Time to flex my (intellectual) muscles

Working, as I do, in the retail motor industry means that a lot of potentially very profitable trades are unavailable to me due to the fact that I am unavailable on Saturday afternoons. Frustrating as this is there is no way round it unless a way can be found to automate the process.

I distinctly remember as a spotty teenager playing around with programming a Sinclair Spectrum SX in a language called 'BASIC'. I managed to draw something that sort of resembled a tank and was able to animate this thing across the screen of the television the computer was hooked up to. It introduced me to some basic (no pun intended) programming principles such as loops and if.... then... else constructs. Why I didn't pursue a career down this road I've no idea; obviously I saw no future in it :-(

Over the years I've dabbled with programming as a hobbyist and I think it is now time to see if I can get my two main pastimes working in tandem with each other. My favoured trade, as regular readers will know, is the so called 'Scatter Gun' trade which can be worked very mechanically ... i.e. if this condition exists then do this or else do that. I'm sure this can be worked into a programme, or 'bot' to take care of things whilst I'm off enjoying selling cars.

Although I'm self taught with the help of various books and the internet I'll state up front that most of the specialised code needed to access Betfair programmatically has been learnt by studying a very useful thread by a chap named Mumbles on the Betfair developer's forum, so credit for any success where it's due. I'll take the blame for any failure right on the chin!

I'm sure a professional developer would start armed with a piece of paper or two and sketch out the main structure of his bot before firing up the relevant software. I'm not a pro, and planning on paper is not one of my strong suites so it's straight in at the deep end with Visual Basic .net 10 for me!

Fairly obviously this isn't set to win any 'User Interface' awards, and this is the unstarted finished product! So there's a few hoops to jump through along the way.

There are a few issues that I've yet to confront properly (and probably loads of 'Gotchas' round every corner) - for example how to keep track of the current score. I know from bitter experience that Flashscores and the like cannot be 100% trusted so it seems to me at the moment that the only sure fire way of establishing the current score is to loop through all possible Correct Scores looking for odds of 1000 to back.

As I start getting this mock up wired for action it might be that I appeal to cleverer readers than I to assist with the gotchas. Hopefully someone will come to my aid. I expect progress on this to be slow, as my patience when things like this aren't doing what I would like them to is akin to that of a toddler playing with Lego. So, please bear with me!