How Betting Companies Are Investigating Arbitrage In Their Systems by Adeoye Damilola (Louie)
Adeoye Damilola

Arbitrage betting is what it says on the tin, betting against your bookmaker’s margin to make a profit regardless of sporting event results.

It is entirely legal in most cases (for now). Still, it has the potential to bankrupt a betting company Not because of high stakes or insufficient expertise but because someone is artificially hacking their system.

It is a betting technique applied by betting punters whereby they wager on all the possible results or even turnarounds of an event. In simpler terms, it means a situation whereby a bettor makes numerous bets on all outcomes of an event so that you would make a profit anyway. It could be on the same betting platform or a different betting platform. Many professional punters advise that it is an intelligent move for beginners, but betting companies do not smile at this technique.

The concept is simple: buy low and sell high. When there is an opportunity for you to bet on two teams or players, the odds are likely to be very different.

For example, if Team A is available at 2.00 (1/2) with one bookmaker and Team B is available at 1.90 (9/10) with another bookmaker, you can take advantage of these odds by placing bets on both teams or players. Another example, let’s say you place 100k on Arsenal(2.0) to beat Chelsea in the English Premier League. If you win your bet on Arsenal winning the game, you walk away with 200k. However, if you had placed 50k on Arsenal winning and 50k on Chelsea losing, then won your bet on both games, you would have walked away with the initial 100k plus another 50k for Arsenal winning plus another 50k for Chelsea losing, making a total of 300k for just one successful bet.

Arbitrage Betting: Betting Companies Are On Alert

Betting companies are on alert too. Just like the bettors are avoiding losses, they are too. Therefore, the betting companies try to investigate arbitrages in betting by making up a legal disclaimer against arbitrage betting. They also set up personal investing for popular sports punters like Louie. [a]Louie is a popular Nigerian gambler who employs his wealth of knowledge in betting. This has made it possible for him to maintain a winning streak of more than ten years. He has helped and changed a lot of lives through his sport channels and social media. He has, through his prowess in sport, won a lot of deals with multiple top betting companies across the world. Some betting companies also get their tech gurus to scrape and explore their customers’ sports betting data. Even at that, arbitrage betting is still not considered illegal.

There is no doubt that arbitrage is a problem both in online gaming and real-world casino gaming. But how can it be effectively prevented? The companies making money off the odds across their multiple games, games under different jurisdictions, can never rely on just one primary source to get their clients’ information. Thanks to this reason, it’s pretty much unlikely to fight against arbitrage using traditional mathematical analysis. There’s only one efficient way of dealing with it: using collective intelligence. So there you have it, the bookies aren’t losing out thanks to stupidity or laziness; they are catching up thanks to big data.