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ArbAlarm Trial

Posted by Aegist on July 24th, 2006

This is actually the second trial of ArbAlarm I have had access to. Since I have been trading with a friend this whole time he also took a trial out of ArbAlarm shortly after I took out my previous one and we are now exploring ArbAlarm to see hwo it works and how good it is etc. Obviously I should have written some sort of review after the first trial like I do with all of the other programs I trial, however I was unfortunately busy that week and didn’t give the time to it that I could see it needed. With all new programs they have their own quirks which you need to learn and figure out yourself before you can accurately explain to others how it works, and at first impression ArbAlarm has a lot of its own individual quirks which I am still trying to sort my way through now. This is why i decided to wait before I wrote anything on ArbAlarm… i have found it very difficult to figure out. Most of the other programs seemed really quite obvious to me when I looked. OddsAndBets you had to email them to set your filters which was not optimal, but easy nonetheless. SportsPunter made it a little difficult to find the page where you set your bookmaker filters, but when you found it, it was simple. ArbAlarm on the other hand is software based (not website based like OddsAndBets and SportsPunter) and has a preference screen which allows you to set some settings, but it doesn’t allow you to filter bookmakers there. In order to set your bookmaker filters (amongst others) you need to go to the website. This in itself took me a while to realise that there was even a website component to the program, but now that I know about it, I obviously have much greater control over it, and so can start fine tuning it to meet my personal needs.

www.sportsarbitrageguide.com/picts/arbalarmpreferences.jpg

www.sportsarbitrageguide.com/picts/arbalarmfilter.jpg

My very first impression of ArbAlarm was quite profound. The first time I loaded it, it found a 1.11% tennis arb at two of my bookmakers. I had SureBetPro running at the same time and SBP hadn’t found this arb, so I had to wonder whether it was a mistake. I went to the two bookmakers and there it was, obvious as day.. a tidy 1.11% arb as reported. I was able to place the bets and even had a lot of time to spare before the arb eventually expired. SBP never reported the arb once even though it was at two of the SBP bookmakers which I regularly use through SBP and even though it was for an obvious major tennis tournament. I have no idea why that happened, but it would be a fair assumption to say that this probably isn’t a one off unfortunately. However it is difficult if not impossible to find out which arb alert services are blatently missing arbs which they theoretically should be finding without always running them all and constantly cross comparing them…which is more effort than it sounds, and completely a waste of time.
One problem I have had with ArbAlarm though which will be greatly alleviated by having my bookmaker filter on, but which I still believe to be a sub-optimal setup is how ArbAlarm displays its arbs. There are 3 screens. The first screen shows that you have an arb, tells you the sport and a few other tidbits of information which i really don’t notice. You MUST use this screen to select the arb you want to look at. Once you select the arb, the second screen comes alive and shows you what two or three bookmakers are involved in that arb you have selected as well as showing the complete list of all other bookmakers which have that same arb in one variation or another. The third screen then also shows you the more relevent details such as what the odds are, how much to place on either side, the returns, the game etc. See how ArbAlarm look in the image below:

www.sportsarbitrageguide.com/picts/arbalarm02.jpg

If you have an arb which has many permutations, it will show every permutation of that arb in the first pane, and then all of the permutations of it in the second pane too. What this means is that if you have a tennis arb with 30 permutations, and a tennis arb with 1 permutation at the same time, then you ahve no way of identifying the 1 arb amongst the 30 in the first pane. If you click on one of the 30 then you will see in the second pane that there are heaps of permutations and probably assume that everyhing in the first window is all from the one arbs. I suspect many arbs will be missed in this way. As said above though, this will be greatly alleviated by simply employing bookmaker filters which will for the average arber remove most of the 30 permutations anyway. I just wish I didn’t have to actively click on the arb to find out what bookmaker it is with and all of the other important information.

I am also think it has no way of differentiating old arbs from new arbs, and it seems like it will call arbs expired one refresh, then bring them back as new the next, only to call them expired the following and repeat this for an indetermined period of time. The purge expired button therefore loses its function when this happens.

Shane

And finally, one last gripe I have with ArbAlarm in these opening stages of my experimentation: There is no ‘status’ bar or indication that the software is working. While this isn’t necesasary when there is a constant stream of arbs coming through, when I turn on my stringent filters I end up with an ArbAlarm sitting there loking rather lifeless. Is it looking for arbs, or have I crashed it? I’m not sureyet, and there is no indicator to let me know. SBP removes this problem several ways: It has a screen which updates on every refresh and tells you how many arbs it has found in total, and how many of those arbs you are viewing (through your filters). So with stringent filters on, you can still see that the program is doing something even if you see no arbs. If SBP finds zero arbs, it says that is has found 0 arbs. It even has an icon start flashing which says “Software working normally”.  But with arb alarm I turned my filters on, and it could have found 20,000 arbs, none of which are at my bookmakers, and all I would see is this:

www.sportsarbitrageguide.com/picts/arbalarm03.jpg

Which I am not sure is entirely different to how it would look if it was having trouble connecting to the server, or how it would look if it froze, or any other number of potential problems. It is identical to how it looks while it is connecting at startup, and that is one reason why this gets to me…I never know if it has connected at startup or not.

I’ll continue

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