If you are a keen bettor, or at the very least peruse sports betting content on social media, you will likely have seen accounts promote the idea of AI tools to help you with sports betting. From the outset, we should state that you should be highly skeptical of these. AI is not an oracle; it doesn’t have some magical code to guarantee success with sports betting. However, that does not mean the technology is not used in sports betting; it can help with strategies in various ways. Just bear in mind that it is just a tool.
To illustrate what we mean, consider the concept of beating the spread, i.e., betting on a team to cover a theoretical handicap in a game. Plenty of bettors will look at NFL or NBA odds online, building a parlay of teams or zeroing in on a single selection. It’s one of the most common types of sports betting and one where statistical analysis comes to the fore.
AI Is A Powerful Analysis Tool.
That’s where AI comes in: in the area of stats analysis, it is beneficial and capable of almost instantly analyzing millions of points of information. So, if you have access to an AI bot, it can – theoretically – help you spot value in the betting lines. If it has the available data, it can tell you that the Golden State Warriors are undervalued to cover an 11.5-point spread or that the Atlanta Braves can beat the New York Mets by more than two runs.
Yet, it all depends on data availability, which is where the problem lies. AI can search the web for the latest news, but is limited in what it can view. You can’t, for example, ask it to “preview tonight’s game” and formulate a winning bet. AI doesn’t work like that, nor is the internet an open repository of all the statistics that AI needs to give a decent analysis.
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Good Data Is Essential.
So what, then, is the solution? If you are serious about using AI for betting strategies – and again, we recommend you avoid these subscription services – you will need to feed the bot with ‘good data’ and then ask it to make recommendations when comparing the data to the latest odds.
The key to the above approach is getting the good data and giving it to ChatGPT, Gemini, or whatever AI bot you use. So, for basketball betting, you would start with sites like basketball-reference and NBA.com, which have some good data for free, and maybe add more advanced metrics from a website like Cleaning the Glass, which you can access for about $5 per month. You will ask the AI to compare and contrast the data with the current odds (the daily list of games with the spread) and see if it can pick out anything that offers value. As long as AI has all the current news – injuries, etc. – it should reasonably pick out where you should put your money.
There is, however, a final caveat. Two. The first is the reiteration that none of this guarantees success. Indeed, the whole concept is designed to spot value, not a fool-proof betting system (those do not exist in reality). Secondly, it should be noted that sportsbooks do not just make up odds on the fly. A deep amount of actuarial science is used to compile these betting lines, including AI in some cases. As such, the anomalies you are looking for can be hard to find. Yet, from time to time, AI can help you determine what constitutes a good bet in any sport – more value than it looks like on paper – and that should be the primary goal of any bettor, regardless of which tools they use.
