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The betting industry is now worth billions of pounds per year in the United Kingdom alone, not to mention the vast markets of other nations. As the niche expands, bookmakers have been forced to adapt to technological changes to ensure they don’t get taken apart by sharps.

The famous Midas algorithm is one such example. It was developed by Cantor Gaming and updates the odds on display automatically if something happens in the sporting event. The beauty of Midas is that it determines how important an occurrence in a game is. By doing so, it can change the price accordingly, and ensure the user remains ‘ahead’ of the odds during in-play markets.

Sharps are at the end of the seven-punter spectrum, just ahead of high-rollers and prospective pros. These days, very few ‘sharps’ succeed without the aid of technology. Whether your aim is to become a pro or earn a nice side income, time is money. Rather than spending hours poring over data while researching games, you can get everything done in a matter of minutes thanks to automated bots.

Speed is everything when searching for value bets. One time, an arbitrage would be available for several minutes. Today, it won’t be there by the time you come back from the bathroom! Yes, there is an expense involved when investing in bots, but the time you’ll save means this particular investment pays for itself in very short order. The modern markets are much too quick for long-term value betting using no technology.

Automation Helps You ‘Invest’ in Value Betting

Sharps view betting as a financial investment and NOT a gamble. They understand that consistently investing in value bets will ultimately lead to profit in the long-term. Sharps are also busy people and know that bots give them an edge that even non-automated software cannot. If you have the latter, you need to do the following to make your bets:

• Be at your computer when the value bet becomes available.
• See the value bet.
• Log into the account.
• Navigate through to the right bookmaker account.
• Decide on the size of the stake.
• Place the bet.

Given the speed of the market, there is no guarantee that the bet will still be there by the time you try to place it! When you use automated software, you can ‘set and forget.’ Your bot places the value bet the instant it appears, so you don’t lose the opportunity!

5 Types of Bots to Improve Your Value Betting

Scrapers

This type of bot scrapes (extracts) data from a website. In this case, it will extract odds of your choosing from selected bookmaker websites. You can import this information from the site on to a spreadsheet or a local file saved on your computer.

When you use a bot, it extracts data automatically from the web pages loaded into your browser. The more data you scrape, the better the chances of finding a value bet; at least when you know what to look for!

Crawlers

Also known as a web spider, a crawler begins with a list of URLs to visit, follows each hyperlink it uncovers on each page, and add them to the ever-growing list of URLs. A data crawler is especially useful when unleashed on odds comparison websites because you can quickly find the best odds and perhaps uncover value bets.

Icebergs

In the investment world, an iceberg order is a single large order divided into lots of smaller ones. The purpose of hiding the true order quantity is to avoid tipping off the market and causing an unwanted price change. In betting, you can use an iceberg bot to place large bets similarly, ensuring the price doesn’t slip to a level below where a value bet exists.

Predatory

We return to the investment world once more, where so-called predatory bots are used to exploit inefficiencies in markets. They are especially popular in the Wild West of decentralised exchanges. In betting, one of these bots can identify where the icebergs lie and exploit them to the user’s advantage.

AI Bots

As you may know, after reading earlier guides, successful sports betting and trading is data-driven. While it is true that the more data you have, the better, you can’t hope to accurately collect AND properly analyse it without AI.

AI has already been used to great effect to develop a heads-up version of Texas hold’em poker in machine form and defeat humans in one-on-one games. In 1997, an upgraded version of the Deep Blue computer defeated chess Grandmaster, Gary Kasparov, in a six-match series. In essence, Artificial Intelligence works because it takes advantage of human flaws extremely well. It stands to reason, then, that it is effective at exploiting our errors in betting.

At Mercurius, we use AI and machine learning to gather and analyse millions of data points, AND transform our findings into a value betting strategy that works https://trader.mercurius.io/. With data analysis algorithms, we can make highly accurate predictions about a match’s outcome.