What can be done via robotics and automation? Perhaps the better question to ask is what can’t be done via robotics and automation?
It can clean your house. It can clean your swimming pool. It can fill up your coffee pot. Why, it can even fill up your bank account. Automated sports betting software isn’t just a thing, it’s a fact of life for the serious player.
Just as the online betting sites continue to improve the quality of their product through technology, the professional bettors – often referred to in the game as the smart money – are also advancing their opportunities for winning by utilizing the wonderful world of automation and bots.
Sharp sports betting pros are taking advantage of today’s far-reaching technological advancements to create and develop automated sports betting software.
These programs enable bettors to delve deeper into the analytics of wagering, to get their bets down with more pace and increased effectiveness.
Fighting fire with fire
Every leading online sports betting site is implementing cutting-edge technology to enable them to establish odds both at a faster pace and more significantly in terms of their business plan, with finely-tuned accuracy.
These betting sites aren’t in the business of losing money, and if you look around at the proliferation of online betting operations over the past 20 years, clearly, they aren’t money-losing propositions.
The oddsmakers at these betting companies are working with the latest technological advances in order to set the odds on each day’s sporting events. Detailed analytics and algorithms dive deep into every match on the calendar. No betting line is set frivolously.
When establishing a betting line, a gambling site will place significant emphasis on several factors that come under scrutiny when assessing an upcoming game. Power rankings, a detailed statistical analysis of each team’s strengths and weaknesses, play a key role.
A team’s margin of victory and strength of schedule will be taken into consideration. Other factors that are assessed include home-field advantage, record in head-to-head meetings, injuries, weather conditions, and scheduling.
A team playing for the second game in as many nights, or performing in a day game following a night game, are also part of the equation.
Each specific sport will provide specific elements that must be considered. A football team with a defensive line that delivers persistent pressure on the quarterback that is facing an opponent with a poor offensive line would play into the betting odds assessment.
Starting pitchers will be the primary aspect looked at in establishing baseball odds and goaltending would be similarly emphasized in hockey.
All of these factors are assessed, but ultimately, the numbers are crunched via a combination of advanced mathematical equations, detailed scientific formulas and betting-specific computer algorithms will determine the odds.
While this is generally more than enough data to come up with odds that will beat the vast majority of public bettors, when it comes to people who make their living at sports betting, they’re ready to fight fire with fire.
They’ll be doing their own data analysis via their own system of algorithms and equations to determine where these odds can be beaten.
A three-pronged approach
When it comes to successful automated betting, there are three factors that are vital to any success.
Firstly, it’s about finding bets that offer value. Secondly, it’s being able to get the wager placed quickly, before the betting site can adjust the odds. And the third part of the equation is to ensure that the automated program makes as few mistakes as possible.
The automated software must quickly identify those value bets. If a sports betting site has established odds that are off a bit – let’s say for example, a star player was hurt at that day’s practice, or a major trade went down and the site hasn’t adjusted its odds accordingly – for the bettor, it’s all about the ability to act fast.
It won’t take a site long to refine that betting line, or take it down until new odds can be established. A player with an automated betting system will be informed of and alerted to the opportunity much more rapidly than they would be by the naked eye. Thus, they can get the bet down at the more favorable odds before the adjustment is made.
This process is a combination of big data, real-time analytics, finding the opportunity and then artificial intelligence getting the bet down at the correct time.
Finally, machine learning helps the program evolve by identifying errors and then using the combination of past and present information to ensure better decisions are reached in future transactions.
The newest rage in sports betting is live or in-play wagering. These are bets that occur in the midst of a game that’s being played.
It could be which hockey team will score the next goal, which baseball team will get the next hit, or which soccer team will be awarded the next corner kick.
These are bets that have to be made in rapid-fire fashion. By developing an automated sports betting bot, a player can ensure that they’ll never be shut out of a wager.
The betfair bot
British bookmaker Betfair has gone one step further in this process. They offer their players a design program in order to aid them in the creation of their own betting bot.
Betfair’s data science team has created a dedicated Betfair page on GitHub. The page is continuously updated with new information.
Among the details offered at this site are data and third party betting tools. These are an excellent method for building models and back testing strategies.
There’s also instructions on how to automate your betting with ratings, a library of resources to help players develop and monitor their automation and data journeys, and API guides that assist in polling odds and making live transactions.
For example, the Betfair API can be used to get current exchange data, create bets, check your account balance and is an integral component in creating an automated betting strategy on the Betfair exchange.
There are also predictive models covering several major sports, including the FIFA World Cup and Rugby World Cup.
