Video Summary

In this series, we'll be testing out automated sports trading strategies to help you make informed decisions without having to do the work yourself. For this first episode, we're taking a simple approach: betting on the favorite of every event. This strategy is based on the concept of long shot bias, where people tend to bet on underdogs, causing the odds of favorites to be overvalued. According to a memorable video, if you bet on the favorite of every match in a tennis tournament, you'd get a 103% return on investment, compared to an 80% return by betting on underdogs.

We've written code to implement this strategy, which will continuously scan for events starting within the next five minutes and bet on the favorite when the odds difference is within five price sticks. We'll bet £1 on each event and add the result to an event list to prevent repeat bets.

After running the code for 500 bets, we started with £102 and ended with £103.16, making a profit of £1.16, with a return on investment of 0.232%. While this result isn't spectacular, it's a promising start for our automated strategies. In the next episodes, we'll be exploring other approaches to see what works best.