My first bet on Byteball sports betting app were losses. I layed Chelsea as the maker in the bet at 1.493 and lost 493MB, ~31 USD. I laid at a good price and could have covered my bet on Boylesports.com or a betting exchange at 1.57 - 1.70 but I didn't today. I think the sports betting bot could have a big future if you could maximise the window on the Byteball desktop wallet to take up the entire screen. Much easier to see what is going on. Also I expect that if more markets could be populated over time it would be easier for users to have more choice of bets.
I think markets are removed from the app too early before an event starts, maybe 90 minutes before the event starts, and if people want to bet before watching a match they can't at the moment. I know this protects market makers from big odds movement or something like that but I think ideally the future of this is to offer in play betting with odds that move, similar to all betting websites but for know I don't think markets should be closed until they actually go in play or maybe 5 minutes before they go in play.
I think the market maker balance should be able to be used to place bets as well [ with the caveat that if you place bets and don't have enough balance left your market making bets are no longer available] . I couldn't do that today so had to withdraw my maker balance and then place a bet as a taker.
Hi I'm the dev of this bot, thanks for your article!
The wallet can't be resized on Windows but if you use Linux you can resize the wallet to the entire screen if you desire (no idea why it's different depending of operating system).
The offers are removing 50 minutes before fixtures start to avoid exploit from an user who could watch the beginning of a match and decides to fund or not the smart-contract. It's a downside of using smart-contract but as advantage you are very safe when you use this bot, even if it went down you would be able to claim your gain. This delay could be reduced in future but for now I prefer to stay conservative, interests from takers and makers are both to be preserved if we want to make this platform to grow.
In play betting is not possible, professional bookmakers hire people to watch fixtures and constantly set odds in-play (they are helped with some algorithms of course). This bot is far from having enough volume to make such a thing profitable for makers and anyway smart-contracting would be too slow for that.
Thanks @papabyte for the response. Cool, I'll check it out on linux when I get the chance. I have a dual booted HD around somewhere
I understand where you are coming from. It does make sense to ensure both makers and takers are happy with prices they are offering and taking, and no one is taking an advantage of odds being online after the event had started. Being conservative at the start is probably a good idea. I understand about in play betting, long into the future it could be a possibility on a smart contract platform.
Thank you for your work on this betting bot, it is very cool to be able to use byteball like this.