Auto Select Market trigger in Excel(Q2)

[keesbart]

Hi,
I am using the -1 trigger in Q2 to move to the next market.
If the race is Suspended I place -1 in Q2 and automatically the program moves to the next market.

Yesterday after 8-9 seconds the Hunt 20:30 race was suspended for a short time and the program fired the -1 trigger and moved to the next market, while the Hunt 20:30 was actually still In Play and not really Suspended.

Does anybody know if there is a way other than Suspended to fire the trigger?
If there is this would help me very much.

[Captain Sensible]

It could have happened for a variety of reasons , late withdrawal, false start etc You probably just need to add additional conditions depending on what your betting strategy is.

I wouldn't rely solely on 'suspended' to move markets as the API will return that for various reasons. Any other conditions depend on if you're betting in play etc

[keesbart]

Captain, thanks for the reply.

I am betting In Play.
I was looking for other conditions, but I can not find them.
Do you have a suggestion? It would help me a lot.

[osknows]

a couple of suggestions

1. Wait until the market is closed then forward
2. Check if any back price is blank & lay price is 1.01 indicating a possible winner

[keesbart]

Thanks Captain.

I will try your suggestions.

[Captain Sensible]

Looks like you were caught out with a false start where Betfair put the market inplay then reset after the false start.

You could do osknows suggestions not sure what flags come up for a closed market and it may mean you miss the next race/s if markets are close to overlapping or stewards , photos etc delaying the market being closed. Plus alot of markets don't actually hit 1.01 so that may always cause you to miss races.

I'd probably look at taking a timestamp as soon as inplay was displayed then keep a count of how long the inplay flag had been inplay. False starts would usually mean the inplay indicator had only been displayed for a max of say 10 seconds before being recalled.

So you could set a counter to track how long in play had been displayed and then switch markets once suspended was shown and the in play indicator had been running for at least 30 seconds.

[keesbart]

Tanks Captain,

I just changed my program in a way that only after 60 seconds In Play I will place the -1 trigger in Q2.
I will see if this works well.

[Captain Sensible]

A lot depends on what your betting strategy is, if you only need 60 seconds inplay then that should be fine but obviously you'll miss the business end of the race if it's a long one and just have to hope we don't have any sub 60 second races if you're logging the time inplay has been displayed.

UK races can be such a pain with times as nothing ever goes to plan and delays happen far too often causing overlaps. Wouldn't take too much for a meeting to be put back half an hour and you end up missing the majority of the days racing if you're relying on one race before moving to the next. Sometimes it's best just to accept the odd blip like the false starts and let things move based on the race times.

[keesbart]

Captain,

I fire the trigger: if Suspended after 60 seconds in Play.
This just worked well.

After every race automatically a copy of the spreadsheet is saved.
So I have a lot of historical data.
I found that not in every race the winner has a last Price of 1.01 which means that I cannot use this condition.

[Captain Sensible]

K, thats the way I'd do it, in your last post wasn't sure you'd also using the suspended as a condition also.

[keesbart]

Thanks for your help Captain

[Captain Sensible]

No problem, if you are switching races based on the last race it might be worth splitting the meetings into separate tabs.

I know quite a few people do this just to avoid occasions where meetings start getting delayed and overlap or even get put back half an hour or so. The delays are more likely to make you miss races more than the odd occasion where we have a false start. You can always add conditions within the sheet to drop refresh rates until we're close to the off to save on data calls etc.

[keesbart]

Captain, thank you for this information.
I will see if I can implement this.