How I automated Sports Betting on Bet365 and Williamhill BotDev · Follow 3 min read · Apr 17, 2024 -- 💵 4 Listen Share
Sports betting is a type of gambling that refers to the activity of placing a wager on the 💵 outcome of a sporting event. The sports betting and lottery market size worldwide was over 200 billion U.S. dollars in 💵 2024. (Check the latest report here)
Millions of people are spending their money for earning or for just fun every day.
As 💵 a senior developer with vast experience in web automation, I have worked on several projects related to sports betting automation.
Web 💵 automation could bring a huge value in many fields, let alone betting.
The first bot I made an auto-cashout bot. It 💵 monitors all bet slips and clicks on the cashout button (you give up the potential profit and only take the 💵 current profit) according to the predefined rule. Yes, you are right, it is the stop profit or stop loss rule 💵 as in the financial market.
The second bot was an arbitrage betting bot that aims to profit from the gap of 💵 odd values on two bookmakers. ( Bet365 and Williamhill in my case)
Arbitrage sounds wonderful, right? It means a money-printer that 💵 makes a profit in any case. Because there are dozens of bookmakers, the odd values for the same event differ 💵 from one to another, especially for live betting.
This second bot was not easy to implement.
It has to identify the arbitrage 💵 opportunity.
The bot has to scan all events of the interesting sports realtime on two bookmakers and identify where the arbitrage 💵 exists. In my case, I was only interested in football, I built this part myself. But if you need this 💵 for all sports this is quite a sophisticated part that needs a bunch of scraping threads. To simplify this step, 💵 you can consider the third-party service including PostiveBet.
2. It has to place bets on two bookmakers at the same time 💵 with the calculated amount.
I faced several problems here. First of all, the bot needs to check if the odd values 💵 stay the same (at least the arbitrage should still be valid). Secondly, sometimes betting is disabled in the event that 💵 the bot was trying to place or the bet amount is limited. Finally, sometimes bets are rejected on the house 💵 end.
Anyway, the bot worked well and it proved that it could earn decent money. (Unfortunately, any kind of betting is 💵 not allowed in our country, and I just had to see my clients earn. >_<)
After several weeks, the bot suddenly 💵 stopped working because of the new restrictions Bet365 implemented. I spent a whole week finding a workaround and finally, it 💵 worked again.
Saying all the above, building auto-betting bots was really a great experience for me and it was really fun. 💵 The most important thing is that building a good bot directly brings profit.
TIP for those who are interested in technical 💵 detail.
The most difficult part is to avoid being blocked on Bet365 because they detect if the browser is being automated 💵 using Selenium or not. As a workaround, you can use Bright Data (formerly Luminati Networks).
I am still developing various interesting 💵 services using the web automation technique and will continue to write my experience.
