British and Irish results, bet365 on the sports board, and South African racing

Issue #9

Eight days, and the headlines are at the top. British and Irish racing now has results, starting prices and form, not only prices. bet365 prices sports as well as racing, and British and Irish racing as well as Australian. South Africa is the third racing country on the panel. Form builds tomorrow's Australian card the evening before, your own affiliate links can be built into every racing response, and race results can be pushed to you by webhook. Below those: a daily report on which bookmaker had the best racing odds, versioned bulk datasets, error messages that say what would work, new client releases that save credits by default, and smaller changes to accounts and the site.

The headlines

• British and Irish results, with starting prices. /v1/racing/results carries British and Irish horse racing from 6 October and British and Irish greyhounds from 12 October. Horse races carry every starter's finishing position and starting price, as a decimal (sp) and as the fraction the UK quotes (sp_fraction); a runner that did not complete the race is labelled abnormal: did not finish once the result is final. Greyhound races carry the finishing order with each dog's trap and trainer. More than 570 British and Irish races had resulted by Tuesday night. Filter with country=GB,IE.
• Form for British and Irish racing. /v1/racing/form answers British and Irish thoroughbred races: the field from the UK racecards with draw, rider, trainer, weight and form figures, now with age and rating where the card prints them, and each runner's recent runs from the British and Irish results above. The new /v1/racing/greyhounds/field (3 credits) does the same for a greyhound race, Australian or British and Irish: every dog in the race with its recent runs, in one call.
• bet365 prices sports. Under the same bet365 key, on /v1/sports/{sport_key}/odds and the sports closing lines: NBA, NFL, college football, NHL, MLB, soccer, ATP and WTA tennis, rugby league, rugby union, cricket and AFL Women, pre-match, with head-to-head, line and total where bet365 shows them. In the 24 hours to Wednesday morning it priced 15 sport keys. bet365 also prices British and Irish racing from 13 October, alongside the Australian and New Zealand racing it has priced since 6 October, which is now read right up to the jump: on Tuesday 13 October bet365 held a price within two minutes of the jump on 201 of 205 Australian and New Zealand races.
• South African racing. country=ZA is priced by three South African bookmakers from 13 October, easybet_za, topbet_za and betway_za, alongside PointsBet, on next-to-go and best-odds. A race quoted by several books is one race with every book's price on it.
• Tomorrow's whole card, the evening before. /v1/racing/form builds an Australian thoroughbred field from Racing Australia's acceptances before any bookmaker has framed the race: every accepted runner with its recent runs, last10 and last_start_date, and any runner Racing Australia has already withdrawn marked as scratched. Name the race by venue, meeting_date and race_number; card_source: acceptances says where the field came from. /v1/racing/acceptances now carries horse_ref on every runner, the same identity form and horse history use, so the two join directly.
• Your own bookmaker links, built in. Store your affiliate or tracking link format once with PUT /v1/link-templates, for every bookmaker or per bookmaker, and every racing response that carries a bookmaker link then carries your version beside it: source_link on next-to-go, best-odds and markets, and betslip_win_link, betslip_place_link and betslip_link where a betslip link exists. On Plus and above; storing and reading templates costs no credits, and an account without templates gets the same responses as before.
• Results pushed to you. The race.result webhook event is live: every five minutes a sweep posts each race's result to your endpoint as it goes final, signed and delivered like race.odds_open, at most once per result. market.suspend is withdrawn, and subscribing to it answers 422 with the list of live events.

More on British and Irish racing

Asked by a tip-settlement marketplace and an analytics platform that need racing outside Australia

• Irish greyhound tracks are filed under IE whichever bookmaker quotes them, so country=IE returns Irish dogs from every book.
• /v1/racing/closing-lines and /v1/racing/price-paths take country=GB,IE as a list, as next-to-go does, and every closing line carries meeting_date_local, the race's date in the venue's own time zone. Key British and Irish day files on it rather than on the Sydney date.
• Christmas racing. A build page for the Christmas fixtures at Kempton, Chepstow, Newbury and Leopardstown, 26 to 29 December, with each course's closing-price archive measured on the page: puntersedge.online/uk-racing-odds-api/christmas-racing.
• Prices in your currency, approximately. The plan cards in the UK section and on /api/pricing show pounds, euros and New Zealand dollars beside the Australian dollar price, at the European Central Bank's reference rate. Plans are billed in Australian dollars and your card issuer's rate applies.

Form and horse history

Asked by a racing analysis platform that builds its card the night before

• runs_total now counts starts only on /v1/racing/form, /v1/racing/horses/runs, /v1/racing/greyhounds/field and /v1/racing/greyhounds/form. Before 13 October it also counted the scratchings we hold for the runner, so a horse with nine starts and two scratchings read 11. The scratchings are still there as held_rows_total, and nothing else in those responses moved. A backtest that used runs_total as a count of starts should be re-run.
• Horse history includes Australian country meetings that no bookmaker prices, read from Racing Australia's results, so a horse's runs at those meetings appear in /v1/racing/horses/runs and in form.
• Runner names follow Racing Australia on the form field, without a bookmaker's country suffix such as (Jpn), so a field matches the acceptances by name.
• PointsBet runners carry barrier, jockey or driver, trainer and form on next-to-go wherever PointsBet publishes them.
• /v1/racing/horses/form makes up to 30 fresh reads of Racing Australia's pages a minute for each key. Past that it answers 503 with Retry-After straight away rather than holding the request.

