Some people are great believers in technology and certainly it has helped enormously in solving many problems. It is not surprising then that some have turned to modern computer technology to help them with betting.
Betting software has been around in some form for a while now and there is a bewildering choice of several different types available to help the bettor. Some are tools for betting calculations, some are for keeping track of bets placed, while others will actually interact with a betting exchange to give you better performance with quicker updating of odds plus other useful features. Then there are also some sophisticated automated types of software termed betting bots or just bots which will actually place bets for you.
We will have a brief look at some of these various kinds of software...
Dutching is a term which involves betting on more than one contender in a sporting event and splitting your total stake proportionally depending on the various odds on offer. Most people choose to have the same profit from a successful bet whichever of the chosen outcomes wins but you can adjust the proportions to vary the amount won if you think one outcome is the most likely of the two or three chosen. A dutching calculator can usually be set up to make these kind of calculations very easily and quickly so can be useful for horse racing betting in particular where quite often there is more than one horse fancied to win.
Another fairly straightforward type of software is the bet tracker, which as the name suggests, allows you to keep tabs on your bets, their type, amounts and success rate. This can be useful to enable you to see what is the most successful area of your betting, or least successful perhaps, so that you can make changes and be more successful.
This type of software actually helps with placing your bets on an exchange. Examples of this type of software which connects to an exchange platform include Fairbot, Gruss betting assistant and Cymatic Trader. My personal favourite is Fairbot which is reliable and being continually improved. It runs on your computer and connects directly with Betfair or Betdaq servers so that you have displayed information within the shortest possible time. As well as ultra-fast odds updating it provides a host of features including the depth of a market, the weight of money, one click in-play betting, trading with preset parameters, and much more. This kind of software makes placing both back and lay bets much easier and quicker than on the standard interface and is an absolute must for traders. This type of software will generally allow you also to place small bets which may be less than the minimum £2 allowed on Betfairs own site.
This type of software seeks to give you an edge with your betting by making predictions based on the vast amount of historical data available on the internet. The most popular type is probably for football, and some of these will use an algorithm to predict the outcome of a forthcoming match based on the performance of the two teams in their last six matches, plus perhaps their average goal statistics, and also previous head-to-head meetings between the two.
One might have thought that these types of software would be very useful since they are able to crunch the numbers relating to a mass of data but, apparently, their general performance has been found to be wanting. It appears that sports like football are unpredictable and the statistics only help to a degree in forecasting future outcomes. Such types of software also are not able to incorporate the human element preceding a match such as whether a certain player is going to be rested or is injured, or whether there has been disagreement with a manager or some such.
Some football software types aim to simply give an indication of the likely number of goals to be scored in an upcoming match, but again it seems these are generally not accurate enough to get profit with correct score markets, although they can perhaps be of assistance on a broader basis, perhaps if you restrict your bets to the over 0.5 or over 1.5 goals markets. The odds here are low but the strike rate can be good.
There are some software programs for horse and greyhound racing that can take all the harvested data and turn it into graphic form, displaying a forthcoming race in an animation showing how the race might be run. These can be fun but are no more accurate in their forecasts.
The big appeal of a betting software is to make things generally easier and/or faster, and some types of software certainly beat laboriously going through data manually. Perhaps such software should be used as a general indication and then you can narrow down your selections and use your human intelligence and knowledge to make the final judgements!
One of the key things to note about betting software programs is the sheer amount of data that they can research, assemble, and process. Historical data going back many years can be analysed to spot trends. This is very useful if your sport is complex by nature. Also, many different countries and leagues are easily handled by good software programs for football, golf, baseball, tennis, basketball, hockey and horse racing, and so they are especially popular.
For those who are averse to risk there is the possibility of making guaranteed profits, barring mistakes, by means of arbitrage betting. Specialised software is very useful for this since it can scan many bookmaker sites across the world and retrieve up-to-the-minute information on many different events and then display them, highlighting any disparities which can give you profitable trades. This is done by backing at different odds with different bookmakers, or by backing at a bookie and laying back on a sports betting exchange at lower odds.
Betting arbs tend not to last very long because bookmakers are themselves constantly checking their various odds offered and adjusting them so as to stay aligned as much as possible with others, and with the big exchanges. Thus speed is essential with arbing and you really need good software to do this.
Arbitrage betting can be profitable up to a point but bookies tend to notice the practice and limit accounts so all the money spent on a software needs to be quickly recouped before you can actually start making a profit; and then it may not be too long before you are searching for more bookies to use because of account limiting.
Even the best examples arbing software will not necessarily guarantee a profit since sometimes the odds just change too quickly, and it is still possible to make a mistake when placing your bets since you have to do it speedily.
A Value Bet Finder is a type of software which is designed to find odds where the bookmaker has made a mistake in favour of the customer, or simply offering better odds than all the others for whatever reason. The theory is that, providing you make only bets which offer real value then you will profit in the long run. A good software can find value bets very much more quickly and easily than a human, but of course, the bets, although good value, still need to come in fairly often, and this cannot be guaranteed. Technology does not have insight and so might not actually be giving good value where judgement is required.
Going a stage further is an array of available automated software bots that will actually place bets for you at pre-determined times and within certain set parameters such as the odds on offer. One such is BetBot Pro which is approved by Betfair and Betdaq and connects to their API. It encompasses all the common sports and will run through a sequence of events during a day, placing bets using the rules you have set. You can choose to back or lay, first, second or third favourites for example. You can also use different strategies or input selections from tipsters. You can use fixed level stakes or a number of different staking plans, plus also a stop loss to avoid ever becoming too much out of pocket if luck is against you.
So we see that betting software can be helpful with many types of betting and it is worth exploring what is available in respect of the kind of betting that you want to engage in.
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