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.
