Hooligans Sportsbook

Gambler's toolkit

  • Start date •
  • Replies
    27 Replies •
  • Views 2,113 Views
Follow
djiddish98

djiddish98

The Dunk
Since
Jun 6, 2010
Messages
442
Score
0
Tokens
0
My day job involves a good deal of setting up shop in Excel. However, there's also a good deal of downtime as well, so I spend large chunks of my day working on projects that I think will help me make smarter bets.

This one attachment is a file that scrapes matchbook's MLB lines and current available dollar amounts and tracks any changes (within refreshes) of either the lines or the dollar amounts. So, if you see a large negative amount next to a line, then you might infer that someone made a large bet on that line.

However, someone could equally be pulling their money off of the market, as opposed to placing a bet.

Still, I think you could assume that a large amount of money moved away from a certain baseball line. Meaning someone found that attractive enough to bet on it, or the person offering the bet didn't like giving as much in the way of odds anymore. (Unless it was all just arb related as opposed to taking an actual side)

I don't have all the inside knowledge to really implement this information in a valuable way, so I'm offering the tool up to the community as a contribution. If anyone can find some good use for it, it would be great if you could share that with me or anyone else if you found the tool helpful on your end.

The code is crude (I took 3 CS classes in college before dropping). Also, if you feel like it, you can enter your usename and password for MB in the VBA code (I've commented it there), and it'll log you in (I'm not trying to steal your names and pdubs!) You don't have to do that though, but you should log-in otherwise the markets won't auto-refresh.

Run the matchbook macro to initialize the websites (one for AL and one for NL), then run updatemb and it'll cycle through every 2 seconds and refresh.

Good luck!
 

Attachments

  • matchbook-nologin.zip
    53.6 KB · Views: 158
Last edited:
As you stated, it is extremely difficult to tell whether market makers are moving because of a market change or if there was actually an accepted offer. When I ran my bot there, I was always asking for more transparency in their markets. Things like that would be extremely helpful. I guess they just don't want people to know how much money they are making though.
 
Thanks for the feedback Monkey. Some sort of indicator on their website would be a great addition in terms of information - IE highlight the bet box in green if a bet has been accepted or red if someone removed their money; as you said, perhaps too much information.

Here's another one that might be helpful for fantasy baseball players - it pulls all the player data (by value per game) from baseballmonster.com and you can then run averages or medians over a set number of games for every player. If you log in to baseballmonster, you can set the stats in your league so the values will be relevant. Just run the getPlayerData macro and it should start pulling data. Again, code is not optimized at all (I'm having it do one player at a time, so slow internet connections be warned)

I feel like most websites only offer the average performance over a set number of days, which can be useful, but most likely isn't.

I'd rather have a consistent player on my team with some upside than grabbing someone who hit two homers and 6 RBI in a game but then sucked for the rest of the week (which the median will show me). Also, I don't want a player to be penalized in my rankings because they got the day off for a game, reducing their totals if the ranking is cumulative. This will exclude games with no data - so if you're pulling 9 games worth for each player, it will find 9 games worth of performance.

Let me know if anyone finds this useful.

Enjoi!
 

Attachments

  • baseballmonster-uploadz.zip
    36.4 KB · Views: 162
Last edited:
Here's another tool I made for the "score in first inning" and "first team to score" props for MLB. It goes to 5dimes, greek, bookmaker, betPhoenix and bodog and pulls all the lines for those two props and shows them in an orderly fashion ala a crappy sbrodds. I set it up to show me how off Bodog's line was from the rest of the "market average" (which includes the vig), but you could easily rework the formula to spy on some bad lines the greek has left up. I feel like bookmaker is the sharpest in this arena based on 2 days of anecdotal observations.

This tool is probably the least polished of all (bookmaker's website doesn't always redirect properly, and the program will hang), but I think it's useful because it seems like most websites (bookmaker aside) make their MLB prop pages purposefully obtuse in order to slow people down.

Also ,the RFI (run in first inning) will not show yes or no - it'll show away team as yes and home team as no (FYI).

Again, hope this helps someone, or if anyone thinks its a worthy idea to expand upon, I can delve further.
 

Attachments

  • prop-upload.zip
    62.8 KB · Views: 169
Last edited:
Good stuff kind sir. I've been wanting to get into the first inning score and first team to score thing more. Although me wanting to do more of anything usually ends badly. But I did find that interesting.

Where were you when "The Dunk" happened? I was at home and I went bonkers.
 
Excellent, dj. Looks like you've put a lot of work into those spreadsheets. With those update while loops (the hanging problem with Bookmaker specifically), perhaps you could just use a counted loop so that it doesn't hang in an infinite loop if it can't redirect. It would create a sort of timeout at least - which you could perhaps specify somewhere in your spreadsheet rather than hard coding it.
 
Good point monkey - Or I could have the application wait a second or two for the page to load (I have that a couple of times in there - not a fan, but I was too lazy to fix it like I tried to do with BM below).

The issue is with their iframe - I'm waiting for it to initialize and load all the a href tags so I can grab them and click on the MLB prop I want, so I'm basically running a loop grabbing all the a tags until the length of that array is > than a certain number. I can't do the full number of links at a certain time, because bookmaker is always adding and removing markets.

Is there a simpler way to track whether a website is running some processes in the background? Readystate and .busy don't seem to work in this scenario so I resorted to some hacked up measures.

If there's some interest in this tool, I can certainly edit it to become a bit more reliable. If I recall, it was looping pretty well with what I implemented above - the other solution is to just create two browser windows (one for each market) instead of going back and forth between their pages and relying on the while statement. However, I already had browsers for the other sports books initialized, so I wanted to reduce the clutter to a certain degree.
 
Probably go with the anal fissures - unless I had kids or didn't want kids. I wanted to wiki anal fissures, but I'm afraid of what shows up in their picture demo.

Also, thanks to Yahoo's personal player update notes for introducing me to anal fissures when Kaz Matsui had them at some point during a fantasy season (he was not on my team). I recall the note had an almost mocking tone.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.