How Sports Bettors Can Use AI-Powered Analytics for Smarter Wagers

Sports betting has become highly mainstream nowadays and has drawn in more and more sports bettors than we have ever seen before with the rise of legal sports betting. Simultaneously, artificial intelligence has developed tenfold since the post-COVID era and has begun to reshape the way humans do things, including sports betting.

Sportsbooks have used AI for some time now to analyze real-time data and market influence to move lines and make the most vigorish possible. The sportsbooks make essentially all of their money on vigorish, or the “fee” collected for a bet, and AI can find line moves to maximize the amount of bettors betting on a game. However, with AI becoming more mainstream, sports bettors are beginning to optimise their advantage with AI. This is how.

Elimination of Human Bias

One of the distinct differences between human intelligence and artificial intelligence is emotion, and emotion is the driving factor in how successful a sports bettor can be. Most recreational sports bettors make sports betting picks based on their intuition and sometimes emotions, picking the team they “want” to win rather than the team they truly think will win. Eliminating bias is a key distinguishing factor between a recreational sports bettor and a professional sports bettor.

The pros almost exclusively rely on models and their algorithms to make sports betting decisions, leaving bias and intuition out of the equation. For the recreational bettor, AI can help reduce the amount of human bias by giving straightforward analysis and helping the bettor remove bias.

Automatic Betting

Perhaps the biggest advantage of AI sports betting that is also the hardest to employ is AI bettors. This just means that an AI bot scans every book for late-line movements or mispriced lines, searching for the smallest of edges that add up quickly over time.

While highly useful and perhaps the best implementation of AI in sports betting, it’s also the hardest in real practice. Most legal sportsbooks have highly upgraded software that can detect non-human sportsbook use and will ban anyone with irregular, bot-like betting behavior. However, some professional sports bettors use smaller sportsbooks, sometimes/often illegal, where software isn’t as advanced and automatic AI betting bots are usable.

Using AI to Find True Lines

Believe it or not, the goal of a sportsbook is not to predict the final score of the game. Correct score predictions are potentially smaller goals for sportsbooks, but their true bread and butter comes from setting lines that will create the most even action in a game.

Sports books make their money by collecting as much vigorish, or vig, as possible. This is the extra 10 in -110 standard odds, which is the lowest it can go. Some books even have 20-cent vig on certain lines. Their end goal is to even out the action on a game and collect as much of that vig, or “juice”, as possible. This means they are not trying to find the correct line the game will end on, but rather the correct line that will make the action as even as possible. This is why when a certain team has heavier action coming in on them, the line moves against their favor to get people to bet on the other team.

Because of this, professional sports bettors and sportsbooks do not have the same goal of predicting a game’s score, which is a common misconception. This means professional sports bettors can use AI to help them find the best game predictions that have the furthest advantage over where a sportsbook may have the line set. Finding these certain lines with the help of AI maximizes the sports bettor’s edge and can make winning much easier for the bettor long term. To further enhance your AI-driven strategies and compare them with real-time market data, consider checking the betting lines via BetUS Sportsbook.

The Future of AI in Betting

With sports betting becoming increasingly mainstream, finding an edge to beat the market is all the more important, which is where AI has come in and helped turn recreational sports bettors into professional sports bettors. If you are a new sports bettor looking to take your betting to the next level, turn to AI to eliminate human bias, place bets automatically/quicker, and find true lines.