When you first start out betting it is unlikely you would consider using a betting bot – you are focusing on learning the ropes. Eventually, if you have managed to consistently make money, you will need to think about scalability and look to maximize profits at every turn. Enter the world of betting bots. But are betting bots legal?
Betting bots come in all shapes and sizes, but they all have one thing in common, they are perfectly legal. In the realm of sports betting and horse racing, using betting bots is frowned upon by most corporate bookmakers. Online poker sites consider the use of bots to be cheating.
Sharp bettors that have found a slight edge over the rest of the competition will need to turnover a significant volume of bets into to realize reasonable profits. This situation is not dissimilar to the algorithmic trading conducted by investment banks and hedge funds.
The use of bots to automate betting makes a lot of sense – who wants to sit there all-day placing hundreds of bets individually? I would much rather turn a bot on and kick my feet up while it does the heaving lifting for me.
Web-Scraping Betting Odds
In sports betting, any well-designed betting system is going to require one thing above all else…data! Arguably, the most important piece of that data puzzle to solve will be obtaining bookmaker odds.
A bettor with a little bit of Python programming knowledge combined with some familiarity with the Beautiful Soup library can create their own bot to scrape odds from a bookmaker’s site. Obviously though, this is not going to be for everyone.
There are also various companies (for example: https://betsapi.com/ and https://the-odds-api.com/) selling odds data they’ve compiled from their own army of web-scraping bots. This is certainly simpler than building your own, but these services can be quite expensive.
Just by being a little bit smart about it (using a VPN), there will be no way for either of these options will be directly linked to your betting accounts, so there is no risk of bookmakers restricting your accounts for scraping their odds.
However, if you have built your own odds gathering bots, and you break certain web-scraping “ethics”, you may find your bots blocked by anti-scraping software or your server IP address(es) blocked or banned. Scraping odds multiple times per minute will be in instant red-flag and has the potential to look like a DDoS attack, which may have legal ramifications depending on where you live.
Some bookmakers (Pinnacle) and betting exchanges (Betfair, BetDaq & Smarkets) offer APIs to allow bettors to gather the odds data they need through dedicated infrastructure. This makes the data easier to access for the bettor and ensures the bookmaker/exchange website is not over-run with web-scrapers. Win-win!
Bots That Place Bets With Bookmakers
Once you’ve got a system in place to identify the bets you want to place, deploying a bot to place the bets with bookmakers will enable you to take advantage of more opportunities and scale up your earnings. The complication here is that you will have to be logged into your bookmaker accounts in order to place the bets.
The bookmakers will be able to track how frequently you are placing bets. If your betting bot is placing bets at an inhuman pace, it is highly likely your account will be flagged for review and eventually your betting stakes will be restricted. At this point, you will most likely have broken a bunch of the Terms & Conditions the bookmaker has in place when using a betting account with them.
It seems a little bit silly to think a bookmaker’s business is to take bets and yet they would restrict your account for placing more bets with them. But let us look at it objectively for a minute. From their perspective, if you have gone to the effort of building a bot to automate your betting strategy, you are probably onto something. The bookmaker will see your betting activity as a risk that they could lose money, even if they are not sure what you are up to.
There is also an added complication with using bots to place bets on websites. For the bot to function effectively, it will first need to scrape the website for the real-time odds and event information before it can place the bet. The web-scraping activity itself will cause strain on the website depending on how many bets per minute you are trying to place.
If your betting bot crashes a bookmaker’s website, they will have a lot more to worry about than just the losses they could face on your account. The solution to this is to place bets via APIs.
Betting Bots That Use APIs To Place Bets
Totes, sharp bookmakers, and betting exchanges offer APIs which bettors can use to place high frequency bets. In fact, betting exchanges actively promote the use of betting bots. When you head over to the Betfair App Directory, they have a category specifically dedicated to Automated Betting.
Most of these companies over software developer kits (SDKs) and developer support/forums for their APIs. Obtaining an API key is normally a simple application process, however there is often a one-off fee for access.
Automation of a strategy can be a marvellous thing. Watching your bot work for you can almost be hypnotic. But the reality is that the bot executing bets for you is the simple part. The hundreds of hours of research, monitoring and adjustments to your betting strategy is where the hard work is really done.