Test your strategy before you fund it
Most Betfair trading ideas are tested the expensive way: on real money, one match at a time, over months. BetBot keeps a record of real matches as they were traded, the prices every few seconds and the score as the feed showed it, and replays your strategy over them. Here is exactly what that replay does, and what it refuses to pretend.
What a replay does
-
It runs your strategy, not a model of it
The same code that decides your bets live reads each recorded frame in turn: the price ladder at the touch, the score, the minute, the serving flag, the stats where the feed carried them. A trigger fires in the replay exactly when it would have fired on the night.
-
It fills one reading late, like Betfair does
An in-play order on Betfair waits out the exchange's bet delay, so the price you decided on is never quite the price you get. The replay places your entry on the frame it fired and fills it against the next reading, at the worse of the two, never past your limit. A stop loss is chased the way the live engine chases it, not assumed to have matched where it was placed. The replay can only ever be pessimistic about a fill.
-
It holds the newest games out
Move a dial and you are searching, and a search always looks good on the games it searched. Every result is split by day: the older seven tenths of the games are what a search may look at, the newest three tenths are the games it never saw. The Lab shows both halves, so a strategy tuned on old matches has to earn its keep on new ones.
-
It carries its own margin of error
Plus eight percent over forty bets in twelve matches is not the same as plus eight percent over nine hundred. Every result carries its standard error, counted by match rather than by bet, because bets inside one match share one result. The verdict says which it is: thin, inside the noise, or clear of it.
-
It says what bank the strategy would have needed
The deepest fall in your record is one path through the matches in the order they came. The Lab reshuffles the same results a thousand times and reports the fall at the median, the ninety-fifth centile and the worst. The same results in another order, not a forecast.
return on money risked, with its error by match
older games and newest games, each with its own figure
the deepest fall seen, and the fall at the 95th centile when reshuffled
every bet a dot you can open, with the sentence the strategy wrote when it placed it
What it refuses to pretend
A backtest that only shows winners is a sales tool. These are the limits, written on the result itself whenever they apply.
- A match without a usable tape is counted, not replayed. A tape whose score feed failed is held out unless a verified outside record of the match repairs it, and the result names every match it left out and why.
- A market the strategy watches is matched by market. An Over 1.5 strategy replays over Over 1.5 tapes, never over the match odds of the same game dressed up as the same thing.
- Horse racing in-running is not replayed at all. Nothing records those prices after the off, so the Lab says so rather than guessing.
- A one-tick ladder scalp cannot be tested between recorded readings. The scalp bracket is refused by name in the Lab; it runs live and on paper.
- No result is a prediction. It is a count over games already played, with its error. What it buys you is a reason to put money on, or a reason not to, before the money goes.
Then paper, then real
A strategy that reads well in the Lab goes on paper next: the same engine, live Betfair prices, no money, with the stake caps, the daily loss limit and the price sanity exit all running. When its paper record earns it, you arm it for real money yourself. BetBot never arms a strategy for you.
You can sign up, build strategies and read everything here before a card is asked for. The Lab and arming are part of the membership: £24.99 a month, seven days free.
BetBot is an official Betfair App Vendor and connects to your Betfair account through Betfair's own vendor sign-in; your Betfair login is never stored.