Unless you’ve been living under a stone for the last few years you’ll surely be aware of Betfair. They’re now the largest betting company in the world and their meteroic rise to fame has been nothing short of spectacular. If anyone had come to me 5 or 6 years ago and told me that a brand new company, with a start-up budget that wouldn’t have covered Ladbrokes’ staff lunch bill, would soar past the large bookmakers in terms of trade, I’d have told them they were crazy. But that’s exactly what happened.

Right from the very start Betfair was an innovative idea. They had a great team behind them and fairly quickly they bought out the only competitor in their field at the time, Flutter.com, so this left the way clear for them to carve their own unique niche in the marketplace. Their innovations didn’t stop there, because they’ve continued to roll out revolutionary new products and services - such as their own advanced poker client and zero edge casino - on a regular basis ever since.

One of the key reasons Betfair have succeeded where others have failed is that right from day one they’ve made it their purpose to provide freedom to the punter. I don’t just mean freedom in the odds you choose to back or lay at, but freedom in the way you bet. For centuries we were forced to bet on bookmakers terms, who were happy to fleece the public for every penny they could take, but Betfair changed everything by creating tools to help their customers WIN!

Here are a few of the inhouse tools Betfair have created to make the job easier for you:

1 – Betfair Firefox Extras

This is an add-on application for the Firefox web browser that allows you to add notes to runners as you’re monitoring the markets and your notes are then shown every time the runner is entered in future. It’s quite cool and very useful for keeping track of runners you want to watch for.

2 – Excel Tracking Worksheet

The name of this tool doesn’t really do it justice, because it’s much more than a simple tracking worksheet. If you know a bit about Excel you can use it to create your own sophisticated trading application that functions in a similar way to many commercial betting bots.

3 – Betfair Direct

This is a free desktop application that offers quick access to the betting markets, customizable shortcuts and betting with fewer clicks. Personally I prefer to use commercial products like Bet Angel Pro for my betting, but this is quite a neat tool if you don’t currently have that.

4 – Victor The Predictor

If you bet on soccer matches this excellent software will give you an insight into the true odds you should be backing or laying at based on the historical data of the participating teams. It uses the latest Machine Learning techniques with Neural Nets to come up with accurate predictions.

5 – Betfair Advantage Tool

This is my all-time favourite, but the problem is that it’s only for Australian customers. What they’ve done here is combine the Betfair markets with live odds from the AU TAB system and then they’ve included a fantastic Timeform-style form guide. Roll on the UK version!

You can keep up-to-date on the latest developments in the Betfair Labs section of their website and I’d recommend checking in from time to time, because there’s some good stuff in there that can make your betting experience a whole lot easier and (hopefully) more profitable.

The Betfair Developers Program

Something else Betfair have done that truly sets them apart from every other betting company in the world is start their own “Developers Program” where they actively encourage developers to build applications that interact with the Betfair website. This enables users to bet in ways that were never possible before and I can honestly say that it’s changed the way I bet for good.

Here are some of the most popular (and profitable) innovations they’ve released:

6 - Grey Horse Bot

This is THE software I simply can’t do without nowadays. It’s a fully automatic betting bot that comes packed with features for profitable betting on auto-pilot. You can set it up in the morning, leave it to run all day and check back later to see how much you’ve earned. It’s excellent!

7 - Value Horse Finder

VHF is a sophisticated software application that monitors the betting markets on Betfair and compares this with the odds on offer with the bookmakers to highlight when there are profitable discrepancies to be had. I’ve used this software since it was first released and I’ll tell you that I regularly make upwards of £100 a day with it, so this is another I’d highly recommend.

8 - Bet Angel Pro / Bet Trader

If you aspire to be a professional betting exchange trader I’d look no further than the applications above. The reason I’ve placed these together is because many people prefer one and many the other, but as you can download and try each of them for FREE I thought I’d let you decide.

9 - Bet-IE

Bet-IE is a horse racing dutching application with a big difference. Not only does this outstanding software enable you to calculate the stakes for your dutch bets and submit them with ease, but it also comes with a VERY cool live indicator that tells you exactly which horses you should bet on and when you should bet. Following this information alone is extremely profitable!

