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Hello,

I'm trying to host a Betair bot I've written on PythonAnywhere. Unfortunately, the P.A. servers are located in the US and this means that I am unable to login as they IP geography check.

Are there any plans to have servers hosted in Europe?

Thanks Robert

I don't represent PA so I can't answer about the geography thing.

However, do keep in mind that betfair will ban you anyway if you access their services using a bot (unless you are a regular player, in which case you wouldn't have the geography restriction).

And unless you're really cunning, it's really easy to spot bots. At the very, very least you'd want to clone the user agent from a real browser (assuming this was HTTP), introduce slightly random delays to your requests and also introduce periodic longer delays ("off to make a brew" type delays).

I've never had anything to do with online gambling (from a consumer or developer perspective, but right now I'm thinking of developer) but if I were to do so, I'd always manually inspect the logs of the top few percent of winners and also run some statistical analysis of betting patterns to identify anybody who was out of the ordinary. That's just off the top of my head, I'm sure the experts have many more tricks up their sleeve, but just getting around those simple measures is somewhat challenging.

Guys,

I don't know why you think Betfair has banned bots. They have a published API specifically so you can write your own trading systems.

They have taken action against bots that have caused problems with their own systems, but they are quite happy for people to build and use their API.

Cheers, Robert

Ah well, I wasn't making a comment specifically about Betfair, just pointing out that bots are really easy to spot. If they don't mind them, that's not an issue. (^_^)

I can't imagine why online casinos would care about bots since the odds are inherently stacked in their favour - you can't help but lose money in the long term, no matter how skilled you are. I can see why online poker and the like wouldn't want bots because if someone can figure out a good enough algorithm to fleece poor players (which isn't hard to imagine - poor players are really bad) then they could swamp the place and drive real players away. Bookies are a bit of a special case - if someone managed to predict sporting results and the like with perfect accuracy then it would certainly ruin them, but then again if you could come up with an algorithm for that then you'd probably make far more money in other applications (such as the stock market).

I used to have an account with betfair and I used their API to download and archive odds. After a few weeks they banned me (not only from the API but also from the website, freezing my funds) and said I'd have to bet more frequently if I wanted to use their API. I had to wait for about 3 weeks for my account to be unfrozen. Haven't bothered with them since.

Regarding server location -- it's certainly something we've got on the list, but it's not that high up. I'll add an upvote on your behalf, @rcs1000.

@giorgostzampanakis: Wow, sounds like they're pretty touchy about that, unless your code was hammering their servers unnecessarily (i.e. many requests per minute every minute). Perhaps they don't want people analysing the trend of the odds and drawing conclusions based on that.

Still, sounds like they handled it very badly. Freezing your funds in particular is entirely unjustifiable. However, let's face it - betting and gambling aren't business areas that tend to attract the most upstanding and conscientious companies.

Cartroo: Their infrastructure can handle hundreds of requests per second and there are many bots who do just that. I was only hitting once per second or so. Anyway.

Sure, a few requests a second from one user isn't much of an issue. A few requests a second from a thousand users starts to become a problem. Someone open sources the code and it becomes a few requests a second from tens of thousands of users, that's a big deal.

It's certainly possible to design services that scale to more or less any load as proved by people like Google, Facebook and Twitter, but it's tricky. As soon as you hit the limit of a conventional RDBMS, even with distributed caching and other tricks, then you're into uncharted territory for a lot of web developers and that means your development costs really shoot up - maybe Betfair decided that the best compromise for their business was to instead simply stamp on people they feel "overuse" their service.

That's their prerogative. Of course, you're also quite free to decide that's poor customer service and you'd rather take your business to Betfair's competitors, and it sounds like that's what you've done - fair enough. I'm just pointing out they might have somewhat justifiable reasons for their policies which aren't entirely based on paranoia. (^_^)