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Comments ( 1 )

• Stefan

  1.8.2019 12:07:01

  My reply to betfair BDP team:

  Yes, understanding of UX can be very difficult, but in bfexplorer actually all necessary steps required to run automation strategy are very simple, half of steps you do when you open bet event market for manual betting or trading.

  When you open bfexplorer for the first time, there are no My Favorite Events added, so you open a bet even clicking on one of items in the Events list.

  In the Event Browser are displayed all events you click on, so for instance if you clicked on Upcoming in-play events, then in Event Browser are all active bet events on betfair which are open at in-play as well.

  Now big plus icon is in Event Browser toolbar, when you click on in, and as you are in the context in events, what else you can add to events, well yes only My Favourite Event. You bet on greyhounds so I believe you added there Greyhounds Racing, right? Or you did not mange to do anything.

   I would like to hear with what you have got main problems when dealing with bfexplorer user experience (UX).

  Now when you just read the screen, you can see such plus icons, or similar looking icons like reload, start, and stop, and so on.

  Why are the same icons on many places in bfexplorer app, and why are they the same, well because they represent the same action, like add, start, stop…

  In My Strategy to Execute, is small plus icon, and I think  I do not have to repeat again what was said about plus icon, in this context when clicking on the toolbar button, a new strategy is added.

  And it is similar to execute automated strategy, so similarly like when you open bet even market, you can execute strategy in the same Event Browser view, just by clicking on Execute in Strategy Executor.

  So all steps:

  http://bfexplorer.net/Products/Feature/15

  http://bfexplorer.net/Products/Feature/23

  http://bfexplorer.net/Products/Feature/24

  I thought you watch my video and will try to repeat what you see in that tutorial:

  http://bfexplorer.net/Community/BlogContent/434

  Then you would ask, I cannot find “Greyhound Racing Betfair ML Ratings Trigger” from your video, and then I would reply, this strategy is available only for subscribers who paid for development of the strategy, but as in this case the strategy is from public domain I added it to “Community Bots” so with the latest release of bfexplorer app, you could find it there. This happened next day after I posted the above article.

  So from UX point of view, user acts in context of actions displayed on user interface, in this case in different views.

  So creating a strategy is just click on add button, then filling in parameters that are described in description view, and actually all bot strategies have default parameters so just by click on Save button user adds new strategy which can be executed, and in practice mode user can watch how the bot behaves so from that user can understand what actually strategy does, for instance:

  “Place Bet and Close Selection Bet Position”

  What such named strategy can do?

  Well yes, place bet, and then close bet position.

  Naming convention is general, I hope it is understandable; ok others could call it green up, or tick offset and so on, but the point here is that using different parameter settings influence strategy/bot behavior, and this way are built all bfexplorer bots.

  Your bot:

  “Greyhound Racing Betfair ML Ratings Trigger”

  What Mr. Smith could understand from such name, well maybe a word trigger, so bot/strategy triggers something?

  As bfexplorer app is extendable, anyone familiar with any .net programming language can build its own strategy, and such strategy is added to the application when app is starting up.

  Therefore I thought that someone from your team will take some time and try to implement your ML strategy using

  http://bfexplorer.net/Products/BfexplorerBotSDK

  I can create simplified version or share my code.

  It is like you do when you code VBA in Excel, but in this case strategy is directly integrated to bfexplorer app, and so it can be really executed autonomously in 24/7 mode, none from your third party tutorials can do that:

  https://betfair-datascientists.github.io/#using-third-party-tools-for-automation

  But bfexplorer can do so.

  I thought that your tutorials are aimed to community of data scientists, who are familiar in different programming languages like R or Python, or just use ML tools without programming as Microsoft Azure Machine learning tools, and so.

  If you think Excel automation is the way to go, then go through betfair app vendors forums, where people have big problems to automate their betfair strategies using Excel formulas and/or VBA, so it is quite impossible for common people to do anything reasonable without assistance.

  So what option have data scientist build his ML/AI model for couple months?

  Learn some third party tool, and make automation which is actually not so good automation, and he must reload markets manually or copy selections to Excel sheet.     

  Learn betfair api and spend another 2 months building his betfair bot app. Or of course he can hire someone on freelancer web sites. Or he can use my Bfexplorer BOT SDK and and program just trigger bot, as the rest will be done by bfexplorer app.