Thursday 2 January 2014

(Almost a very...) Happy New Year... and a request for some help!

Happy New Year everyone, and I hope your heads are fully recovered from whatever revelry you partook of and that you are ready to face 2014 in both a personal and a trading sense.

The 'Almost a very..' qualifier in the title refers to my recent performance in Cassini's Friendly Tipster League. I've been languishing near the foundation of said league for a while now, and whilst I knew hitting correct scores sufficiently frequently to challenge for the cash was unlikely, I am, in truth, more than a bit disappointed by my dismal showing! But I came soooo close to a massive reversal of fortunes on New Year's Day when late goals robbed me of no fewer that four winners, although a VERY late equaliser turned a loser into a winner. So a net three decent profits gone in the dying embers of ten games. I suppose the moral of the story (for this is far from an isolated occurrence although it was the most costly thus far) is to lay the current score in evenly matched games in the last five minutes of the 90 wherever you can!

I wait with baited breath for the next update to the league to see if I've managed to do a Fulham and claw myself out of the relegation dogfight!

My cry for help is for some computing advice...

I'm in the process of putting together a piece of software using SQL Express and I would like to be able to record the Home and Away teams for each trade. Once I've sufficient data I hope to be able to draw some pointers from it for the future.

It seems to me pretty daft to have two separate tables with the same teams in them so I'd like ideally to reference the same table for two teams but there is no direct relationship between them other than that they are both soccer teams! I've looked in the usual places but am a little confused as how best to accomplish this, my goal is to have a trade table looking something like this:

The front end will be written in Vb hence the choice of SQL over Access. Any advice gladly received even if it's 'give it up, Gun, and stick to Excel!'. Thanks in advance.

7 comments:

  1. Hi gundulf,

    I have actually got someone working on a trading/betting results database that is not made in access, based on the instructions you put up some time ago about how to make one in Access.

    I'm sure he would be able to help you out, I'll get him to take a look at this post and see what he says.

    Feel free to check out the latest video on my blog of the database that's being made, it's not long, would appreciate some feedback if possible.

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    1. Thanks for the offer, but it's been sorted thank you!

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  2. Contact me privately in the green room next time. I might be able to help.

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  3. Hi, Dave,

    Happy New year and hope you are well!

    If I understand it correctly…

    Just create a relationship between each foreign key field (HTeamID and ATeamID) as you have in the table above and the primary key in your teams table (which should contain only 1 unique record for each team).

    So you create 2 primary->foreign key relationships. That's really all you need to do.

    Give me a shout if you want to discuss further.

    Best regards,

    Ken (Mackenzie)

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    1. Hi Ken, long time no speak! Hope you're doing ok and still dabbling. I appreciate your reply, but young Magellan had already pointed me in the correct direction.

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  4. hi gundulf,

    I was wondering if you could help me out with that spreadsheet you created under the topic "Insure your trade, or take the risk???", the one for all 17 scores trading. I couldn't understand the amount spread evenly over and also the formula. Please advice. Thanx.

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  5. Hi, I've been a fan of the site for a while, so firstly thanks for all of the information you've thought me over the years. I have one very simple question and with your experience in having tried pretty much everything matched betting, trading or arb related, I thought you would be the best person to ask (plus the fact you have always been quite approachable when people have needed things before). The question is: Is there a way to harvest data, say for example football matches, to try and find a dead cert trend. My idea would be, again for example, the price of a favourite team to win regularly drops a couple of clicks after the match has kicked off (or ideally in the last few minutes before kick off). Meaning you could bet pre game and know with great certainty which way the odds would go. So a common trend, which I'm sure occurs all the time. Is this possible? Or am I simply searching for a holy grail that does not exist?

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