Machine learning is a hot topic in 2022, as improvements in technology and the related field of artificial intelligence have made frequent appearances in the media.
These technologies are used for many things nowadays; improving the user experience of our apps and software is one such area, and the technology has been credited with helping to build the best sports betting app by online gaming partners working in the United States.
Every day there seems to be a new story in the news about advancements in this field; from robots that can walk to chatbots that can provide a believable level of interaction with humans, data science looks set to be one of the most exciting areas of technological development this decade.
Data Science & Sports Betting
Online sports betting has been hugely popular across much of Europe for almost two decades but was banned across most of the United States for more than a decade as a result of the federal UIGEA bill that was passed in 2006.
When the Supreme Court revoked the PASPA bill in 2018, the floodgates opened and almost half of US states are now permitting some kind of online gambling.
Sports betting is seen as the most socially acceptable form of gambling by many in the United States, so it is unsurprising that online sportsbooks have been the fastest services to be legalized around the country.
Casual bettors often spend a lot on their recreational betting, and this is possibly the group who would gain the most from employing aspects of data science in their sports betting activity.
Successful sports betting requires logic, analysis, and a strong sense of reasoning; computers excel at all of these things, and data science algorithms can examine data sets far faster than any human ever could.
Used correctly, these algorithms can provide you a fast advantage over the other bettors competing to win in your favorite sport, and this technology is only a click away with the help of google today.
Data science is simply a technical way of describing the methods to calculate and analyze numbers; the more data that you have, the greater your chances are of finding patterns that could help you to win money from your sports betting.
This same technology is used by the sportsbooks themselves to help determine the odds that they offer to players, so it is indisputable that you can benefit from employing the same techniques yourself!
How Predictable is Sports Betting?
There are many ways to try and predict the outcome of your favorite teams next match, league, or tournament; the odds provided by online sportsbooks provide an invaluable insight into the bets being placed by other gamblers, but if you rely on this information by itself you cannot hope to gain an advantage over other players who are doing the same thing.
If you have a lot of experience with betting then your intuition will go a long way in helping you to judge which team to put your money on, but it’s wise to cross-check your guesses with historical data before placing your bets.
There are many statistical analysis methods which can look at years’ worth of historical data in seconds and provide you with some additional insight into the likely outcome of the next contest.
This technology can go further than simply looking for patterns in historical data.
Just because one team has a strong history of beating another does not necessarily mean that their chances of performing the same way this year will be the same, and the predictive analytics abilities of machine learning are able to search out these small nuances and make predictions as to what will happen in the future.
It’s an exciting technology, but the best part about it as that you don’t necessarily need to understand the deeper complexities of it yourself to benefit from it.