How I Built a Sports Betting Bot | Arbitrage Betting Explained

[00:03] arbitrage betting two million views i thought to myself wow this is a super science degree why don't i try combine the two and so

[00:15] here we are today if you don't know what arbitrage wedding is it's a way to make risk-free with little asterisks match let me give you a short explanation

[00:29] game team one is playing team two and there are two outcomes win or lose this is what it might look like on a sports betting site bet 100 on either of these teams and

[00:43] this is the expected payout the probability of a team winning is the probability of a team winning is given by 1 divided by the odds so in the above case 1 over 1.22 means that our favorite the cabs have a supposed 82

[00:57] percent chance of winning whilst the pistons have a 24 chance of winning unlike a coin toss which you can pretty confidently assign a 1.5 odds to each outcome determining the odds for real sports matches with unknown factors and

[01:10] variables is much more difficult looking at our previous example the total probability for our match on lab brokes sums up to 106 percent more than 100 this means that you're guaranteed to lose money if you bet on both sides

[01:26] but when the odds provided by the bookmakers differ enough to favor us that is when they sum up to less than one an arbitrage opportunity arises in this example we've guaranteed

[01:40] ourselves three percent profit by betting on both sides here we divvy up the bet according to our odds so regardless of the outcome we get the same payout now it might not seem like much but over

[01:52] numerous bets it does add up now you might be thinking hmm this sounds too good to be true how do arbitrage opportunities even that's a good question and well there are a combination of reasons the main

[02:07] one being that bookmakers just aren't perfect determining odds is difficult people make mistakes and bookies want to stay competitive with other bookies with that being said there are usually more frequent and larger arbitrage

[02:21] opportunities in smaller and more obscure tournaments sports because it's harder to predict who might win plus there are less people betting to sort of balance the scale and iron out any inaccuracies well the presence

[02:35] of arbitrage better sort of brings the odds across the bookmakers to some equilibrium because well if there was a life discrepancy then people would jump in to close that gap and make profit well i guess the other way around like

[02:48] make profit and close that gap as a as a byproduct okay so now that we know what arbitrage betting is let's get on to what i built it's quite simple in fact it's not really a bot since i still have to

[03:01] manually bet but it does make life easier and for a better youtube title so what i need first well to find an arbitrage opportunity union have the best odds there are no shortage of bookies but these were the main ones i

[03:15] looked at and really it was only the ones highlighted in green which i found so let's go ahead and collect all the odds from the different bookmakers now to do this manually would be an absolute nightmare i'd have to continually switch

[03:29] between tabs wait for the odds to load and then manually record and figure out what the best bookies are so the first step is obviously just automate and scrape the data i can't directly scrape the site since

[03:43] it's not static and actually takes time to load instead i use selenium which is a tool that automates web browsers i got selenium to mock open this site load and then look through rows and elements to get the relevant data i use

[04:00] the headless version which does the exact same thing without the gui or graphical user interface so it's a bit more lightweight when running continuously after scraping and finding the best odds

[04:12] tabulate great hmm well not really it's not that helpful to always be watching instead

[04:25] why don't i notify myself when an art opportunity does show up sent an email whenever an app opportunity appeared awesome over here you can see a massive 14

[04:40] arbitrage opportunity now that's quite rare and more often than not you'll find that the rbops are more or less between one to three percent i also wanted to run this 24 7 but didn't want to keep my laptop on

[04:53] permanently ah thank you cloud computing i set up an aws ec2 instance to run the script 24 7. essentially printing or borrowing a server computer that's always on

[05:09] now we just sit back and let the money flow in fact i made a ton of mistakes along the way like when early on when i thought i

[05:23] opportunity except that it was because the same two teams were playing two matches on different days and i bet it on opposing days i don't know how i did that yeah a bunch of free money i made was from bonus fits

[05:38] will often give you an initial promotion or they'll match your first deposit up to 250 bucks if you sign up to a lot of bookies that could easily mean over 1 000 in bonus bets if you have good odds and use your

[05:53] bonus bet on the other dog then you can easily guarantee that 1k in bonus bets turns into at least 600 in cold hard dollar dues nothing like hard earned money in fact i was super surprised when

[06:09] ladbrokes kept contacting me offering me bonus bit promotions long after i had forgotten about it and you know i won't say no to free money something i could have done was to automate the complete betting process so

[06:22] that's actually betting on the games and depositing money but i thought that this was a bit risky especially since the bot would sometimes screw up the odds because of again like i said different days and the other risk

[06:36] bets could potentially be cancelled in fact this happened once when i had great odds i bet it on two different matches and then on one of the bookies it actually prevented me from from getting those same odds because i think

[06:49] it was a system error because the bets the odds provided were just too good to be true um so i bet on you know one side already and bookkee um it was attracted to them i have this sort of

[07:04] exposed side on one bookie and so yeah that isn't great the other thing that's difficult is if the odds are extremely skewed let's say like you know one to ten um on one of the sides i'd have to bet like an insane amount to

[07:19] i'd have to bet like an insane amount to counteract uh the other odds and being able to deposit that much money automatically um i thought was a bit too risky and something i didn't want to do now if you're familiar with sports

[07:31] sports betting software out there already so why bother what's the point of all this and well you're right there is sports arbitrage software out there that collates odds

[07:44] bet on but it costs money you know it's not cheap it's pretty damn ugly and well you can't just add and remove what you want slash don't want plus i thought making this would be quite fun

[07:58] which it was and oh yeah arbitrage betting is risk-free with an asterisk because there is risk and you can get screwed over um like i mentioned before if your bet is either cancelled by bookie or attracted then you're left

[08:11] on the other bookkee which is better i'm usually concerned just a bit on the opposing side with odds that aren't great so you're not losing the entire bet you just might be you know down a couple bucks or

[08:24] depending on how much you've been so it's not horrible it just means that you taken advantage of the app opportunity because it's disappeared oops by the way the arb software is currently

[08:37] local and only with me but if you're interested and want to use it do let me know and i will try and spend some time uploading and deploying it it's currently only showing three

[08:49] two player sports just because they were the easiest to scrape hope you enjoyed it's not something i usually make and if you want to see more of this let me know you want to see more of this let me know down below