Help With A Diagnostic Error

[Deestar]

Hi

Can anyone help with the following. I use a fairly basic excel trigger which has worked (Betfair API errors aside) with no glitches for a while. Yesterday i left it to run as usual and came home to find it had gone a little haywire. Basically the triggers are set up to place no more than one bet per horse per race taking SP at off if remaining unmatched after triggered. It then moves on to the next race at a set time before the scheduled off. Yesterday in some races horses were bet 2/3/4 times. As is the "sods law" way with these things the erroneous bets cost me rather than helped me.

Looking at the diagnositc logs I get a host of errors that I haven't seen before but the main recurring ones are:

System.IndexOutOfRangeException: Index was outside the bounds of the array.
at Betting_Assistant.DecompressedMarketPrices.calcVirtualBackBets()
System.IndexOutOfRangeException: Index was outside the bounds of the array.
at Betting_Assistant.DecompressedMarketPrices.calcVirtualLayBets()

and

System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
at Betting_Assistant.DecompressedMarketPrices.calcVirtualBackBets()
System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
at Betting_Assistant.DecompressedMarketPrices.calcVirtualLayBets()

The only difference yesterday to what i do normally is that I set the triggers up much earlier in the morning. I also run the same set up on the overnight Australian markets and this morning there seems to have been no errors. I didn't see anything on the Betfair twitter feed indicating any sort of API/Website problems yesterday so I'm at a loss to explain what happened.

Any help appreciated?

[Deestar]

Just thinking some more about this, I don't see how the trigger can place more than one bet per horse (as happened) unless the Bet reference etc was cleared.

I do use the CLEAR trigger but this is set to run when the market goes in play (i.e. CELL E2 says "IN PLAY"). I don't bet in play and bet triggers are either BACK-SP/LAY-SP so it couldn't trigger in play anyway. I also have the CLEAR all bet ref on new market load checked.

So to my mind the only way a bet could have been placed twice, or three times or four time as happened (i.e. the first bet was placed then the reference was cleared leaving the trigger open to fire again on the same selection etc) was if:

the market went in play and then back to not in play (i can see this happening under a false start situation but unless there was about 20 yesterday I don't see that as a possibility) or

the market incorrectly reloaded itself and thus cleared the original bet refereneces. Has this ever happened to anyone else before? Is it a bug?

Any help appreciated.

[Captain Sensible]

MIght be worth checking your bet history to see the timings of the additional bets, i.e. if they were grouped together, what odds were you requesting and matched at i.e. was it carrying forward bet triggers etc, Without knowing the races it's hard to say whether there were false starts causing your duplicates but in general most errors I've ever had are down to me not coding for one of those once in a blue moon situations.

[Deestar]

Thanks for the response. The extra bets occured in at least 15 races yesterday so defintely not false start issues.

I've been watching closely today and some buggy things have been happening. I'm getting (NR) flashing up for split seconds at a time against all runners in the field, (never seen that before) and the 3.05 at Wetherby suspended about a minute before the off causing my market to reload hence creating a CLEAR and then retrigger through my spreadsheet. I've raised an issue with Betfair to see if there is an API issue but so far no response.

Getting the same diagnostic errors today as yesterday. Checked back through the logs of the last week and nothing like this has happened in them but my betting is exactly the same so perplexed to say the least.

[Captain Sensible]

The (NR) issue has been happening for ages dunno if it 's the API throwing out duff infoor how BA deals with duff info.

Amrkets can get suspended for all sorts of reasons pre off, even the removal of no runners will trigger suspends, I'd try and beef up your coding if a suspend is going to trigger a clear. Plenty of info is sent to the excel sheet if you don't want to use VBA things like E2 hold not in play / in play status and D11 shows the time to the off if you wanted to avoid duplicating bets pre off

[Captain Sensible]

*D2 not D11

[Deestar]

Thanks, I hadn't known about the NR issue it's a new one to me. But I don't thin its a big deal re triggering the clear.
As you suggest I'll defintely relook at my coding but there is nothing obvious about the suspend that should trigger the clear from within my formulea.
My concern is that the suspend is triggering a market reload (i.e. tricking the software into thinking that a new market has loaded) in which case a clear is unavoidable as I have clear ticked for all market reloads. Not sure how I can avoid that and still let the software run automatically as everytime a new market loads i obviously want it to clear the old bet references.

[Captain Sensible]

I'd be surprised if a suspend is making the software assume there's a new market or theyd be plenty more complaints as most of us probably use Clear bet refs on auto select market.

If you had 15 markets duplicating bets you should have quite a bit of data from the betting history to see why and when it's retriggering i.e. are the bets at regular intervals after the intial bets, are they at certain times past the minute etc

[Deestar]

yep given that no one else seems to be having a problem then the smart money is obviously on something I'm doing. A little gutted as its been working sweetly for a good few months. Just odd that I'm seeing these errors for the first time. As is always the case with this game though, just when you think you've cracked it.......

Thanks for your help.

[alrodopial]

At what day/race/starting time did those bets occur?
Give us a 2/3 of examples , our records may be show if something happened
Can you find out from bf history what time got placed?
1minute before off, starting minute , later ?

It would be a good idea to make excel record your bets with exact time (.xx of seconds accuracy) , successful placed bets and just tries

[Deestar]

I asked Betfair if they had any problems on Saturday. This was their response.

Thanks for contacting us.
We experienced a problem on Saturday between 1.45pm and 3.45pm with our underlying Accounts service and this would have caused timeouts and slow requests to the Betfair API during this time.
The non-runner issue appears to be unrelated to the above and would only occur if the API returned 'REMOVED' against a specific selectionId. This should only happen if a runner has been removed by Betfair.
Please report this to Gruss and they can investigate & advise us directly if they believe this is an API related issue. We haven’t received any other reports of a similar issues from Gruss customers or from other software application users.