Make no mistake about it, sports betting is starting to take over the United States. There does not appear to be an end in sight, either. This train is going to keep on rolling for a while before it slows down. As of right now, there are 19 states in the US that have legalized mobile sports betting, with more on the way. New York legalized mobile sports betting early in 2022, and other states such as Ohio and Maryland are on the way later in 2022.
Along with more and more states legalizing mobile sports betting, there are also more sportsbooks opening up and legalizing as well. It all started off with FanDuel Sportsbook and DraftKings Sportsbook, and now there are plenty. The states with the most legal sportsbooks are Colorado and New Jersey, with both states having over 20 sportsbooks that have gained legality to operate in those states.
So, with all these states racing to legalize mobile sports betting, and of course a bunch of companies opening up as legal sportsbooks, there is a ton of opportunity for sports bettors. Enter OddsJam, which has the most innovative sports betting API in the industry. Having access to this sports betting API allows sports bettors to employ the most important strategy of all: line shopping across all of the legal sportsbooks to ensure that the bets you are placing have the best odds.
With OddsJams API, you can ensure you are maximizing your profits while also gaining access to the best sports betting software on the market.
Line Shopping
Here is the dirty little secret of how sports betting works in 2022: all sportsbooks are going to have their own, unique way of pricing odds. Each sportsbook has their own proprietary method of setting these odds, and this means that there are always going to be different odds across all of the sportsbooks. This allows an opportunity to find discrepancies and mispriced odds between all the books.
Please refer to the screenshot above as an example of this. What is shown are the moneyline odds for every major sportsbook in one of the NBA finals matchups between the Boston Celtics and the Golden State Warriors. As shown in this screenshot, there are differing odds across all of the books. The odds on the Warriors range from +140 to +146, while the odds on the Celtics range from -165 to -175.
The screenshot above is an example of exactly that. What we see are the moneyline odds for every major sportsbook in an NBA Finals game between the Celtics and the Warriors. As you can see, there are differing odds for all of the books. The odds on Golden State range from +140 to +146, whereas the odds for the Celtics go from -165 up to -175.
Overall, the sports betting industry can be viewed very similarly to how the stock market works. Essentially, the way it works is that the public mostly sets the market by how they are placing bets in terms of money. The odds change where the money goes. Now, of course outside factors are also going to influence odds, but overall the odds will change on the sportsbooks depending on how each specific, individual sportsbook is receiving money from the public.
The same way Apple stock will rise as more and more people purchase their stock, the same logic applies to the odds on bets. Meaning, if more of the public decides to bet on the Celtics, that means that the Celtics are going to become more expensive, or less favorable to buy, which means that the odds are going to go up from where they currently are. In this same scenario, as money comes in on the Celtics, this also means that the Warriors would become more favorable to buy. So, the odds on the Warriors would go up.
Because of this being the nature of how sportsbooks operate, this allows us to find opportunities where there are mispriced odds, and take advantage of those discrepancies. Differing odds across all sportsbooks means that not every single book is going to have the correct odds. Using the OddsJam API, you can get access to odds across all major sportsbooks and find these discrepancies.
