Is Automated Betting Profitable?

Analyzing 200 verified bets notified by a Telegram bot.

In 2019, I joined a Telegram channel with a bot that sends notifications every time some conditions are fulfilled in football matches. A couple of months ago, the creator of this bot — or at least the one who paid for it — published a video on YouTube showing the results of the 1000 bets made thanks to the bot’s notifications, and the results surprised me. In this article, I’ll analyze the historical betting data to find whether automated betting is profitable or not.

To have a solid analysis, I’m only considering 200 bets verified in Blogabet, so we can trust our results, but when necessary, I’ll use the 1000 bets to draw better conclusions.

About The Bot

The Telegram bot sends Corners Race notifications after certain conditions set for prematch and live football games are fulfilled. Corners Race or “Race to Corners” is a betting market where you bet on one of the teams to reach to a certain number of corners before the other team. There are 2 prematch requirements — the favorite team has to play with the home advantage and odds less than 2 (50% probability). The live match requirements are the following:

• The notifications are only sent in live games between the minute 65 and 85.
• The favorite team is losing, or the game is tied.
• Ball possession of the favorite team is 55% or more.
• The favorite team must have more corners, shots, shots on goal, and dangerous attacks than the underdog.

These conditions help identify strong teams that dominate the game but are losing or the game is tied, so they will take more risks to score a goal. Therefore many corners will be conceded by the underdog.

Once all those conditions are fulfilled, a notification will pop up, so you can place a bet or ignore the notification based on your criteria. Another strategy used with this Corners Race notification was value betting. In the article below, I explain how you can find value bets manually and automatically with some lines of code.

You can see how the Corners Race notification looks in the picture above. Everything is in Spanish because the Telegram bot belongs to a YouTuber from the Spanish-speaking community (Le Picks).

The Data

For the analysis, I’m considering 200 bets verified in Blogabet between January and August 2019. In the profile of this Telegram bot, you can find 321 picks, but only 200 are Corners Race. To carry out this analysis, we’ll use the odds, stake, and profit/loss made on each bet.

The dataframe looks like the table below. I’m leaving the .csv file and all this analysis made with Python on my Github.

Results in each month

The Corners Race market usually has high odds. This doesn’t happen only because the probabilities for a team to get to 5, 7, or 9 corners are low, but also because, in my experience, Corner Race odds aren’t so well calculated as other popular markets. It’s no surprise why only a few betting sites like Bet365 offer Corners Race.

Naturally, high odds will cause a low win rate. However, this shouldn’t affect profitability. For example, April had one of the lowest win rates (38.6%), yet the system still made +7.39 units. This happened because the low win rate was compensated by the high odds.

The total balance of the 200 bets is positive at the end of month 7 with 51.07 units and a 17.67% yield. If we consider the 1000 bets, then the system is still profitable with 66.22 units and a 6.22% yield. But here’s the catch: Corners Race isn’t a market everyone can stick to. In fact, the cumulative earning/losses graph below reveals many ups and downs that tend to happen daily.

This means that in one day, you could increase or decrease your bankroll dramatically, so you need to use low stakes to make that effect smaller. Also, you need to be mentally prepared for a losing streak. Probably the longest losing streak here was between July 7th (53.2 units) and July 14th (42.2 units). That represents 7 days of losing money.

That being said, if you give up on the lowest point, you’ll probably miss the next peak.

Results in every competition

One of the bot’s advantages is that it sends notifications no matter the league and teams’ popularity as long as the conditions mentioned before are fulfilled.

This means that you don’t have to be an expert in multiple leagues but only analyze the live match and decide wisely. In the beginning, the bot covered leagues from 40 countries, which are displayed in the choropleth map below. Nowadays, the bot covers matches in over 200 countries, as described on the website it was developed (TheBookieHunter).

That being said, it’s always useful to have some information about the teams and leagues that show up in the notification, so you can decide better before you place a bet, and the table below reveals that.

In the table, I grouped data from competitions with more than 10 samples, while those countries with less than 10 samples were joined in “Rest of The World.”

It seems that Corners Race tends to perform well with popular leagues — all of them had positive results during 200 bets. However, the data for each country isn’t enough to draw conclusions.

Conclusion

The monthly results revealed that automated betting for Corners Race is profitable with a significant daily increase and decrease of the bankroll because of the high odds. The system would have many losing streaks throughout the months, so it’s important to be ready for it and not give up at the lowest point of the system’s performance.

The analysis is available on Github. I’m trying to create a similar bot to profit from live games like this one did. Let me know what betting market would be good to test!

So far I made a simple, yet profitable betting tool for pre-match games. In the article below I show you how I did it.