Here comes the weekend... But why do Saturday's traditionally offer such poor value for the punter? A few years ago I spawned a paranoid thought that it was set up this way as - no doubt - most of the betting on the horses goes on at the weekend. In any event both the Fancy Fillies (www.betfayre.co.uk) and - my own - Philosoper's stone system have thrown up two low-risk trades for this afternoon, one to lay and one to back. I like the automated nature of all of this.

Do you "bot"? There are a number of trading bots on the market at the moment (including of course our original Bismarx bot) and, if you do, do you find the bot helps your betting or hinders it? There's a lot a bot can do, but only if you tell it to. Come to that, how many traders/scalpers are there out there? My own view is that you need a pretty heftly bank to scap often miniscule margins off Betfair, but I know at least a handful of people who do this for a living.

When the racing stops, where do other fruitful betting opportunities lie?

I'll be looking at a number of products this weekend which have been developed to exploit opportunities in the new medium of Betfair games and "virtual" sports betting. One of these (following virtual soccer) looks particularly interesting and I will report back as soon as I've had a chance to test it out thoroughly.

On the other hand, most of the casino scalping system's I've looked at are none too clever. The idea of playing thousands of rounds of mind-numbingly tedious BlackJack or Roulette just to scoop some free casino chips does not personally appeal at all. And, knowing the random nature at least of the latter, I also suspect many of these systems could wipe you out as quickly as they could make any money. If I'm wrong, perhaps someone will let me know?

Conversely, playing sit-and-go tournaments on poker sites can yield profitable results. You don't need to be a wizard at odds either, since plenty of programs such as Texas Calculatem will do all the hard work for you. Programs such as this aren't joing to turn you into the next WSOP superstar but they can be very lucrative in low-limit S&G's. I seem to cash at least two thirds of the time, and I'm no poker expert believe me. Let me know if you use any poker programs and how you get on with them.