About Us

Graphics / Design: Jason Canobie & Marc Hinse

Original Game Concept: Salvatore Difficile

Database Design: Jason Canobie, Pedro Silva Mendes & Jimmy Harlindong

Additional Programming Assistance: Jimmy Harlindong, Vladimir Alexandrov & Stefan Voggenreither

And a Special Thanks To: All the alpha & beta testers and other contributors not listed above

Game History:The Elite Betting Game is the evolution of a forum based tipping competition to predict the outcome of the premier class of the former F1 Real Manager game (F1REM) which was part of the F1 Portal Website back in the early 2000s
The object of the game was to predict the outcome of each of the G1 Races which occurred twice weekly in those early days. The game was created to be a fun competitive game between the managers of the F1REM game, and to fill some time during the non race days of the game. The Managers simpily posted in the forum who they thought the top 8 of the race would be, and the managers would be given points for how many they correctly guessed for each race. It became quite popular by the end of Season 4 & 5 of F1REM before the game became too difficult for the original creator Salvatore Difficile to manage with the game attracting almost 30 - 40 bets per race.
In Season 5 & 6 of F1REM the G1 Betting Game, as it was called back then was a bit of an unmanaged mess, where it was anyones guess as to if someone would work out the results for each race so was starting to loose some of the support it had received in the previous few seasons, so in mid Season 6 I took over the management of the game in the forums as I had become a bit annoyed at the lack of results and sometimes waiting several days for a single race to be tallied and reported in the forum.
The game ran quite well under my management for the next 12 months but was beginning to attract in excess of 70 bets per race, so the need for an automated approach to managing the game was looked into and was decided the best solution was a web based form to input bets into an online database and then to script the result tallying process to occur automatically at a set time following the race.
Pedro Silva Mendes who was the original creator and F1 Portal admin at the time was fantastic in providing the original database concept who also ran a similar tipping game on his site for Formula 1 races. I had at the time some interest in database driven websites and had taught myself how to code in PHP and MySQL and used this as an oppertunity to put some of the theory into practice.
Testing of the new game began in Season 12 as the Alpha test season and Season 13 to be the Beta Test Season of the game, with a launch set for Season 14. The game was quite stable immediately and the only question would be the End of Season Script to reset the game for the new season which by far was the biggest process in the game. To my suprise there was only a few small typo with no major effect on the script, which was ammended and by the tie Race 1 of Season 13 came around we were ready for the launch in 2 months time for Season 14.
Season 14 of F1REM was announced during the break as the final Season of F1REM by admin Pedro Silva Mendes which was a huge suprise by all players of the site, the game had outgrown its server and the cost of running the game and the time needed to run it was a major factor in Pedro putting the game into an early retirement. Due to this the game didnt end up launching for that season, eventually the game came to a halt mid season with no contact with the admin.
After a short break the game had a sudden influx of suspicous Spanish managers appeared along side a new Catalan politically motivated admin Sergi Sanchez took over the game, this brought alot of unrest in the game and it almost immediately lost much of its original player base due to the sudden sucess of Catalan managers and speculation they were receiving help from the admin of the game as well as speculation the accounts were all managed by the same person.Being Australian and not used to the ongoing Catalonian quest to become a country in its own right felt like it was becoming too politically motivated so I made the decision to Leave F1 Portal in late 2004.
After small break, I decided I needed something to fill the void during the Christmas period of 2004 so decided to give another management game a go called F1-Time, After a few seasons of playing and trying to get the hang of a much more difficult game to play and got a general feeling of a good community behind it i asked the game admin of F1-Time about running the Betting Game based on their highest ranked group, which after a few emails exchanged I ended up using my ready to go game as a new side game for F1-Time under the name of Class 1 Betting Game
Six seasons were played with the game improving greatly with every new season as changes were made to improve the usability of the website, but just as it got going and started to attract a decent amount of players F1-Time grinded to a halt between new versions of the game and stayed that way for a whole yearIn late 2005 I was invited to be a tester in the final test season of a new F1 management game called Grand Prix Racing Online (GPRO) which was in the process of being developed by a team of former F1REM Managers, some of which were some of my former teammates in F1REM and after not too long found myself redeveloping the Betting Game for the third time this time for GPRO.
Within a few races I could already see the massive potential of the new game which had a good mix of the old F1REM game as well as some new ideas from classic F1 management games, due to the difference in the games it took quite a bit longer to adapt the betting game to GPRO but was completed in March 2006.The game in the early seasons was run with a separate login system which made it difficult to attract new players, with only around 50 players for each of those seasons, so after some discussions with GPRO Administrator Steffan Voggenreither we came up with a system that allowed users to login to the Elite Betting Game using a simple secure link and authorisation code being passed between the sites to allow login data to be passed from GPRO to the Elite Betting Game without direct access to the GPRO Database.
The change to the login system alone doubled the amount of players almost overnight and the game continues to service the community of GPRO free of charge even 17 years later in 2023.
The game has remained mostly unchanged now for 17 years, with the only changes being small changes and and bug fixes brought about by updates on the server side to keep the game running on its current platform. In July 2023 it was decided to finally do a major upgrade of the game to bring the game compatibility up to the latest versions of PHP and MySQL, but due to the wholesale changes needed it was decided that a re-write of all code was the best choice for a faster, more responsive game using less resources given the advances and new abilities of the programming language.
The first objective of the new version of the game is updating the game to the new code base, while at the same time streamline everything in the back end, fix the known graphic glitches in a new design bringing the game upto the current Web Deveolopement Standards.
Enjoy The Game, and if you have any suggestions or improvements please dont hesitate in letting me know via email, which is available from my profile page on GPRO.

Jason Canobie
Elite Betting Game Admin
Updated 14th July 2023