. The first is one I’ve mentioned before. The number of people signing up for the newsletter remains very low, but I’m getting much bigger numbers signing up for blog userids, a much more cumbersome process, whose sign up form is tucked out of the way in the Admin section. Standard blog users have no posting rights and all comments are vetted, so can anyone tell me what is the attraction? The second query is why someone should buy EuroBlaster from my by now very old affiliate link. When was the last time I mentioned it? Haven’t they followed the rest of my posts since then? I don’t want to have to revisit and rewrite every word I’ve ever published, so – for the record – my only live recommendations are the ones I place in Best of the Bots at the top of the page or the Botfarm Recommends section in the sidebar.

When not chasing rainbows with the Internet Marketing fraternity, I have spent the past few weeks trying to “productionize”  the most effective of my bot strategies, so as to minimise the time I need to spend on maintaining them.  The screenshot above is of one of my two VPS services (CNS), which at the moment is running at around 68% CPU capacity while hosting:

• Winpro and Winalot Expert Advisors, running 4 forex currency pairs each on the Metatrader 4 platform (squeezing into the bottom of the screen)
• Two instances of Super-Roulette, each churning through over 10,000 spins an hour on different Playtech casinos (whose windows are covered)
• GreyHorseBot Lite, running what finally looks to be a winning greyhound strategy (but I’ve seen too many false dawns to be categoric)

Over on my other VPS (Tagadab), there’s a slightly more leisurely schedule of 4 simultaneous tables of low stakes poker, being governed by the Shanky holdem bot and a “cash hopper”, used for switching tables every half hour.   Tagadab is also where I run the Psychic Soccer Profits bot (temporarily in dry dock), the Article Marketing Robot, when making an article submission, and Roulette Assault on any casino not covered by VPS1.

You could say I’m getting my money’s worth out of the VPS setups.  I need two because the screen-scraping bots which need to move chips and click buttons (ie poker and roulette) don’t coexist too well when fighting for control of the cursor.  But it’s also useful to have two for contingency purposes.  I was tickled to find that one of my VPS hosts is physically located in the same Docklands hyper data centre as is used by my multi-million-dollar financial services clients.

Obviously there are still mountains to be climbed on stock and index trading, horses, blackjack and other casino games.  But I seem to have the infrastructure in place to tackle these in due course once the first phase provides the funding to support them.

As for the list of favourites which I promised, the greatest recommendation I can give a product is that I’m using it daily, and that is true of everything mentioned above.  To avoid having to embed affiliate links in every article (which so disrupts the flow of things) I will maintain a short list in the right hand margin of all current top picks, as well as the Best of the Bots page linked from the header.  Combine these with the intensive campaigns I am kicking off via the Article Marketing Robot and no-one should be left in any doubt as to where I think they should be investing their money.  Try Googling “The Botfarm Recommends” a few times over the coming weeks and you will see what I mean.

In my delight I couldn’t wait to contact the AMR developer, but in fact he beat me to it.  His email arrived within minutes saying that he hoped I had just been doing a test run, because my referral link was corrupted.  He wasn’t wrong – I had successfully gatecrashed the front pages of Google with over 300 articles, none of which had a working resource link.  And just as eggs can’t be unscrambled, there was nothing to be done with the articles which were already out there.  My best idea was to resubmit with a corrected URL, in the hope that a second duplicated article would overwrite or displace the erroneous ones.  In a third bite at the cherry, I rewrote the article a few days later to be a straight head to head comparison between AMR and the Miracle Traffic Bot.  This time I trampled roughshod over the sensibilities of the directory owners and used a direct (and correctly formatted) affiliate link.  By this time my automated submissions were up over the 500 mark and again the dissemination and Google indexing were almost immediate.  The use of an affiliate link doesn’t seem to be a problem with directories which have automatic acceptance, though it probably would be for the higher ranking directories which use a manual review process.  Not that I’m too worried – I have had articles manually rejected for minutiae such as not leaving a line between paragraphs, but missing out on a few of the stricter directories doesn’t seem to affect the overall effectiveness of the technique, at least over a short-term horizon.

Now here’s the mystifying part.  Half a dozen ebooks and courses I purchased all agree that article marketing is the best way to build backlinks, encourage clickthroughs and in the end make affiliate commissions.  However, apart from a slight uptick in Botfarm traffic, I’m still waiting for the dam to burst.  Not a single referred sale of the Article Marketing Bot (or anything else for that matter) and next to no additions to the email list.  Of course blasting the net with a misformatted link doesn’t inspire confidence.  But there are  still very many valid links to both the Best  of the Bots page and to the AMR site.   Their failure to pour cash into my coffers makes me think I have to go back to scratch with this marketing lark and maybe read and listen to some of the reams of material which I have purchased and downloaded over recent weeks.  And as it is really a separate world from that of my bots, I plan to create a second blog to chart my pilgrim’s progress in that new niche.  Expect to see an honest appraisal of some extremely highly hyped products.  And an equally honest reporting of clickbank and other earnings from my endeavours.  The working title is The Long Hard Road To Easy Money.  The domain name I bagged to support it is longhardeasy.com which, on mature reflection, can easily be turned to other uses should my internet marketing efforts vanish down a hole.

Separating the two strands, of course, will leave me free to concentrate in this blog on the good, the bad and the ugly of the bot world, starting in the very next post with a roundup of all of the bots still on my hot list.