Understanding NBA Betting Odds Using AI-Analyzed Data
Learning about the 2023/24 NBA season can be a lot of fun for any sports fan, and artificial intelligence has taken some of the hassle out of learning tedious information. As AI grows in strength, this will become an ever-more useful tool for fans of the NBA. In this article, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of the role AI is playing in compiling NBA data points, and discover how NBA prop bets today utilize AI to deep dive into every game and analyze every play.
Standard Sports Betting
Sports betting has been done in the same way for decades now. You, the player, visit an online sportsbook to find the odds of an upcoming game you’re interested in. You’re presented with odds in either fractional, American, or decimal format. You assess the odds yourself before placing a bet based on your knowledge.
In some cases, your knowledge might be extremely limited—for example, if you don’t know much about the NBA but catch a game every so often. You’ll be putting money down based on limited information, which isn’t the smartest way you could be choosing to bet.
Alternatively, you may know all there is to know about the NBA. You may know all the players and how well they perform and can list the Eastern and Western Conference rankings from memory. While you’re better placed to make smarter bets than those with minimal knowledge, you’re still never going to be able to analyze and understand as much as a robot can. That’s where AI comes in to change sports betting forever.
AI Sports Bets
Artificial intelligence is the phrase we use to describe the intelligence of computers and software. AI has come along in leaps and bounds in recent years, with machines able to analyze mass amounts of data at superfast speeds.
There’s no chance that any human could read through as much data in their whole lifetime, let alone in a matter of seconds as AI appears to. AI has become a useful tool in many fields, including the world of sports betting. With its ability to understand and interoperate large amounts of data even being used to predict upcoming games⎯this is called predictive analytics. In AI sports betting, the algorithm assesses thousands of data points about matches, analyzes player statistics, and takes data from team rankings across decades to provide an accurate prediction on trends. The AI-interoperated data can identify patterns that even the most avid NBA sports fan would miss.
Let’s explore a random example of the NBA basketball player Jalen Johnson of the Atlanta Hawks. Superfast AI software can gather data about this player from throughout his career, both at NBA tournaments and beyond. Performance data will be analyzed alongside other information. If you come to bet on an upcoming Atlanta Hawks game with Jalen Johnson on the bench because of an injury, the AI will amend its performance predictability accordingly, helping give you more informed data to look at before deciding on which bet to place. Now, extend that example to every player and every team across every NBA season. You can see how an AI can make more reliable suggestions.
The best thing about AI is that it’s always learning, meaning that it’s growing in strength all the time. AI can adjust odds in real-time according to changes in the data. Plus, it doesn’t have bias like humans have. This ensures that AI suggestions are void of factors including team loyalty or glory supporting.
Outside of analyzing real-time data from the NBA season and factoring in historical information from past seasons, AI can also be used to scour social media and online newspapers to understand public sentiment. This can support the AI in proposing smarter bets because bad press plays a role in putting players off their game, affecting results.
The Bottom Line
AI is the next big thing in betting and getting ahead of the curve will ensure that you’re making more-sound bets, starting today. By trusting in a super-intelligent machine to provide odds based on its analysis of mass data, you’ll turn your standard bets into something smarter.
Betting has been the same for decades now and it’s exciting to embrace technology as it pushes your betting game to the next level.