What Is Live Betting?
Also referred to as “in-play” or “in-game” betting, live betting means wagering on sports while the game is ongoing in real time, rather than placing bets before the game begins. Because the game is ongoing and the play is constantly changing, the odds are continuously shifting as the advantage swings to one team or the other. Live betting odds work in the same way as the pre-match market, the only difference is that they are shifting in real time as the projected outcome of the game changes.
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What is live betting: the advantages
Whether you’re betting moneylines, spreads, or totals, live betting provides sports bettors with several advantages over pre-match wagering.
Exploit odds discrepancies between sportsbooks - By monitoring live odds, sports bettors are able to identify variations between books, creating opportunities to capitalize on favorable odds. This allows bettors to take advantage of pricing discrepancies and maximize their potential profits.
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Avoid beating the Closing Line Value (CLV) and delay limits - Closing line value refers to the value of a bet relative to where the line closes. Consistently beating the closing line value means that you’re winning and may cause sportsbooks to limit you. With live betting, you can’t beat the CLV, and so limits will typically come slower than they would with pre-game bets. We don't have insights into everything books use to impose limits, but betting live on only big market games has delayed or in some cases prevented limits on some books of our users, sometimes significantly. With that said, you may eventually get limited, just like you will even if you are making smart pre-game wagers.
Subscribe and join our discord to get the latest knowledge around limits for each book, as well as some generalized best practices for delaying limits even more while live betting.
Actual arbitrage opportunities on mainline bets - Pre-game arbitrage opportunities do exist, but they disappear in seconds or a few minutes max if you are lucky. There’s no sure reason why this is the case, but the potential reasons why they may disappear include:
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The arb only appeared because books were moving their line due to new information (player injury, etc), so the opportunity only arose because one book was slower to update.
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The betting community is pretty “sharp” about odds and will start hammering them when they appear, books see this and react to it.
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Books likely have insight into lines of other books and, although it may be somewhat slow, they can react when their line is an arb of another book.
The bottom line is that the window to hit a pre-game arbitrage bet on a mainline is usually pretty small. Unless you are already at your computer and logged into all the sportsbooks, the time it takes to pull everything up gives you a pretty low chance of hitting the arb. Plus, if you place pre-game arbitrage bets, you’ll almost certainly be beating the closing line value.
Better promotion conversion - When converting Free Bets or Risk Free Bets, live betting can generally be much more profitable than pre-game betting, if you have patience. 80%+ promotion conversion is pretty common, with opportunities for even higher. This is due to two main reasons. The first is the same principle as live arbs; simply the fact that the lines are moving creates times where odds across two books are closer than they would be pre-game. The second reason is that Free Bet conversions are much better when betting on a large underdog, which is rarer for pregame. When the game is live and you start to have a blow out, or later in the game when it is relatively clear who will win, you can get much bigger underdogs. When you couple that with a book who has the favorite for better odds, you get great conversions
Get around pre-match limits - In many cases, your account limits for pre-game bets won’t be the same for live betting. Often, the limits aren’t as strict as with pre-game bets, and, in some cases, you won’t be limited for live bets, even if you are for pre-match bets.