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Specifying your BotBuilder Bot

Bots come in all shapes and sizes and what you want your Bot to do depends on the Betting Strategy that you want it to implement.

Because of the almost infinite range of possibilities, we don't have a standard form for specifying your Bot, and nor do we expect you to come to us with a fully defined, fully specified requirement ... though of course, if you can, then so much the better.

What we suggest is that you make an initial proposal by eMail to: botbuilder

But there are some basic parameters, listed below, that you might consider including in your initial proposal.

Don't worry if you're not sure about anything in the list ... it may not be relevant to your proposal, or may only be defineable at some later stage in the proposal.

• Is the Bot for your own personal use, or is it an idea for a commercial application that you hope to market at some later stage?
• The country from which you intend to operate the Bot.
• The Markets that you intend the Bot to operate in, e.g. Soccer, Horse Racing, Financials or whatever, or All Markets.
• Is the Bot intended to be fully Automated i.e. you set the parameters, hit 'Go' and just leave it to do its stuff?
• Or is it a 'Helper' application, .e.g. you select a Market(s) and monitor them yourself, deciding when to submit Bets, but with the Bot showing you a particular view(s) of the Market, making suggestions for Bets and then perhaps, automatically "Greening"/"Redding" up. (We have a range of GreenUp functionality that can be plugged into your Bot if required).
  Or perhaps you want the Bot to submit the initial bets and then you take over control after that.
  But the main distinction we need to know is between fully automated 'Set and Forget', and supervised Manual Betting.
• Is the Bot to operate only 'InPlay', or does it need to monitor events before they go InPlay', and, if so for how long? ... important mainly in terms of Data Call charges.

So your initial eMail may be something like:

I'm looking for a Bot that will Monitor UK Horse Races while they are InPlay.

The Bot will wait until 2 or more Runners are Trading at or below a specified price, and when they are, it should submit Lay Bets on those Runners.

I should be able to set the TriggerPrice and also the Stakes, which may vary from Race to Race.

I should be able to specify whether the Stakes should be fixed or whether they should be set to a specified Liability.

I want to select the Races, and set the Triggers in the morning, and then just leave the Bot to run unattended until after the last selected Race.

The Bot is for my own personal use, and I'll be operating from a UK IP address.

Except, don't ask for that one ... it sounds great in theory, but it's a quick route to the poor house!

As soon as possible after reading your proposal we'll reply to let you know whether we are able to work on your proposed Bot.

If the specification is reasonably complete and relatively straightforward, like the example, then we'll give you an estimate of the time it will take us to build and test the Bot.

If the spec. is less detailed or more speculative, we'll get back to you with some more detailed questions, and possibly some suggestions for features we'd recommend putting into the Bot so that it will be able to operate your overall strategy efficiently, and, hopefully, profitably.

We've had a lot of experience of building Bots (20+ of them) over the years, so we have a reasonably good idea of what sorts of strategies are likely to be profitable, and we will give an honest opinion as to whether we think your Stategy is likely to be a) do-able and b) profitable, but, of course we make no claims to infallibility ... if we could, we wouldn't be doing this for a living! ... so we're happy to consider any sort of strategy, no matter how improbable it may appear at first sight ... some of the maddest ideas we've had put to us have often proved to be highly profitable for their originators.

One question that often bothers clients is 'What if my idea is a goldmine ... will those folks at BotBuilder just copy it and use it themselves, or sell it to other people?' To which, the honest answer is:

"Yes, we probably would use it ourselves, but we'd tell you what we were doing, and which trigger settings we were using, but no, under no circumstances would we sell it or share it with any third party."

If you're uncomfortabe with the idea of us using your Bot, then your best solution is to go elsewhere and have it developed by a Saint, but there can be big advantages for you in sharing your Bot with us, particularly if it's a Bot for Horse Racing ... we have a large database of past Betfair Horse racing markets and some quite sophisticated analysis programs, which can greatly speed up the optimization of your Trigger settings, and, whilst we aren't allowed to share the Data, we are quite happy to share the results of our analyses so far as they are relevant to a particular Bot with that Bot's owners.

So, if you've had an idea, and you're thinking "I'm sure that would work, but it would have to be automated, because I can't sit around all day waiting for the right combination of Prices / Runners / Goals", let BotBuilder Build it for you: botbuilder