Most average gamblers lose money on the horses but if you’re techy enough, you can often get a head start on the field by the simple application of a little technology.
One appropriately-named tool is the fascinating “Grey Horse Bot” a Betfair racing app that was designed and built from the ground-up by users of this, the world’s biggest betting exchange, from its earliest days.
The tool has grown and been adapted over the last 10 years or so and is today, what can only be described as the “Swiss Army knife” of betting bots. It was first designed for gamblers on greyhound racing but today is used more for horse racing as the name suggests.
The main thing that sets this bot apart from the many alternatives out there is automation. It’s an easy to use but effective tool that gives you full control in various ways. There are five ways to decide what your bot does with your bank at Betfair, including a “stop at profit or limit loss” feature. You can pre-set the bot to gamble on real-time ranked odds filters – and you can add filters to any specific wager via manual or automatic mode.
Perhaps most usefully of all the Grey Horse Bot enables you to calculate your betting trades (remember that with Betfair you can lay as well as back) in various ways using the odds available. So, for example, you can request specific prices on selections and simultaneously analyse the position of other potential wagers to trigger them.
One of the most popular Grey Horse Bot features is the “set and forget” mode. This uses a CSV text file format which enables the user to create a list of selections with parameters. It then imports these selections via a server tips module.
The bot also enables “Dutching” whereby users place bets on more than one horse in any given race – with the proviso that the overall return is the same if any of them way – and all this is automated.
Like most betting bots available for use with Betfair, the Grey Horse Bot is best trialled before being used in a real-life situation. In this way, you can learn to use and develop it to its full extent and hopefully make a steady profit from your tech-abilities.