Sports

• Tennis matches join across bookmakers however a book writes a player's name, as an initial and surname, in full, or surname first, so each match is one event with every book's price on it. bet365's WNBA and college football fixtures join the panel's the same way.
• One price per bookmaker per side on the arbitrage endpoints: a book that lists the same match twice contributes one set of prices to /v1/arb/sports, never a mix of the two.

Results

Asked by a subscriber backtesting results against closing prices

• /v1/racing/results?date= returns the races that start on that Sydney calendar date, each race once, by the same rule as the closing-line archive's meeting_date_aet, so results and closing lines join on date for every country.

The archive and bulk data

• Which bookmaker had the best racing odds? puntersedge.online/bookmaker-report answers from the closing-line archive, updated daily: the best price by price range, each book's margin, and how sharp its prices were against the result. Three Colab notebooks, linked from /datasets, load the free dataset and work through which bookmaker is sharpest, closing-line value and late money.
• Versioned bulk datasets. Every bulk file carries schema_version, dataset_version and source_notes, and any change to a file already published is listed with its reason and row counts at the new /v1/bulk/restatements. A file whose contents have not changed keeps the same ETag from one build to the next.
• Closing-line rows are fully typed in the API reference as ClosingLineRow and gain three columns, appended last: duplicate_suspect and duplicate_of_race_id mark two race ids that look like the same race but could not be merged safely, and meeting_date_local is described above. A single bookmaker's copy of a race listed at a different start time is folded into the race that was run.
• Both coverage endpoints publish each bookmaker's closing-line rate and the gaps between races and results, races without a result and results without a race, each with its denominator: /v1/racing/closing-lines/coverage and /v1/racing/results/coverage.

Errors that say what would work

• A 404 points somewhere useful. On /v1/racing/price-history it names the venue's races that do have history on nearby days, or the venues with history that day, or the date the archive starts. On /v1/racing/markets it says whether the race id is unknown or the race has no stored market.
• A 422 for an unknown parameter suggests the one you probably meant (from to date, event_id to race_id). Dates are accepted as YYYYMMDD and YYYY/MM/DD as well as ISO, and categories such as thoroughbred, dogs and trots resolve to horse, greyhound and harness.
• A forward-horizon 403 on events and best-odds names the plan that reaches further, its price and the upgrade headers, like every other plan gate. A 429 names your plan as sold and links the rate-limit guide.
• Docs. /developers/rate-limits has a table of every credit, upgrade, billing and rate-limit header, and /developers/errors lists the 403s keys actually meet. period_start, next_reset_at and reset_at on /v1/usage are UTC, and /v1/health/stats says when it was measured, over what window, and what each figure counts.

Clients

Asked by a paying customer polling next-to-go

• Python client 0.4.0 and TypeScript client 1.3.0 send the ETag back by default, so an unchanged next-to-go board comes back as a 304 for 0 credits and the client hands back the board it already holds. pip install -U puntersedge or npm install puntersedge@latest.
• A 304 on next-to-go is answered from a small stored entry, so it comes back faster than a full board.

Your account

• Signing in takes your Gmail address with or without dots or a +tag, the same way signup stored it.
• A password reset signs that browser straight in, and the console's password panel says how to confirm it is you when it asks.
• Lost your key? The console's Issue & show my key button sorts it out yourself, and the welcome email now says so.
• Upgrading from Free starts your paid plan's full allowance from zero, and emails name your plan as sold: Standard, Business.

The site

• Which plan do I need? on /api/pricing also asks what the data is for and how much history you need, picks the cheapest plan that covers all three, explains why with the licence wording for that plan, and opens the buy dialog.
• Spring carnival pages for the Caulfield Cup, The Everest and the Cox Plate, which is at Flemington this year: what to build, and what that track's market did this spring, measured from the closing-line archive.
• Seven Australian bookmakers have their own page (Sportsbet, TAB, Ladbrokes, Neds, Unibet, PointsBet and Betr) with a live panel: its share of Australian and New Zealand races, how fresh its prices are, which sport keys it carries, and a live race. For example /sportsbet-odds-api.
• How the Australian odds and racing data APIs compare, on one page with every figure about another provider linked to its source and dated: puntersedge.online/compare.
• /status shows yesterday's response times for the busiest endpoints, measured at the API.
• Teams that want a contract or a trial on real work: /api/pilot describes a 30-day pilot, and the sales form takes procurement details.

Under the hood

• Every change to a plan, allowance, key or setting on an account is recorded with who made it and the before and after.
• Each payment event is acted on once, however many times it is delivered.
• The database is copied off the server every two minutes, encrypted, on top of a verified weekly full copy and the nightly backups, so a restore can come back to within minutes.
• Integrity checks run over the archive and results every night and alert us the moment one fails, for example a check that every final result keeps the placings it was published with.
• The API's libraries were updated to current releases, and the console session is accepted only from puntersedge.online's own pages.

Reply with anything you want on the list. Requests from people building on the API are the ones that get built first. Write to hamish@punters-edge.com or use the feature request form.