Everybody is arguing about technology being at people’s service, technology bringing unique advancement in people’s everyday routines, and elevating the quality of everyone’s life. And for the greatest part of what we can think of, this is quite true. But there are some cases where advancements in technology end up distorting the meaning and the essence of some of the things that we have been traditionally doing in certain ways.
Sports betting has emerged as a viable means of earning an income for many of those bettors who make a more professional approach to wagering on sporting events. But for a major part of the global punters, such as those who maintain accounts on sites offering online bet Indonesia, sports betting remains a hobby, a casual routine, or even a favorite pastime and does not involve necessarily the pursuit of long-term profit.
There’s still a big portion of bettors that don’t treat sports gambling as an income stream. Of course, winning is always the purpose, but it’s not like such punters will commit to developing sophisticated strategies and well-designed, efficient, and robust approaches to sports betting.
Rather, such punters are more likely to be driven by their own perceptions, personal analysis, estimations, and unsystematic forecasts, which draw mainly on their subjective interpretation of probabilities and less on any vigorous predictive models. And the thing is that for these punters, being able to win, while heightening their confidence in their skills and abilities to make good predictions, is maybe equally important as winning.
In the past few years, we’ve become witnesses of a revolution taking place in front of our eyes. Technological developments such as digital systems, Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and big data analytics are radically changing major aspects of our lives. Sports betting is no exception. In fact, sports betting has seen enormous transformations ever since AI and digital technologies have stepped into its ecosystem.
For the most part, new structures and new practices in the industry have benefited bettors (and bookmakers of course). Everything that has to do with improving customer service, like chatbots or customized betting services, for example, has been more than advancing the experience of users. Nobody can deny that AI and technology, in general, are at the service of bettors when it comes to such applications, because the reality is that they do actually improve their betting experience.
But not everything that has to do with Artificial Intelligence is good for the bettors. Just consider that now, everyone can do a little search on the web and find instructions or even the necessary framework to build their own AI-based predictive model for sports results. In a nutshell, everyone who has a bit of tech-savviness and digital literacy can develop their own model that will make predictions for sports games based on artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data. Being able to analyze huge amounts of data, find patterns of outcomes, and reveal causal relationships between variables, anyone can make a more robust analysis of sports games’ probabilities and use these to inform their betting decisions.
Of course, no one drags bettors to develop AI-based predictive models, unless they, themselves, want to do so. But being able to do it, is on its own very enticing and it is difficult, even for those who take a more casual approach to sports betting, to resist ‘sophistication’ when it’s out there, available to everyone.
So, bettors end up searching for a continuous advantage over the house or for an edge that will make them improve their betting strategy and hence, their profitability.
But this kind of approach towards sports betting resembles more the pursuit of profit and less the enjoyable, fascinating and interesting world of betting. It kinda loses its essence, gaining a more impersonal and distanced character, when in fact sports betting is all about being a good pastime for causal punters and about the joy of backing your favorite teams and athletes in your favorite sport, as well as the confidence of developing one’s own skills and capabilities in making good and as accurate as possible predictions.