10 - Soccer Mystic

Imagine looking at a soccer match and knowing exactly what will happen to the odds, how they will move and where to place your trades before the match has started, or even in-play. This new software from the team at Bet Angel Pro enables you to model every soccer match with pinpoint accuracy and then structure your bets to force maximum profits out of the market.

Of course, this is only a small selection of the betting software that’s available to you nowadays, but what I’ve listed here are tools that I’ve used personally and they should give you a good idea of the diverse range of (largely automated) tasks you can now perform with the betting tools and software that have been created since the inception of Betfair’s developer program.

If this is a sign of the times ahead, I can’t wait to see what comes next

In case you didn’t know it yet, Bet Angel Pro is the daddy of all trading applications. If you’re really serious about making the most of the betting exchanges and you’re looking to give yourself the best chance of making money, this is one piece of software that delivers every time. It allows you to maximise the potential the betting exchanges offer to the fullest extent possible.

Whether you’re looking to scalp the market, catch larger (more profitable) trading swings, take speculative positions, be the bookmaker, dutch the market, create your own trading strategies, or even build a fully automated trading bot, Bet Angel Pro can do it for you with ease.

This is what others have said about it….

“I have now stumbled across the ‘Rolls Royce’ in trading programs. The program is Bet Angel… It has absolutely everything you could think of to assist anyone in trading the markets, from a novice to a pro.”

“With so many bots & methods for using the exchanges these days it can be a problem to find what is best for your needs. Bet Angel, by some miracle, manages to cover nearly every possible angle you may need to cover… Customer support is excellent, and the software is extremely well priced. This is the bot I use the most, and I do not see that changing any time soon…. Just buy it!”

“I am very impressed with your approach to always trying to improve the software and I feel the changes are made with thought as opposed to just a pointless visual change. I don’t know much about the people behind Bet Angel Pro but it feels as if it is people who trade or at least understand what people want. Too many companies just try to cash in with poor products.”

“I took your offer of a trial for Bet Angel Pro, and WOW. This is a traders dream come true, so many features, and all of them so useful in many different situations. You have me as a lifetime member, I dont even have to wait for the 20 day trial to finish, this is the one for me! Thank you so much for your superb efforts in making Bet Angel Pro the very best tool a trader could ever wish for, I look forward to a long and very fruitful relationship. I would recommend Bet Angel Pro to anyone who is serious about trading”

And NOW you can try it FREE!

Yep, you heard that right. This afternoon I came across a secret, unadvertised, page on the Bet Angel website that allows you to download the full “professional” version of the software and use it for the next 7 days for free. I’ve never seen this advertised before and it’s almost impossible to find it on their website, but I did find it and I’ll happily share it with you…

Download Bet Angel Professional For FREE!

I don’t know how long this offer will be available and the normal trial version of the software would cost you £20 for 20 days use, so I’d grab this fully-functional free version while you can!

This has to be one of the most widely recognised betting products on the market and is a nigh on essential bit of kit to anyone using Betfair on a regular basis – especially those considering venturing into trading. As the name suggests, it is the basic version of a much more advanced piece of software, kind of like its little brother.

To anyone considering buying the full version with all its flashing lights and jingly bells, I would heartily recommend a few weeks using the basic version and acquainting yourself with it and its basic features before venturing onto the ‘full fat’ version.

I tend to be one of those people who will be doing a million things at once and realise at the very last second that I was planning to stick a bet on in a particular race. Now, if I go to Betfair, I’m gonna have to faff around clicking various buttons here and there before getting my bet matched, and wobetide I have the audacity to try and place that bet just as the market goes ‘in play’!

So, nowadays, my weapon of choice is Bet Angel Basic with its simplistic one click betting and quick refreshes (as low as one second, although I believe the full version refreshes at as much as 1/100th of a sec – feel free to correct me for I may be wrong) to place most of my bets.

It is also a must have for the novice trader. There is an inbuilt ‘momentum indicator’ to help you follow the weight of the money and try to make informed decisions on trades. And to help spread your profit over all runners after a successful trade it has a ‘green up’ function that is as simple as a single mouse click.

So to anyone who has ever missed getting that bet on ‘in play’ or just before, and indeed to the would be trader, I recommend you head on over to the Bet Angel website and get your hands on a free copy.