Should Bettors Use AI Tools to Help Win Bets?

Artificial intelligence is being used to help people all over the world, including sports bettors. The betting sites are always looking for ways to make their sportsbook bigger and better. But is artificial intelligence the answer? 

FanDuel testing AI tool in the US

With FanDuel testing a new artificial intelligence tool on their US sportsbook, a few AI experts are advising bettors to be cautious when using AI tools to prepare for bets. Last month it was revealed that FanDuel is testing an AI chat tool that can be used for research, finding betting options, and creating parlays.

Jonathan Sadow, FanDuel vice president of product transformation and innovation, commented on data integrity in an emailed statement.  “At FanDuel, we build software with the belief that data integrity is of paramount importance. Our best-in-class data pipelines power our sportsbook and the research that Ace provides is built upon the same data that informs our pricing and other stat-based capabilities,” Sadow said.

“Ace was created to make the experience of conducting research for bets easier for our customers so they can spend more time watching the sports they love.” AI tools for sports betting are becoming more common.

Still in the process of development, the sportsbook made their Ace AI tool available to about one per cent of their bettors in the US. Ace isn’t available in Canada. According to Ozgur Turetken, associate dean with Ted Rogers School of Management at Toronto Metropolitan University, using AI to help prepare for bets comes with some risks.

The pros and the cons

“If people know what they’re doing, this tool will make them even more powerful. If people don’t know what they’re doing, this is going to be dangerous because of all the hallucinations and all the other stuff may backfire. And this is true for the use of generative AI in general in my opinion,” Turetken said.

“If you are completely unfamiliar with the questions that you are asking the tool or the prompts given, then you have no way to verify even if something doesn’t make sense at all, like pure hallucinations. Obviously the users’ knowledge and competencies are important because they need to take whatever AI is giving them to make sense of it.”

University of Guelph finance professor and artificial intelligence expert Nikola Gradojevic spoke about how AI can be used to help bettors with research.

“For processing a vast amount of historical information, AI is just invaluable. That’s something you want to use because statistically we can’t have all these games processed in our heads. It’s impossible,” Gradojevic said.

“I think AI is definitely something you can use just to classify information. It can help you classify and understand some of the basic stats of the past. You can summarize statistically what happened in the past, AI can do that for you.”

How AI can help sports bettors

Researching a team or player can take minutes or hours depending on what someone is looking for. Gradojevic said some of the variables that might be used to predict the outcome of a game are team level statistics, player level statistics, temperature, altitude, hostility of the crowd, and injuries. Sports bettors can use AI to try to reduce the amount of time that they spend on researching those variables. “It has to be reliable because if you’re using some inaccurate historical data to predict the future, you’re not going to get far,” Gradojevic said.

Syracuse University sports analytics program director Rodney Paul believes FanDuel’s AI tool can help the sportsbook and their bettors. “They certainly are not introducing tech to help the company lose money, but if the bettor finds more enjoyment in betting through finding ways to parlay their ideas or find new bets they may want to make, everyone can benefit in terms of enjoyment in the activity of betting,” Paul said in an emailed statement.

As AI continues to advance, more AI tools for sports betting could show up on other betting sites. Some of those AI tools will be more reliable than others. “Theoretically, hallucinations will always exist. There’s no way to 100 per cent avoid that. In the presence of those, there’s still merit in using these tools versus not,” Turetken said.