Tip-ie - Automated Bet Placement Software

Tip-ie offers a great new way for you to place your bets and in the majority of cases achieve better returns than SP.

It will back or lay selections for you via Betfair, at the time you specify and the stakes you select. It also allows you to specify the minimum and maximum odds at which to place the bets.

Tip-ie can also be linked to your favourite tipster to enable you to back all their selections with just a couple of clicks of your mouse.

How Does Tip-ie Place Your Bets?

Tip-ie needs to be connected to the Internet when it places your bets, so realistically you'll need broadband access to the Internet to get the most from the software. You'll also need a Betfair account.

Access to Tip-ie is provided via your Betfair user name. It uses the Betfair API so you will need to register with the API program (don't worry it's free to register).

Click on Login and enter your Betfair Username and Password. Once you've logged in the software will pull in from Betfair details of all the current events that can be bet on.

Use the toolbar at the top of the screen to set-up default values for all of your bets. These can be saved so that you don't have to re-enter them each time you run the application.

Odds can be entered either as a fixed amount or based on those available at the time of placing the bet, via the options in the dropdown list. The options refer to the odds that are displayed on Betfair as follows:

Selecting "Reverse" will give you the bets odds, but you run the risk of your bet being unmatched. By selecting the "Current" odds you'll get your bet matched the majority of the time, but if you are betting to larger stakes you may wish to select "Sure Bet" or "Sure Bet+".

Once you decided upon the bet options, it's time to enter your bets. Use the hierarchical menu down the left-hand side of the screen to enter your selections.

Selections are displayed in the right-hand window. You can adjust the stake amount and time the bet is placed, for each of your selections. You can also specify min and max odds at which you wish to bet.

That's all there is to it. Once you've entered all selections press the start button. Tip-ie will then count down the time to place the next bet, at which point it will automatically place the bet for you on Betfair, leaving you free to get on with your work or other activities.

From the Betfair screen we can see the bet placed on Betfair. In this instance Free to Air won at 11/4. For our £5 stake we won £18.50, minus Betfair commission, which at 5% was £0.93. At SP the profit would have been £13.75.

To give Tip-ie a go visit the IE Software web site and select: Products -> Tip-ie

How Does Tip-ie perform compared to SP?

How well Tip-ie performs will vary depending upon the settings you choose. To give it a test we used it to back all of Equiform Ratings top rated selections (excluding Hunter Chases and Bumpers) over the period of a couple of weeks.

We were using a laptop to run the software and had a few teething problems while getting to grips with the software. It worked fine on days when we monitored it, but when we left it unattended it failed to back any of the selections.

We had checked that it worked fine when the screen had timed out, but what we hadn't realised was if the laptop experienced no activity for 25 minutes it shutdown the hard disk, thus preventing Tip-ie from running. Since we discovered the cause of the problem Tip-ie has been running great.

During our test period we used Tip-ie to back selections in 397 races. We instructed Tip-ie to place the bets 5 minutes prior to the start of the race and take the "Current" odds available. For the purpose of our test we didn't specify any min or max odds.

We started with a betting bank of £1,000 and staked £5 on each of the selections.

After the 397 races are betting bank at SP would have shown a small loss, down to £993.43. However thanks to the odds obtained by Tip-ie, after taking into account Betfair commission of 5%, our betting bank increased to £1,121.44. That's an increase of £128 or just over 25 points.

Our basis for choosing to place the bets 5 minutes prior to the race, was that horses most likely to win would shorten in price in the live market and we'd achieve better odds.

Tip-ie can place bets right up until the scheduled start time of the race, so further testing would be required to establish the best time to place the bets, although we imagine it will very much vary from race to race.

The graph below shows how our Tip-ie betting bank varied from that of betting at SP.

To try Tip-ie for yourself visit the IE Software web site and select: Products -> Tip-ie

STOP PRESS

We've just discovered Betfair are offering a tool called auto-betfair, which will enable you to automatically place bets in a similar way to the above. The software is currently in beta test, which means it's offered "as is" and is an unsupported product. But they say it's been tested with Windows XP and it's free.

We'll be trying it out and will report back how we get on using it. To download the software, go to the Betfair site and click on the "New! auto-betfair" link.