With large fortunes riding on games, sports bettors want any advantage possible. So, applying Artificial Intelligence (AI) to the field to calculate the odds is natural. It brings some certainty to an uncertain field.
Most sports can also be boiled down to numbers. Take football; touchdowns, field goals, yards gained or lost, the distance the ball is thrown, the number of injured players, a team’s overall record, etc. Some sports are more conducive than others to collecting all possible numbers involved in playing such as tennis.
Betting is also a numbers game and computers are great at calculating numbers. A computer program can aggregate data gathered from a wide range of sources fed into it to correctly predict outcomes. Thus, AI is now being applied to predict a variety of sports across the world. Algorithms have been created to predict the exact score of games which helps betters looking to score big.
Sidelines.io is the world’s first odds-comparison platform for the newly regulated market. The company was founded earlier this year by Or Lifshitz and Rotem Haber, former employees of Google.
They seek to “make smarter sports betting decisions faster than ever before.” Founded by former Google employees, Sidelines utilizes digital technology programs to analyze sports. They boast that you “can beat the bookies by turning their odds against them”.
Their projection engine coupled with a robust set of algorithms bring you the top picks and help you find the best odds. Sidelines’ large network gives them access to information that is fed into their algorithm that calculates the odds for many sports, including the NFL which is in its second week of the season. Their program is connected to FanDuel, DraftKings, MGM, and others which give users the ability to track the odds, follow spreads, line movements, among others
They harness machine learning and natural language processing that boost players around the world. Their goal “is to help users make informed sports betting decisions based on the most probable outcome and the best possible odds, using advanced technological tools”. For most people, they largely bet based on emotional reasons. However, by utilizing formal analysis, players are able to win big. Their team behind the tech includes many sports fanatics, product managers, and data scientists.
Their website gives users access to important sports data and analysis, betting advice, and projections which is said to help players win more. It contains a mass of sports news covering offers from operators, bottom lines, injuries, and analyses.
However, the industry is highly competitive. Another company called Unanimous AI has been able to accurately predict many football games, including the Super Bowl.
However, even with AI, there are still upsets.
While it can be reliable, there are seemingly unknown factors including the weather, team dynamics, and morale among others. But as AI matures, it will be able to factor them in with greater ease.
Because the Supreme Court legalized most commercial gambling last year, the industry has been exploding. There is a great deal of money at stake in this booming industry.
The nature of how algorithms predict outcomes gets tricky for those who are not familiar with the language statistics and IT. For example, an AI created by a company in India called Predict 22 uses “logistic regression, Markov Chains, neural networks, and random forest. These techniques not just look at the time series of data, but also the classification of the data, which ultimately leads to someone winning or losing the game.”
The 28-year-old founder of Predict 22, Shubham Bindlish, is hoping his company’s product will have mass appeal that will open up sports betting.
“Sport has so much data that it is never available to the public to crunch, and is owned by broadcasters, betting companies, and strategy game companies,” says Bindlish regarding his algorithm.
Bindlish claims his algorithm is accurate 95 percent of the time.
