Bot tries to execute strategies and place bets when market prices are downloaded. If market prices are not being downloaded then your strategies will not execute or try to place bets.
By default bot is set to start monitoring markets few minutes before start time and to keep monitoring markets until they are Closed. In most cases you will not need to change those settings, but if you decide to place bets early or need to monitor large number of markets at same time then you will need to make some changes to optimize those settings by your needs.
First option is refresh rate for getting market prices. Default value is 1,000ms (1 second) and it can be set low as 300ms. This means that every 1 second bot makes one request to get prices for 5 different markets. Then next second it gets prices for next 5 markets and so on. With refresh rate of 1 second bot will be able to get prices for 60s x 5 = 300 markets each minute.
If you are monitoring all football markets then this might not be fast enough, specially during the weekends when there are many matches that start at same or similar time. In that case you can set faster refresh rate, like 500ms and this would allow bot to get twice as many prices per second. Below is a table that shows how many market prices can bot get per second/minute for different refresh rates.
|
Refresh rate interval
|
Market prices per second
|
Market prices per minute
|
|
300ms
|
15-20
|
1,000
|
|
500ms
|
10
|
600
|
|
1,000ms
|
5
|
300
|
|
2,000ms
|
0-5
|
150
|
|
5,000ms
|
0-5
|
60
|
High refresh rates will allow bot to get prices faster, but it will also require faster processor to consume all those prices and execute your strategies. Each downloaded prices must be checked against each strategy so that strategy can decide if it should take any action for those downloaded prices or not. This requires very fast processor (CPU) if you are running high number of strategies at same time. You should check article on minimum configuration for limits and hardware that we recommend. If your CPU is not fast enough then bot might not work properly, become unreliable or crash. It is always best to test your settings in simulation mode before using real money and see how bot performs over the course of few days.
Also if you are running other programs with your Betfair account then you should check those other program refresh rates too and make sure that your account is not making more than 5 requests per second in total to get market prices, as that is Betfair API limit. If you exceed Betfair API limits then you might get blocked by API or charged additional fees for API use.
Other options at monitoring settings form should help you optimize time when to start monitoring markets. If your strategies are placing bets only few minutes before start time, then set time to start monitoring markets to 2 minutes before that time. There is no need to monitor markets few hours before start time when your strategies will only attempt to place bets just before start time.
Same goes with time until when to monitor markets. If you do not have any strategies that will attempt to place bets during in play then there is no need to monitor markets until they are Closed, so set this to monitor markets until Start Time or In Running.
Number of markets that bot is allowed to monitor is by default set to 500. This is more than enough to cover all horse and greyhound racing markets. It will be also enough if you plan on loading football single market type e.g. Match odds. In case that you will load more than one market type per football match then you should increase this to higher value e.g. 1,000 or 2,000.
The less markets bot monitors at same time the higher refresh rate of prices for those markets you will get. If you have only 5 markets that start at same time and they are monitored with refresh rate of 500ms then that means that each market prices will be downloaded 120 times each minute! Bot will be able to get prices for each market two times each second!
There is also option to stop monitoring markets that do not turn in play, this allows bot to move to other markets in cases when there is delay on some events.
If you are only betting before in play then you might want to display only prices from before in play at main MARKETS grid view. This can be useful if you wish to check favorite prices at later time by having a quick look at main MARKETS grid view.
Other settings include removing of markets from MARKETS grid view so that they are no longer monitored or maintained. Removing market from MARKETS grid view will free memory and improve bot speed, but it will also prevent bot from betting on that market. By default bot is set to remove closed markets without any bets, deselected markets and all markets 24 hours after their start time.
You should be careful with removing markets as this can have effect on some staking plans. When market is removed then all its details are removed from bot and staking sequence can be effected in some cases. So its best to keep markets for 24 hours or longer in MARKETS grid view if you are using staking plans or loss recovery.
