So I happened across this post on foreign exchange arbitrage and got distracted for 4 hours into working out if there were any opportunities for using arbitrage betting from here in the uk, what with online gambling being so big and tennis being a simple outcome game I thought I would start with the tennis and see where it took me. More an excuse to practice my rapid application dev than anything else.

If you skip to the end of this post you can see the outcome, or read on, I will be brief.

So I started in excel, found a nice summarising scraper site which gives you all the odds from different bookies in one place (how convenient - I bet they make good affiliate revenue) and did the maths. Within 4 games that evening I found one which worked. If I had placed bet’s across 2 bookmakers totalling £1000 at that moment I would have made a profit of £10.74 (1.74%), guaranteed (unless some natural disaster killed both tennis players?!?)

Great. Well its not, but 1.74% was a start that could be turned into a healthy profit, provided easy money in, easy money out, repetition and scalability (not that I expected that but I thought I would go with it.)  The math I was using was as follows:

Where x was odds on outcome1, y the odds on outcome2
if c was less than one then it would be an arbitrage bet which held profit (this is a simplified version of the math, which I am fairly sure is correct)

This gave me a percentage of return based on a formula, next I wrote a quick scraper which pulled match’s from the odds aggregater, it pulls all tennis games across different championships and arena’s. I wrote the scraper in csharp, a variant on a rules based spider-scraper system I wrote in php a few years ago for ripping various things off the net into db’s. So 1 hour or so later at the flick of a switch I now had all tennis match’s popularly available to gamble online on in the uk with odds, bookie details etc etc.  I love RAD in c#. Apply the math to this and you get the following:

Yeah, its ugly, but it works.

So yeah perhaps that early game I found that made nearly 2% was a fluke or a miscalculation, perhaps arbitrage betting is as fluidly fixed by the free market as forex is, either way in the few days I have checked I haven’t found any arbitrage bets that are viable at all, let alone any healthy returns. There probably is scope in the practice, perhaps with 24 hour rate watching you might catch the book-keeper fluctuations and make the odd 1-4%, but really, for all the hassle of multiple accounts and bet-shop money holding its probably not worth it. Good excuse to re-write my scrapers in csharp though, and do a little maths.

*Gambling is bad, mmmmmkay? Its also worth noting that while if you couple finding this low % profit with the £10 free bet crap that all of these online bookies offer it would seem like a great idea, or at least a good one. Its probably not. These business’s run a filter model for your cash, good marketing, low number page hops and quick card transactions makes it easy to filter in cash, but isn’t so easy to get out returns, also quite often the free initial bet or bonus comes with proviso’s which wreck the rate of returns. Its no surprise, its probably easier to earn your money elsewhere, perhaps by starting up as a bookie? :p

May was a month of brick lane curries, a new art exhibition (silent city), mini golf and a bunch of other blurry stuff.

June was a good month (on the whole apart from hackers and google caffeine?!?), did incalculable amounts of coding, new site rollouts, tennis, monopoly, booked new york flights and some other stuff. Wrote a lot, drank a lot of wine, updated a bunch of auction2post sites because eBay updated their api (for the better) – standard summer month.

I started 4 draft posts across these two months but none seemed to stick, it’s not like the months were dry, posts boning csharp just didn’t fit, I was going to post csharp iis and multisql management code, a nice project I wrote to datamine from ebays new api and I was thinking of digging out my seo hub php based hub and rewriting it as a multi threaded windows app, but yeah sometimes stuff just doesn’t seem to hold enough value.

As ever though projects continue to crop up and evolve. I am working on a stupidly simple file system snapshotter after an incident with a second hacker, I will probably post about ripping data from the Nike app on the iPhone, if it isn’t up already somewhere else. Also I will make a quick program to save the top 20 wallpapers from reddit to a folder so windows 7 can automatically show me new epics (theres even an rss!) if know one else saves me the effort. Unless that is, all this stuff gets superseded. Mostly it’s just me biding my time and making broader plans

Look out for possible random posts on business intelligence, the stock market and brain architecture too, as they seem to keep cropping up.

• Hyper Geo-localisation
  • Based on a postcode a user was taken to their “county” minisite which acted as sub-communities which were developed to appear as subdirectories of the main website, designed as sub communities users can move between counties when browsing information.
  • Content/Advertising could be targetted down to postcode level, including county specific business contacts, userbase and other content
  • Postcodes allowed GPS co-ordinates to calculate all sorts of distances to the user, from local business premesis to vehicles for sale, some intergration with google maps.
  • RSS feeds based on postcodes and counties gave a great flexibility to the user
  • Intergrated with Apache Mod_re-write to provide simplistic urls – wheels-near-u.co.uk/hertfordshire/.. etc.
• All-in Functionality
  • Aim to cover all motoring needs using all modern forms of web discourse including user based interaction via messages, forums, comments, galleries
  • Based on open source software Wheels-Near-U ended up merging the capacities of an online shop, photo gallery, video library, blogging and advertising medium
• Secure, multiple gateways
  • Payments taken in several different scenarios, including online shopping, advertise payment and subscription deals – this meant intergrating two seperate online payment gateways with website and ensuring secure service as per TOS
• SEO
  • Tailored to offer maximum unique/useful content from all given data
  • Designed to make spidering simple, project originally included self generated xml sitemaps, however these proved un-nescessary due to comman sense structure
  • Wide cross section of types of pages all featuring and aimed to comply with 50+ seo html/rules
  • Link pooling / seed based page linkouts
• Complete intergration with multiple web technologies
  • PHP, MySQL, GDLibrary (Image processing/creation), PDF Libraries, SSL, XHTML, RSS XML, CSS, Java, Javascript (inc ajax), Blogging, advert serving, geographical database tailored, Flash, optimised seo, Apache mod re-write, payment gateways, email syndication, login & security systems, custom written statistics engine, multi-server processing, cacheing, secure sessions