Summary
Highlights
Arbitrage betting is a strategy to make risk-free profit by betting on all possible outcomes of a match across different bookmakers. This is possible when odds differ enough between bookmakers that the implied probabilities sum to less than 100%, allowing a guaranteed profit regardless of the outcome.
Arbitrage opportunities arise because bookmakers are not perfect; they make mistakes in determining odds, and they want to remain competitive. These opportunities are more frequent in smaller, more obscure tournaments where it's harder to predict winners and there are fewer bettors to balance the odds.
To find arbitrage opportunities, the bot needed to collect odds from various bookmakers. Manually doing this is a nightmare, so Selenium was used to automate web browsers, mock opening sites, waiting for content to load, and scraping relevant data from rows and elements. A headless version of Selenium was used for efficiency.
After scraping and finding the best odds, the bot was improved to send email notifications whenever an arbitrage opportunity appeared, especially for rare, high-profit opportunities. To run the script continuously without keeping a local computer on, it was deployed on an AWS EC2 instance, a rented server that's always active.
The journey involved several mistakes, such as betting on two different matches of the same teams on different days. A significant source of profit came from bonus bets offered by bookmakers as sign-up promotions. By betting these bonuses on underdogs in arbitrage situations, hundreds of dollars in guaranteed profit could be made.
Automating the full betting process was deemed too risky due to potential errors in odds calculation (e.g., matching different games) and the risk of bets being canceled or odds changing. The video describes an instance where a bet was canceled due to a system error, leaving one side exposed and losing the arbitrage opportunity.
While commercial sports arbitrage software exists, it's expensive, often lacks customization, and the creator found building his own bot fun and educational. He reiterates that arbitrage betting isn't entirely risk-free, as bets can be canceled or odds retracted, leaving a bettor exposed and potentially losing money, though not the entire bet.
The arbitrage software is currently local. The creator is open to uploading and deploying it if there's enough interest. It currently supports three two-player sports, primarily because they were the easiest to scrape.