LAY BACK WITH BETFAIR: AI AND API WITH DAVID PFUNDT
Who is David Pfundt?
A chance afternoon with a few mates set the wheels in motion for David Pfundt, a data specialist who hails from a farm near Beaconsfield in Tasmania.
With a background in computing and data analytics, Pfundt described himself as no more than a casual racing fan.
“My uncle did train some slow horses in Tasmania, but as a kid I probably had only a recreational interest in it,” Pfundt said.
“I did my degree in Tasmania which was a Bachelor of Computing.”
“I started with a small consulting company in Launceston.”
“I spent a few months there and applied for a job at Telstra and managed to talk my way into it,”
Cox Plate day 2015 will always be remembered as a time when Winx started arguably the most incredible run in the history of the sport, with the first of four wins in the premier weight for age race. But the day holds even more significance for Pfundt.
“Previously I followed Northerly and Sunline and I knew the Melbourne cup winners, but that was about it.”
“It wasn’t until 2015 when my mates invited me to the pub for a few bets. They had to drag me there as I wasn’t really interested.”
“It was Cox Plate day and we found a few winners and that was it for me. It wasn’t a huge day but it got the cogs going in my head.”
“I probably was more interested in the fact you could play the game and that was enjoyable. A few months later I realised you have to work to be successful at it, so I started thinking ‘where’s the data’ I can use.”
What is Form King?
“Form king is a cloud based database and platform. It’s more than just a database. Everything is positioned for me to be able to service business to consumer clients,” Pfundt said.
“It was a calling maybe, I don’t know. In the early days when I was spending a lot of time on it and not selling anything it was really just an academic exercise.”
“But around 2020 when I started playing with sectional data and track speed that people might actually want to use.”
“I thought those technical factors and the data edge I had in my previous life made this quite unique.”
What is an API?
“So an API is a means of getting data between two computer platforms without a human having to be involved.
“So if you go to your bank website for example, and you want to see your balance, that web page has gone to an API at the bank, got your balance and served it back up for you.”
How does API work with punting?
“Because data is so prevalent in racing and punting, and because it’s fast flowing and it’s changing all the time with scratchings, odds updates etc, that means that humans won’t always be there to refresh a web page or update quickly.
“So an API is a great way for getting updates all the time, so the exchange at Betfair is an example.
“In terms of modelling, You’ve got a bunch of live data coming in, which could be form, it could be performance data and it could even be things like yard analysis coming live from the track.
“That would all get fed into their the model at various layers, and IT gets weighted accordingly based on the research and training that you’ve done.
“The prevalence of AI in every day life, no matter what job you do, if you scroll through social media AI is everywhere at the moment and you’ve got to embrace it.
What is AI coding?
“You’ve got to have the data. You’ve got to be able to source it clean it and get it in the right format and then you’ve got to be able to process your rules and then execute them on an API like the Betfair exchange.
“So with AI these these coding models are just fantastic now, They’re far better coders than someone like me and i’ve got 20 years experience in the industry. That’s a hard thing to say, but they are they’re just amazing.
“I use them to do nearly all of my coding now and it’s getting to the point where I don’t review its output, I’ve trained it so well, and the latest flagship models are just so good.
“AI coding assist can help people that don’t have technical skills. You can even say to it. Hey, i’m not a coder. I don’t understand code.
“Don’t show me code. Just build me something, here are my racing rules. Here’s the Form King API, Here’s the Betfair API, hook it all together and explain it to me in layman’s terms.
“The tech hurdle is gone now, so my biggest advice would be just to put your thoughts down and find out what it can do and you might be surprised you might go in with a really simple goal of just filtering upcoming races or upcoming runners in horse races that match two simple criteria that you’d like to look for, and you might just tell it to give you a link to the form guide in Form king.
“Suddenly you’ve discovered a short list or a laundry list of bets that you might potentially investigate.
“The thing about lay betting I was thinking about this earlier that I mean I review 50 races a week 50 meetings a week and as i’m doing that I sort of always have to have a look at how my ratings went. I’m always seeing these back and lay angles that I want to implement myself, like i’ve got this model in my brain that I want to put into code nd I haven’t had the time to do it and now AI is helping on my modelling journey.
What is the future of betting and trading through AI and API?
“If you look back at the history of betting, I mean newspaper form guides and all those sorts of things, it’s amazing back in the day when video replays became accessible and all the big syndicates had libraries of cassettes and that was an edge.
“I mean you talk to professional punters from the 80s and 90s and they say we used to get vhs tapes mailed to us.
“Yeah, and that was our edge, and then that’s long gone and now trials are so well picked over that that edge is probably gone at the moment as well.
“I think edges will appear and disappear and so I think enough money in one spot is going to create an edge somewhere else. I think that the future of form is going to be just a very data rich environment where, a lot of people will have access to similar data and it’s going to be about how can I think outside the square using similar data to other people and get an edge that way.
