Nick Mordin has written a number of books on horse racing (e.g. Betting for a Living; Mordin on Time) and has a regular column in The Weekender, which I buy every week. Nick is held in very high regard on the racing circuit, any book and his thinking on horse racing, speed figures, tracks and punting are a must for any racing enthusiast.

Reading Nick Mordin’s column in The Weekender, he makes some very valid points about hard facts being in short supply in horse racing – particularly in Britain and Ireland. Facts that are taken for granted in other countries such as the USA, include sectional times, horse’s body weights and medical records, full details of the the equipment they carry and official gallop reports. Even some of the so-called facts that are available to UK punters can be wildly inaccurate. Official race distances can be out by 50 yards or more.

Gathering real hard facts takes some effort but can lead to profit. In this week’s column Nick’s observations about horses that sweat in the their early starts would appear to be profitable – returning £28.31 to a level £1 stake.

Quite a number of the online bookmakers have offers of free bets. However, when you look at the small print, I’m not quite sure how ‘free’ these are. Often they are a matching deposit, up to a certain limit, based on the amount of money you put into the betting account when you open it. But, you can’t just open an account, deposit some money, collect the matched deposit from the betting company – and then withdraw it all. They usually want you to turnover the initial deposit by two or three times. After that, you might still be lucky to have some money left! I guess you could always bet on near certain bets – and most of the time you’ll get away with it. Such bets are more likely on football or tennis than horseracing – so it may still be possible to make money from these offers.

It is worthwhile shopping around – but be sure to read the small print with all of these free betting offers. You want to make sure that the conditions are such that you’ll get your money back – after all, the point of this is to make money and not line the pockets of the bookmakers!

I have been reading through Colin Magee’s book on automated exchange betting which makes use of the Betfair API using a number of perl scripts. I have been having some success with these, but perl somehow seems rather unsatisfactory and the scripts are not obviously structured, so I have started to recreate the functionality using python instead of perl.

My Ubuntu laptop has python 2.6.5 installed, and the only extras I have needed are SOAP functionality (so far). I was going to go by the recommendations of Dive into Python but have ended up installing SUDS instead. SUDS comes with decent documentation and I have managed to get the Betfair login and logout functions working without any real issues.

My next piece to deal with will be extraction of race and horse data from a suitable web-site. This functionality may need to remain in perl as it is quite strong with this type of activity (html parsing). I’ll research further what python libraries might help.

I have started to take a look at the investment opportunities presented by sports betting on websites such as Betfair and Betdaq. These two sites have an API which allows for easier connection to a computer based trading solution.

I am currently in the prices of acquiring data to perform some further detailed statistical analysis and determine what, if any, trading opportunities are likely to be profitable. However, if I do find some I won’t be able to share them here until I have made a decent profit first!