How Does Live Betting Work?

Admit it, how many times have you caught yourself cursing a bookmaker, and you don’t even know you are doing it for no reason. Therefore, this text is aimed at educating the average bettor. Now you probably think “What are they trying to pull off now?” But believe us, there are elementary things that even gamblers with many years of experience don’t know, not to mention some advanced things, i.e. about what is ‘under the hood’.

Through the story of live betting, we will do our best to pass on to you a part of our betting knowledge that is not small. We will not teach you how to cheat, but we will give you a framework and a good foundation to understand live betting, this important part of the world of gambling. In a way, we will open your eyes…

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Don’t Confuse the Pre-Match Offer and the Live Offer

To know how the creation of a betting offer works, you need to know that the pre-match offer (regular offer, i.e. betting before the start of the game) and the live offer are created separately. Very often these two offers come from different sources, but there are also examples when that is not the case.

So, first thing, watch the announcement of live betting, that is, the live offer calendar for that day to prepare what you will play live that day. Don’t be surprised if your matches for that day are not checked in the live offer. In non-commercial competitions, it is not uncommon for a match to be in the pre-match offer and not in the live offer, and vice versa. This happens because bookmakers use different feeds to create these two types of offers, as we wrote above.

Secondly, because the offer comes from a different source, there are differences in odds. You probably noticed that at the very beginning of the match when you look at the offer.

Third, because bookmakers take live odds from large external partners (who have their scouts in games around the world), they don’t have the ability to influence those same odds the way they want, and especially because live is much more ‘touchy’ than pre-match. What the bookmaker can do is to launch and pause the match on live betting, which mainly depends on how much the match is burdened with bets. The bookmaker will never pause the match on its own, e.g. Manchester United vs Tottenham, and you should know that it is always up to that external partner when it happens. But then you see Barcelona vs Valladolid in which all imply it is best to wager on double chance, and you have prepared to place the bet and take a lot of money from the bookmaker… but, a huge number of bettors started bombarding the operator with bets on this match and the bookmaker estimated that the match was of high risk and stopped receiving bets. Yes, that is completely legitimate. Sportsbooks are not humanitarian organizations to throw money away just like that.

How Does the External Partner Market Work?

Now, there are a couple more interesting situations that are happening lately, and you probably don’t know and never knew about them. Since the competition on the market of the above-mentioned external partners is highly competitive, it happens that one partner buys exclusive rights to a certain league, and only they can do them live from the stadium, hall, etc. Then, these other partners send scouts incognito to the stadium or whatever venue and hit live from their tablets. However, the exclusive partner made some software (or similar) that detects such activities, locating the scout in, say, the 20th minute of the match and kicking him out from the venue.

This happens regularly, and you were for sure, at that exact moment, cursing the family of the bookmaker where you played the slip not knowing that it was not its fault. And this was not only the case in that particular bookmaker but in all bookies that take odds from that provider whose scout was kicked out. In tennis, believe it or not, the one that does those things is, for example, the umpire. And that, with software that is, of course, adapted to tennis.

In some next text, we will write about a new and interesting topic for bettors around the world – and hopefully, open your eyes again. Talk to you soon!