Known issues

Here are some issues related not only to 5StarBot but as well to Betfair betting in general. You should be aware of them using 5StarBot.

1. Laying at BSP. Betfair has a minimum liability of £10 for all lay bets placed at BSP. Therefore if your bet’s liability is less than £10 the bet will not be accepted by Betfair. How liability is calculated for lay bet £2 @ 4.5: £2 x (4.5 – 1) = £7.

2. Min/max odds limit when betting in-play. There are two important features of in-play betting on Betfair: high price volatility and 1 second delay between moments when your bet is placed and when it gets matched. Together they may cause some bets to match at odds outside min/max limits. It happens because when the bot “looks” at prices they might be within the limits and the bet is fired, but after 1 second of artificial in-play delay prices may jump or drop significantly and matched price will be outside the limits. You should consider this risk when betting in-play.

3. Small bets when betting in-play. Small bets or bets with size below minimum £2 require more operations (and therefore more time) to fire than normal bets. When betting before the off it is not a problem, but when betting in-play and taking into account thoughts from pt2 of this page, this extra time required to place small bets can cause your bet will not be matched or matched at worth odds. We advice to bet in-play only with normal stakes, above Betfair minimum of £2.

4. What happens if only part of the race selections match betting conditions. If you have more than one selection per race it is possible that some of your selections will match betting conditions and others will not. For example, you’ve set Max Odds = 5.0, your selections are HorseA (3.5) and HorseB (6.0). Only HorseA is matching your betting conditions. In this case the bot will fire bet on HorseA. HorseB will be no bet. The bot will not continue checking prices for HorseB once the bet on HorseA is fired. If both horses are above your Max Odds the bot will check their prices until one or both horses match the condition. If bets must be placed only if all of your selections match betting criteria, enable ‘All runners must exist’ option in System settings. If you want to be able to check conditions and place bets independently for your selections, you should load each selection separately, for example, you might have two copies of the same race with different selections.